Governments today often apologize for past injustices and scholars increasingly debate the issue, with many calling for apologies and reparations. Others suggest that what matters are victims of injustice today, not injustices in the past. Spinner-Halev argues that the problem facing some peoples is not just the injustice of the past, but that they still suffer from injustice today. They experience what he calls enduring injustices, and it is likely that these will persist without action to address (...) them. The history of these injustices matters, not as a way to assign responsibility or because we need to remember more, but in order to understand the nature of the injustice and to help us think of possible ways to overcome it. Suggesting that enduring injustices fall outside the framework of liberal theory, Spinner-Halev spells out the implications of arguments for conceptions of liberal justice and progress, reparations, apologies, state legitimacy and post-nationalism. (shrink)

This article develops a new approach for theorizing about hermeneutical injustice. According to a dominant view, hermeneutical injustice results from a hermeneutical gap: one lacks the conceptual tools needed to make sense of, or to communicate, important social experience, where this lack is a result of an injustice in the background social methods used to determine hermeneutical resources. I argue that this approach is incomplete. It fails to capture an important species of hermeneutical injustice which doesn’t (...) result from a lack of hermeneutical resources, but from the overabundance of distorting and oppressive concepts which function to crowd-out, defeat, or preempt the application of a more accurate hermeneutical resource. I propose a broader analysis that better respects the dynamic relationship between hermeneutical resources and the social and political contexts in which they are implemented. (shrink)

This paper argues that underlying social biases are able to affect the processes underlying linguistic interpretation. The result is a series of harms systematically inflicted on marginalised speakers. It is also argued that the role of biases and stereotypes in interpretation complicates Miranda Fricker's proposed solution to epistemic injustice.

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a gap in the interpretive resources available to members of a society due to the marginalization of members of a social group from sense‐making practices. In this paper, I address two questions about hermeneutical injustice that are undertheorized in the recent literature: (1) what do we mean when we say that someone lacks the interpretive resources for making sense of an experience? and (2) how do marginalized individuals develop interpretive resources? In response (...) to (1), I argue that to lack interpretive resources is to lack conceptual skill or know how. In response to (2), I draw on resources from Gilbert Ryle and Andy Clark and provide a model of how marginalized individuals develop new conceptual skills by naming their shared experience and using it as a tool for scaffolding each other's conceptual performance. At the same time, I draw on the work of Gaile Pohlhaus and Kristie Dotson to show how these practices succeed only through the redistribution of epistemic power across differently situated social groups. (shrink)

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

This article analyses the phenomenon of epistemic injustice within contemporary healthcare. We begin by detailing the persistent complaints patients make about their testimonial frustration and hermeneutical marginalization, and the negative impact this has on their care. We offer an epistemic analysis of this problem using Miranda Fricker's account of epistemic injustice. We detail two types of epistemic injustice, testimonial and hermeneutical, and identify the negative stereotypes and structural features of modern healthcare practices that generate them. We claim (...) that these stereotypes and structural features render ill persons especially vulnerable to these two types of epistemic injustice. We end by proposing five avenues for further work on epistemic injustice in healthcare. (shrink)

