makes it difficult to engage Bridget’s anger and fear is that – despite its forward-looking dimension – shared responsibility is conceived from a perspective that looks forward and down! Although May makes a clean epistemic shift away from what many philosophers refer to as the “view from nowhere,” there is still a sense in which the perspective beneath shared responsibility is privileged. It is constructed from the perspective of white Bridesburgers who may frame their understanding of responsibility from a privileged downward looking “here” which, as I will argue, is shaped by “feeling at home” in their suburb. The nature of the privileged “forward and down” moral perspective is best described in Maria Lugones’s “world”-travel vocabulary. Bridesburg counts as a world in this sense. When we “world”-travel we experience “being-at-ease” in social spaces populated by people who share our experiences and histories. We also share being “ill-at-ease” in worlds that construct us in ways we do not recognize. Bridget’s move to Bridesburg is a move to a world where she is ill at ease, where arrogant eyes construct her as a threat to property values. White Bridesburgers already inhabit a world in which they are at ease almost all of the time. Most moral agents construct their understanding of responsibility from the moral perspective of worlds in which they are at ease. This alone is not problematic. Difficulties arise when we insist that our definitions of concepts like responsibility, shame, or blameworthiness are not world dependent and can be easily extended to
cover the experiences of persons who, like Bridget, are ill-at-ease in the new community. Shared responsibility is “world” dependent: the moral point of view it encourages mirrors more closely the experiences of those who feel “at home” or “at ease” in the community. Two themes in May’s work suggest this. First, when we think about Bridesburg using the shared responsibility model, the agency, the affective states and actions of white contributors are foregrounded and resolutions are aimed partially at restoring White residents’ sense of goodness. Because outsiders, like Bridget, do not share responsibility for the ways they are constructed in worlds where they are ill-at-ease, Bridget only becomes visible through discussions of how white Bridesburgers can (in forward-looking ways) learn to understand the effects their affective states have on the actions of others. This focus on white people’s behavior makes Ward and her family the object of conversation rather than discussants in that conversation. This is not just another wrinkle in the old problem of how to divide responsibility; it raises important questions about who gets to speak and who gets to judge. Next, May’s account of how contributors ought to develop a moral sensitivity to the conditions that contribute to racial violence is uni-directional, non-interactive. Shared responsibility is “world”-dependent because it requires white Bridesburgers to be aware of how their affective states, prejudices, and understandings of Bridget work to increase risks of violence. The challenge 17