moral psychology. Prior to joining the department at Sheffield in 2016, they had positions at Cambridge, Cardiff, and Nottingham. They were a Mind Association Fellow 2022-2023.
Holroyd applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Oppressive Praise, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Oppressive Praise is at the heart of Chapter 3 of this book - this chapter sets out a view of what we do when we express praise: such expressions are vehicles for expressing our values. I articulate the mechanisms by which praise does this; and how the view of praise I develop can explain how (even well-intentioned) expressions of praise can embody and entrench oppressive values.Learn more about Oppressive Praise at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 wraps up one key part of my view - that praise has the function of signalling our values, by showing what we’re willing to celebrate and promote - the bravery or kindness that the target of the praise has expressed in their behaviour, say. Then page 99 embarks on the articulation of another key bit of the view: that praise expresses values not only in the things it explicitly celebrates and elevates, but in the evaluative frameworks that an expression of praise presupposes.
Here are two examples of this (to mention examples beyond page 99, that I return to, amongst others, throughout the book): someone might express praise towards a father for the childcare they are doing (my articulation of this case draws on an example from Serene Khader and Matt Lindauer’s work on the ‘daddy dividend’). In doing so, they signal - to the target, as well as to other audiences of the expression - that they value his parenting and perhaps more generally the idea of fathers getting involved in the care of their children. Or someone might express praise for someone’s bravery, signalling that they care about courage, and were able to detect when it was displayed.
But expressions of praise might presuppose wider evaluative frameworks and assumptions that audiences might infer, and take to be widely shared by audience members. For example, praising a father for doing basic parenting might presuppose the insulting belief that fathers are not good at parenting, and doing any of it is exceptional and praiseworthy. If part of a wider pattern where fathers are praised and mothers are not, expressions of praise may presuppose - irrespective of the intentions of the person praising - that mothers’ parenting is not noteworthy, to be taken for granted. Thereby gendered stereotypes about parenting and assumptions about whose labour is valuable can be conveyed by what those expressions of praise presuppose. Or praising a fat person for their bravery in choice of dress can presuppose the oppressive idea that they will be, or ought to be, ashamed of their body (as Aubrey Gordon has written about).
Does page 99 give a good idea of the whole work? In a way yes, because it gets to the core idea of the book, about the role that praise can play in signalling and presupposing values (sometimes good values, sometimes oppressive values). It articulates the mechanisms that make praise an important part of our moral interactions but one that can also be distorted by, and can perpetuate, oppression. On the other hand, I think it is pretty hard to get a sense of exactly what is going on just at page 99, since by then we’re already in the details of the conceptual apparatus that, I argue, are needed to make sense of how praise functions. It presents some fundamental ideas of the book, but for them to fully make sense and be understood in context, I think you need to read a fair bit of what leads up to page 99!
Overall, I think you’d get a better first sense of the book by reading the examples that come earlier on - first introduced at pages 18-23, 54-58, and recapitulated at pages 76-80. Those pages give you the examples of the phenomenon that motivates the whole book - sexist praise, ableist praise, racist praise, transphobic praise and anti-fat praise… Then, if you’re super interested in the mechanisms by which praise works to entrench oppression; the implications for thinking about our practices of holding responsible; the norms for expressing praise well; or strategies for resisting and responding to oppressive praise, including when expressed through honorific statues… then please do read on!
--Marshal Zeringue
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