This Viewpoint calls attention to the pervasive wrongs related to knowledge production, use, and circulation in global health, many of which are taken for granted. We argue that common practices in academic global health (eg, authorship practices, research partnerships, academic writing, editorial practices, sensemaking practices, and the choice of audience or research framing, questions, and methods) are peppered with epistemic wrongs that lead to or exacerbate epistemic injustice. We describe two forms of epistemic wrongs, credibility deficit and interpretive marginalisation, (...) which stem from structural exclusion of marginalised producers and recipients of knowledge. We then illustrate these forms of epistemic wrongs using examples of common practices in academic global health, and show how these wrongs are linked to the pose (or positionality) and the gaze (or audience) of producers of knowledge. The epistemic injustice framework shown in this Viewpoint can help to surface, detect, communicate, make sense of, avoid, and potentially undo unfair knowledge practices in global health that are inflicted upon people in their capacity as knowers, and as producers and recipients of knowledge, owing to structural prejudices in the processes involved in knowledge production, use, and circulation in global health. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is a harm done to a person in their capacity as an epistemic subject by undermining her capacity to engage in epistemic practices such as giving knowledge to others or making sense of one’s experiences. It has been argued that those who suffer from medical conditions are more vulnerable to epistemic injustice than the healthy. This paper claims that people with mental disorders are even more vulnerable to epistemic injustice than those with somatic illnesses. Two (...) kinds of contributory factors for epistemic injustice in psychiatric patients are outlined: global and specific. Some suggestions are made to counteract the effects of these contributory factors, for instance we suggest that physicians should participate in groups where the subjective experience of patients is explored, and learn to become more aware of their own unconscious prejudices towards psychiatric patients. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been significant interest in injustices that do not consist in inflicting physical or material harm on others, but operate in more subtle ways, e.g. by targeting our status as epistemic agents. In a similar fashion, this paper aims to bring to the forefront a currently overlooked kind of injustice that occurs in relation to our concepts: conceptual injustice, which is characterised by wrongful in- or exclusion from the application of a concept. The first (...) part of the paper is concerned with spelling out the notion, discussing its characteristic wrongs, and with tracing it in a number of examples. In the second part, I discuss conceptual injustice in relation to connected but different forms of injustice, such as epistemic injustice. This highlights the advantages of having the notion on hand: it enhances our understanding of other forms of injustice like hermeneutical injustice, and allows us to capture a ‘remainder of injustice’ for which we could not account otherwise. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of the philosophical work on epistemic injustices as it relates to psychiatry. After describing the development of epistemic injustice studies, we survey the existing literature on its application to psychiatry. We describe how the concept of epistemic injustice has been taken up into a range of debates in philosophy of psychiatry, including the nature of psychiatric conditions, psychiatric practices and research, and ameliorative projects. The final section of the paper indicates future directions for (...) philosophical research of epistemic injustices and psychiatry, concerning neurocognitive disorders, identity prejudices in psychiatric illness, concepts of epistemic privilege in psychiatry, and the prospects for combining phenomenological psychopathology and epistemic justice. We argue that much remains to be done in the conceptualization of these epistemic injustices and suggest that this future work should be multidisciplinary in character and sensitive to the phenomenology of psychiatric conditions. (shrink)

Why does social injustice exist? What role, if any, do implicit biases play in the perpetuation of social inequalities? Individualistic approaches to these questions explain social injustice as the result of individuals’ preferences, beliefs, and choices. For example, they explain racial injustice as the result of individuals acting on racial stereotypes and prejudices. In contrast, structural approaches explain social injustice in terms of beyond-the-individual features, including laws, institutions, city layouts, and social norms. Often these two approaches (...) are seen as competitors. Framing them as competitors suggests that only one approach can win and that the loser offers worse explanations of injustice. In this essay, we explore each approach and compare them. Using implicit bias as an example, we argue that the relationship between individualistic and structural approaches is more complicated than it may first seem. Moreover, we contend that each approach has its place in analyses of injustice and raise the possibility that they can work together—synergistically—to produce deeper explanations of social injustice. If so, the approaches may be complementary, rather than competing. (shrink)

To verify the occurrence of a singular instance of testimonial injustice three facts must be established. The first is whether the hearer in fact has an identity prejudice of which she may or may not be aware; the second is whether that prejudice was in fact the cause of the unjustified credibility deficit; and the third is whether there was in fact a credibility deficit in the testimonial exchange. These three elements constitute the facts of the matter of testimonial (...) injustice. In this essay we argue that none of these facts can be established with any degree of confidence, and therefore that testimonial injustice is an undetectable phenomenon in singular instances. Our intention is not to undermine the idea of testimonial injustice, but rather to set limits to what can be justifiably asserted about it. According to our argument, although there are insufficient reasons to identify individual acts of testimonial injustice, it is possible to recognize recurrent patterns of epistemic responses to speakers who belong to specific social groups. General testimonial injustice can thus be characterized as a behavioral tendency of a prejudiced hearer. (shrink)

Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a ‘distant’ setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the role of institutions (...) and ideology in relation to the epistemic harm done by individual perpetrators. More specifically, I suggest that the individual, ideological, and institutional roots of genocide denialism constitute a regime of epistemic injustice in Turkey. (shrink)

