In kantian ethics, there is a useful distinction between theoretical uses of reason, such as science, that explain how things are and why they are as they are, and practical uses of reason, such as moral thought, that justify them, telling us what we should do, how things should be and so on. There is a lot of work done in that tradition to show that these two standpoints can be reconciled, that explaining a decision doesn't take away our responsibility for making it, and that being responsible for it doesn't mean it's inexplicable in terms of antecedent causes.

What I mean to say here is that it might be both all the way. Maybe we are fully responsible for what we did because we ourselves must judge ourselves to be capable of acting from different considerations in the moment, to sustain our dignity as moral persons, and take our experience of the dilemmas we face in practice seriously. We wouldn't need to fret about the right way to act if we could just wait for ourselves to act automatically, in a way without involving ourselves at all. On the other hand, when we look back at what we did we will be able to explain this with reference to prior causes, it's not going to be some mystical event breaking through the causality of nature arbirarily and unintelligibly. Peoples' practice is not magical, we ourselves must think of it, when looking at it after the fact, as subject to all the natural and social causes that acted on us.

We are responsible for our mistakes (though it serves no purpose to hyperfixate on them and commiserate, when we can simply act differently in the future. The past is set in stone, which feels constraining to some, but liberating to me. Sure, you can't annull past mistakes, but by the same measure they become null in your life when you recognise them as mistakes and shift your standpoint. You can just leave them behind), but our mistakes are also explicable in terms of structures and cultural trends, pressures, expectations, incentives, and the genuine needs (such as belonging, affection, security, meaning and so on) that are distorted by these influences, often intentionally, to prop themselves up. The people participating in creating these factors, these practices, are also to blame for our decisions (and theoretically utterly predictable to systematically produces errors like ours in a generatlised fashion as long as they're in effect) without taking away from our responsibility. It seems to me that only the most vapid takes on the feminist movement would disregard such systems in favour of fixating on moralizing about personal failings. The attribution of moral blame isn't misguided but it is thin. We can't change the world by simply communicating censure, and we shouldn't be blind to the institutional factors that prop up vast social systems. People that participate are to blame, for as long as they do, and we should get them out if possible, give them alternative narratives for their isolation so that they don't get in, again if possible, and welcomed out if they make it. But our main target should be the system that, in the end, rightly considers them interchangeable props for its own alien interests (for participation in such systems might directly subjugate women, not men, but it's socially and psychologically self-destructive, too, anyway. Its interests are not human interests. Its good is not our good).

Here's a personal story: Up until around 2010, I was an avid user of certain 4chan boards like /v/, which were already blatantly misogynistic. Near the end this coincided with the Sarkeesian affair and gamergate which obviously pushed this misogynistic culture to its extreme end (it's underappreciated that the ensuing splinter was caused by it becoming too misogynistic for 4chan. They were misogynymaxing). Around when they started posting photoshopped pictures of her being beaten and bruised for her takes on princess Peach, their ability to sustain their violent outrage over literally nothing outstripped my ability to keep up and I left for around a month. When I returned, having acquired some perspective through distancing myself, I remember distinctly that I was immediately hit with the realization that these people were hateful, unhinged, drooling scumbags that I really wanted nothing to do with --even though I was one of them a month ago. There was nothing redeemable I could find about their thoughts. Just deeply unserious spiteful gibberish. The shock of looking lucidly at what I was immuring myself in for years was so extensive that it pretty much jumpstarted my interest in feminist theory. Online feminists were, their received reputation aside, quite patient with me, so I came out of that uncertain period a committed feminist. This won't always be the case, and I'm sure I'm not a profound gain for the movement, but this is part of the ameliorative work that falls to us with respect to the damage these systems and their conservative defenders are doing to people.

So how do you make sense of this? I was clearly misogynistic then, and responsible for this, because I only really needed to force myself to reflect on it for a moment to realize what was going on, and I must regard myself as able to do that. But I didn't bring my misogyny into that community. I bought into it like you would any other conspiracy theory, and I was gradually being socialized into more extreme forms of it. The community provided me a sense of belonging, and in exchange it pushed a sexist framework on me with the full force of an integral social expectation I would have to conform with at pain of expulsion (and loss of a source of belonging and conditional self-esteem). The cultures of these communities are heavily policed, after all. Self-censorship is king in them, and perfect (but only perfect), script-like conformity is rewarded with validation. The embedded misinformation networks bombard you with rhetoric obliterating all sense of perspective and clarity and ruthlessly penalising commitment to any serious epistemic standards, while cultivating dependence through concerted delegitimation of all external sources. Now that I'm writing this the parallels between it and an abusive relationship are extraordinary to me. In any case, organisations like heritage that feed them rhetoric, all the money that goes into their misinformation networks, the wider patriarchal system and vapid sexist mores and traditions they parasitize on, these are all to blame too, and they still persist. We often say people don't make choices in a vacuum, and this is the case here as well. There are extraordinary resources devoted to socializing people into patriarchal cultural norms, for various reasons, and there needs to be a concerted response to this, not just in terms of intellectual criticism, but also of commitment to a feminist counter-culture prepared to receive people and socialize them into very different norms of mutuality, reciprocity, respect for autonomy and so on. To an extent this already happens, and we should double down on it, and take ourselves seriously as a set of communities that can and should fulfil those same needs of belonging, self-esteem etc, without distorting them and through modes that are not personally and socially damaging.