Duties to change desires that sustain oppressive structures

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Do we have duties to change desires that we hold which sustain oppressive structures? Answering this overarching question will involve taking on the following three questions: 1. Which desires, if any, sustain oppressive structures? How do they do so? 2. Do we have duties to change these desires? If so, what kind of duties are these?3. Are the objections to the view that one has duties to change desires like these successful?Research context, methods and sources, originality/innovation and contribution to knowledge (academic impact): Some desires sustain oppressive systems - for example, when lots of women desire to have a manly boyfriend, this helps to sustain patriarchal gender roles. In this project, I will motivate and defend the view that we have duties to try to change our desires (and sometimes, the desires of others) when those desires sustain an oppressive system. First, we have a duty to cultivate desires which disrupt these structures. For example, finding "conventionally unattractive" bodies beautiful and sexually desirable. Second, we have a duty to undermine systems which produce desires that sustain oppression. For example, pornography, if it plays a harmful role in shaping our sexual desires. My methodology will involve conceptual analysis; for example, I will explore what it means to be feminine or masculine. I will also draw upon the tools of amelioration - theorising about how we might change a concept for a certain political goal (Haslanger, 2012). In exploring the role of desires in sustaining oppression, I will draw on moral psychology and the literature on adaptive preferences. In the first section, I identify the desires at issue through examining critiques of critiques of sexual, gendered, and aesthetic desires. For example, sexual fetishes for Asian women play help to sustain racist hierarchies (Zheng, 2016); the desire to conform to traditional gender roles - for example, to be traditionally feminine - may contribute to patriarchal harm (Chu, 2018); the desire to be thin and to go on a diet for aesthetic reasons may sustain oppressive beauty standards (Eaton, 2016). In the second section, I will make my positive argument for the duties we are under. First, I explain why these should be considered duties, rather than merely as reasons for action. Second, I explain why we are under these duties instead of some alternatives I consider. In the third section, I defend my view against potential objections and objections raised by other philosophers. The first type of objection is that these duties would be unfair or unethical. For example, it is infantilising to suggest people are incapable of making their own choices about what will harm them (Srinivasan, 2021). I argue the issue is not whether they harm themselves but whether they harm others, so concerns of paternalism are not relevant. Another ethical objection is that everyone is differently placed to resist such desires (Chambers, 2022). I argue that it is a common feature of duties that different people are differently placed to carry them out, as with the duty to give to charity, so it is no problem that the same goes for duties not to have politically bad desires. The second type of objection is that endorsing these duties would be impractical or politically counter-productive in virtue of casting a structural problem as if it is an individual problem (Srinivasan, 2021); I argue that, while these problems are structural, it is necessary for individual patterns of desire to change in order to solve them.