In this article we develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. After providing an overview of previous work on this topic and drawing inspiration from the more developed area of epistemic injustice, we propose working definitions of ‘emotion’, ‘injustice’, and ‘emotional injustice’. We describe seven classes of emotional injustice: Emotion Misinterpretation, Discounting, Extraction, Policing, Exploitation, Inequality, and Weaponizing. We say (...) why it is useful to distinguish these and also to subsume them under a single concept. Our aims are both theoretical and practical: to provide a unified account of emotional injustice, while recognizing the diversity of this phenomenon; to facilitate further research on this topic; to recognize the political importance of emotions; and to outline some of the ways in which emotional injustice can be combated. (shrink)

The idea of social injustice is pivotal to much contemporary moral and political philosophy. Starting from a comprehensive and engaging account of the idea of social injustice, this book covers a whole range of issues, including distributive justice, exploitation, torture, moral motivations, democratic theory, voting behavior, and market socialism.

Although previous treatments of affective injustice have identified some particular types of affective injustice, the general concept of affective injustice remains unclear. This article proposes a novel articulation of this general concept, according to which affective injustice is defined as a state in which individuals or groups are deprived of “affective goods” which are owed to them. On this basis, I sketch an approach to the philosophical investigation of affective injustice that begins by establishing which (...) affective goods are fundamental, and then considers which subsidiary goods—such as freedoms, resources, opportunities, and forms of recognition—may be necessary for the provision of those fundamental affective goods. Drawing from and developing ideas in the extant literature, I argue that two such fundamental affective goods include subjective well-being and emotional aptness. I then show that by analyzing deprivations of the subsidiary goods that enable a person to pursue and attain subjective well-being and emotional aptness, it is possible to shed new light on the cases of affective injustice that have been described in the extant literature, while also identifying other kinds of cases that have not been theorized to the same extent. (shrink)

Recent feminist philosophy of language has highlighted the ways that the speech of women can be unjustly impeded, because of the way their gender affects the uptake their speech receives. In this chapter, I explore how similar processes can undermine the speech of a different sort of speaker: Indigenous communities. This involves focusing on Indigeneity rather than gender as the salient social identity, and looking at the ways that group speech, rather than only individual speech, can be unjustly impeded. To (...) do this, I make use of the notion of ‘discursive injustice’ that has been developed by Quill Kukla, and, with reference to three case studies, show how discursive injustice can effectively derail the speech of Indigenous communities. (shrink)

The literature on epistemic injustice currently displays a logocentric or propositional bias that excludes people with intellectual disabilities from the scope of epistemic agency and the demands of epistemic justice. This paper develops an account of epistemic agency and injustice that is inclusive of both people with and people without intellectual disabilities. I begin by specifying the hitherto undertheorized notion of epistemic agency. I develop a broader, pluralist account of epistemic agency, which relies on a conception of knowledge (...) that accounts not only for propositional knowing, but also for other types of knowing that have been largely neglected in debates on epistemic injustice and agency. Based on this pluralist account of epistemic agency, I then show that people with intellectual disabilities qualify as epistemic agents and therefore as subjects of epistemic justice. Finally, I argue that this pluralist account of epistemic agency pushes us to revisit the current conception of epistemic injustice and to expand its taxonomy in two important ways. (shrink)

Structural injustice broadly refers to objectionable outcomes produced by generally accepted social structures for members of particular social groups. But theorists of structural injustice have said relatively little about why certain outcomes are objectionable, and many theorists suggestively connect structural injustice to a worry about oppression without explaining their precise normative concerns. I provide a normative analysis of structural injustice that addresses this gap and clarifies its connection to oppression. On this view, there are two kinds (...) of structural injustice, each grounded in a distinct moral concern. One is a freedom-based concern for how social structures harmfully constrain members of a social group, depriving them of the means to develop and exercise their capacities. The other is an equality-based concern for how social structures subordinate a social group to others in hierarchies of power, standing, and esteem. By disentangling these concerns, this account shows that our social structures contain multiple kinds of injustice that do not necessarily travel together; some social groups experience unfreedom without being subordinated to others, and indeed their unfreedom is intertwined with their dominant position over subordinated groups. Furthermore, against prevailing philosophical accounts, this analysis shows that there are good reasons to understand oppression primarily as an issue of inequality rather than an issue of unfreedom. (shrink)

We survey several ways in which the structures and norms of medicine and healthcare can generate epistemic injustice.

