Changing epistemic failings doesn’t automatically change reality.

What I have been describing as the awareness model of consciousness pervades common sense diagnoses of ongoing racial injustice. These diagnoses implicitly assume that “at the heart of these patterns of racial injustice is a structure of social relations that is ideologically sustained in spite of legislative, judicial and individual efforts to change it” (Haslanger 2017, 152; emphasis mine). The idea that our “collective epistemic failings” are sufficiently explanatory for why an unjust social order remains in place suggests that what inhibits our coordinating to transform our arrangements is that “individuals in the grip of an ideology fail to appreciate what they are doing or what’s wrong with it, and so are unmotivated, if not resistant, to change” (152). Without denying that this does in fact happen, we should still ask what we should expect from agents once they are no longer in the grip of ideology. Do they feel differently? Think differently? Speak to others differently? Or act differently? One can imagine an agent thinking differently and still engaging in similar behaviors as before. I may be aware that air travel contributes to climate change, but that does not mean that I will hop on a bus to visit my mother who lives two thousand miles away.

It is for the following reason that I find the awareness model of consciousness limited: it would have to explain why it seems possible for a social order to remain in place even as the doxastic beliefs of agents within said order have shifted markedly. One explanation that could be offered is that extracognitive interests in the maintenance of the status quo tend to overwhelm moral awareness and thus we have a problem of akrasia or weakness of the will. Another explanation might suggest that the cognitive awareness was not thoroughgoing enough and so did not produce a “true” conversion of consciousness. Either explanation risks admitting that awareness is not a very effective lever for transforming a social order and therefore raises the question of why to make it central to a theory of social transformation.9

The deeper problem of the awareness model of consciousness in a social order is that it does not sufficiently distinguish a quotidian lack of awareness concerning the complexity of a social order from the lack of awareness that frustrates social transformation. When I go to the grocery store and see that the price of milk has gone up relative to last week, I most likely do not have an awareness of all the macro and micro interactions that went into presenting this number before me. Instead, I may be frustrated at how this upsets the budget I had planned for myself. But let’s say an economist sits me down with an assortment of graphs and the capacity to translate their expertise to me so that I become aware of what economic mechanisms most likely led to the price increase. I may understand my social world better, but when I return to the grocery store, I still have hard and complex choices to make given the constraints of my social order. In other words, given that I am aware, now what do I do?

In the foregoing example, we can see that the awareness of social facts does not necessarily furnish consciousness with practical knowledge. Instead, these social facts may appear to me as only external constraints on my social activity that, however regrettably, I must learn to navigate. What I take to be the limit of conceptualizing awareness as one of the central obstacles to racial justice or social transformation is that this theoretical focus does not generate a convincing account of how agents come to have knowledge of their freedom over and above knowledge of their constraints. In the best case scenario, we are often left with a picture of consciousness torn, alienated from an external social order over which it cannot exert much agency rather than grasping the social order as immanent to one’s life and practical activity. There is a real, substantive difference between acquiring knowledge of a moral or social wrong and developing the knowledge of how to address that wrong. Why wouldn’t increasing awareness of the depth and complexity of systemic racism, economic exploitation, and rampant environmental degradation lead to the conclusion that one’s ideological beliefs matter very little when compared to entrenched incentive structures and practical considerations? Indeed, we can imagine that upon realizing how dependent and intertwined our social practices are with the existing social order, I may come to conclude that there is very little we could do. Somewhat surprisingly, the awareness model of consciousness tends to coincide with conservative arguments against the role consciousness can play in social transformation when confronted with the reality that most people do not agitate for the radical transformation of social life.