The literature on epistemic injustice has thus far confined the concept of testimonial injustice to speech expressions such as inquiring, discussing, deliberating, and, above all, telling. I propose that it is time to broaden the horizons of testimonial injustice to include a wider range of expressions. Controversially, the form of communication I have in mind is non-verbal expression. Non-verbal expression is a vital, though often overlooked, form of communication, particularly for people who have certain neurocognitive disorders. Dependency (...) upon non-verbal expression is a common feature of some forms of neurocognitive disorders such as ‘intellectual disabilities’, autism and late-stage dementia. According to the narrow definition of testimonial injustice currently championed in the literature, people who express non-verbally are exempt from testimonial injustice. However, when we consider cases where meaningful communications from non-verbal people are dismissed or ignored in virtue of identity prejudice, there seems to be a distinct testimonial harm at play. Using late-stage dementia as a case study, I argue that the definition of testimonial injustice should be expanded to include all communicative practices, whether verbal or non-verbal, to encompass the epistemic harms inflicted upon some of the most marginalised in our society. (shrink)

In this introduction to the special issue ‘Epistemic Injustice and Collective Wrongdoing,’ we show how the eight contributions examine the collective dimensions of epistemic injustice. First, we contextualize the articles within theories of epistemic injustice. Second, we provide an overview of the eight articles by highlighting three central topics addressed by them: i) the effects of epistemic injustice and collective wrongdoing, ii) the underlying epistemic structures in collective wrongdoing, unjust relations and unjust societies, and iii) the (...) remedies and strategies of resistance to epistemic injustice. We close by pointing to connections and issues that may motivate further research. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of epistemic positioning to theorize the relationship between identity-based epistemic judgements and the reproduction of social inequalities, including those of gender and ethnicity/race, in the academia. Acts of epistemic positioning entail the evaluation of knowledge claims based on the speaker’s stated or inferred identity. These judgements serve to limit the scope of the knowledge claim, making it more likely speakers will be denied recognition or credit. The four types of epistemic positioning – bounding (reducing a (...) knowledge claim to elements of personal identity), domaining (reducing a knowledge claim to discipline or field associated with identity), non-attribution (using the claim without recognizing the author) and appropriation (presenting the claim as one’s own) – are mutually reinforcing. Given the growing importance of visibility and recognition in the context of increasing competition and insecurity in academic employment, these practices play a role in the ability of underrepresented groups to remain in the academic profession. (shrink)

There is a growing awareness that there are many subtle forms of exclusion and partiality that affect the correct workings of a judicial system. The concept of epistemic injustice, introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker, is a useful conceptual tool to understand forms of judicial partiality that often go undetected. In this paper, we present Fricker’s original theory and some of the applications of the concept of epistemic injustice in legal processes. In particular, we want to show that (...) the seed planted by Fricker has flourished into a rich field of study in which the concept is used to analyze many different phenomena in law, not always following the original characterization provided by her. This has led to a distinction between what we will call the narrow version of the concept, which is closer to Fricker’s original account, and the wider version of epistemic injustice, which is a more controversial notion because it is always on the verge of morphing into other well-known concepts like sexism, racial discrimination, oppression, silencing, and gaslighting. We will show that the value of the narrow version is mostly theoretical, and that in order to use the concept of epistemic injustice one must adopt a more liberal understanding of it. (shrink)

In addition to opening a fertile field for inquiry in analytical social epistemology, Miranda Fricker’s work has provided powerful conceptual tools that merge descriptive capacity and political potency. For this reason, over the last fifteen years, the conceptual repertoire introduced by the author has been well received in both academic and political arenas. At times, the concepts of both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice acquire excessive dimensions in the literature, and this undermines, on the one hand, their analytical precision and, (...) on the other, their usefulness. In this paper I argue against Fricker’s structural parallelism thesis and defend an independent treatment of each of these concepts. On this basis, to counteract the hyperinflation of the concept of hermeneutic injustice, I proceed with an exercise of conceptual precision. To this end, I identify the conditions that make hermeneutic injustice both unjust and hermeneutic. Finally, I present theoretical and practical reasons to encourage the rigorous use of these concepts. (shrink)

The practice of Emergency Management in Michigan raises anew the question of whose knowledge matters to whom and for what reasons, against the background of what projects, challenges, and systemic imperatives. In this paper, I offer a historical overview of state intervention laws across the United States, focusing specifically on Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws. I draw on recent analyses of these laws to develop an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic redlining, which, I suggest, is a form of (...) group-based credibility discounting not readily countenanced by existing, ‘culprit-based’ accounts of epistemic injustice. I argue that epistemic redlining plays a crucial role in ongoing projects of racialized subordination and dispossession in Michigan, and that such discounting tends to have structural causes that can be difficult to identify and uproot. Contrary to the general thrust of recent work on the topic, I argue that epistemic redlining ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations visà- vis large-scale injustice? In this paper, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed and unorganised groups of (...) people are often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense. (shrink)

Epistemic injustices are wrongs done concerning a person’s capacity as a knower. These actions are usually caused by prejudice and involve the distortion and neglect of certain marginalized groups’ opinions and ways of knowing. A type of epistemic injustice is hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when a person cannot effectively communicate or understand their experience, since it is excluded in scholarship, journalism, and discourse within their community. Indigenous Peoples (IPs) are especially vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because their way (...) of life is unfamiliar or inaccessible to others. This leads to the exclusion of their ideas from public discourse, especially those important for human and societal development. This phenomenon is particularly evident in instances related to IP education. José Medina claims that there are cases of hermeneutical injustice which hinders the ability of people to share and make meaning, or simply, hermeneutical death. Ben Kotzee, on the other hand, identifies the specific educational dimension of epistemic injustice. Using both of these frameworks and citing the results of local studies on indigenous education as illustrative points, we attempt to show instances and scope of hermeneutical injustice in the education of IPs in the Philippines. (shrink)

We investigate how epistemic injustice can manifest itself in mathematical practices. We do this as both a social epistemological and virtue-theoretic investigation of mathematical practices. We delineate the concept both positively—we show that a certain type of folk theorem can be a source of epistemic injustice in mathematics—and negatively by exploring cases where the obstacles to participation in a mathematical practice do not amount to epistemic injustice. Having explored what epistemic injustice in mathematics can amount to, (...) we use the concept to highlight a potential danger of intellectual enculturation. (shrink)

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and hermeneutical gaps are misrepresented (...) if they are uniformly predicated of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed “white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social positionality. (shrink)

Contextualist treatments of clashes of intuitions can allow that two claims, apparently in conflict, can both be true. But making true utterances is far from the only thing that matters — there are often substantive normative questions about what contextual parameters are appropriate to a given conversational situation. This paper foregrounds the importance of the social power to set contextual standards, and how it relates to injustice and oppression, introducing a phenomenon I call "contextual injustice," which has to (...) do with the unjust manipulation of conversational parameters in context-sensitive discourse. My central example applies contextualism about knowledge ascriptions to questions about knowledge regarding sexual assault allegations, but I will also discuss parallel dynamics in other examples of context-sensitive language involving politically significant terms, including gender terms. The central upshot is that the connections between language, epistemology, and social justice are very deeply interlinked. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on the nature of testimonial injustice holds that a hearer who fails to accord sufficient credibility to a speaker’s testimony, owing to identity prejudice, can thereby wrong that speaker. What is it to wrong someone in this way? This paper offers an account of the wrong at the heart of testimonial injustice that locates it in a failure of interpersonal justifiability. On the account I develop, one that draws directly from T. M. Scanlon’s (...) moral contractualist framework, a hearer who fails to accord sufficient credibility to a speaker, owing to identity prejudice, cannot justify his response to that speaker, insofar as the speaker can reasonably reject principles that would permit the hearer to prejudicially discount the speaker’s testimony. I argue that my account can better illuminate the idea, shared among many philosophers, that testimonial injustice centrally involves some kind of failure, on the hearer’s part, to appropriately recognize the speaker. In contractualist terms, this consists in a failure of mutual recognition—a failure to acknowledge the speaker as having standing to co-determine the terms on which the hearer and speaker, as epistemic agents, are to engage with each other in testimonial exchanges. (shrink)

Reflection on the historical injustice suffered by many formerly colonized groups has left us with a peculiar account of their claims to material objects. One important upshot of that account, relevant to present day justice, is that many people seem to think that members of indigenous groups have special claims to the use of particular external objects by virtue of their attachment to them. In the first part of this paper I argue against that attachment-based claim. In the second (...) part I suggest that, to provide a normatively defensible account of why sometimes agents who are attached to certain external objects might also have special claims over them, the most important consideration is whether the agents making such claims suffer from structural injustice in the present. In the third part I try to explain why structural injustice matters, in what way attachment-based claims relate to it and when they count. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to adapt Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice to cases of what I call “argumentative injustice”: those cases where an arguer’s social identity brings listeners to place too much or little credibility in an argument. My recommendation is to adopt a stance of “metadistrust”—we ought to distrust our inclinations to trust or distrust members of stereotyped groups.

My aim is to argue that forgiveness may be conceived by analogy to healing. The analogy is not self-evident, but a number of subsidiary analogies will be seen to point in its direction, or so I will argue. In the course of the discussion we shall see how injustice (and wrong-doing) may be compared to physical injury (both change the state of the sufferer to the worse), and how the resentment caused by suffering injustice may be compared to (...) the physical pain caused by injury (both are aversive, action-motivating states). The analogies will be illustrated and supported by concrete examples, ultimately suggesting that, in an important sense, when we forgive, we actually heal. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that to address structural injustice, individuals should participate in collective actions organized by civil society organizations, but the role and the normative status of CSOs are rarely discussed. In this paper, we argue that CSOs semi-perfect our shared obligation to address structural injustice by defining shared goals as well as taking actions to further them. This assigns a special moral status to CSOs, which in turn gives rise to our duty to support them. Thus, (...) we do not have full discretion when deciding whether to join collective actions or not. Under certain conditions, we can even be forced by others to do our share. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and remedies for this injustice are widely debated. This article adds to the existing debate by arguing that theories of recog- nition can fruitfully contribute to Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and can provide a framework for structural remedy. By pairing Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice with theories of recognition, I bring forward a modest claim and a more radical claim. The first concerns a shift in our vocabulary; recognition theory (...) can give a name to the seriousness of the long-term effects of hermeneutical injustice. The second claim is more radical: thinking of hermeneutical injustice as preventing what I call “self-recogni- tion” provides a structural remedy to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice. Because hermeneutical injustice is first and foremost a structural injustice, I contend that every virtue theory of hermeneutical justice should be complemented by structural remedies in terms of recognition. Finally, what I argue sheds light on the seriousness of cases of exclusion of and discrimination against women in academia and helps to draw our attention to new ways to combat such problems. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that ill persons are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Fricker. Ill persons are vulnerable to testimonial injustice through the presumptive attribution of characteristics like cognitive unreliability and emotional instability that downgrade the credibility of their testimonies. Ill persons are also vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because many aspects of the experience of illness are difficult to understand and communicate and this often owes to gaps in collective hermeneutical resources. (...) We then argue that epistemic injustice arises in part owing to the epistemic privilege enjoyed by the practitioners and institutions of contemporary healthcare services—the former owing to their training, expertise, and third-person psychology, and the latter owing to their implicit privileging of certain styles of articulating and evidencing testimonies in ways that marginalise ill persons. We suggest that a phenomenological toolkit may be part of an effort to ameliorate epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Structural Injustice advances a theory of what structural injustice is and how it works. Powers and Faden present both a philosophically powerful, integrated theory about human rights violations and structural unfairness, alongside practical insights into how to improve them.

Miranda Fricker has influentially discussed testimonial injustice: the injustice done to a speaker S by a hearer H when H gives S less-than-merited credibility. Here, I explore the prospects for a novel form of testimonial injustice, where H affords S due credibility, that is, the amount of credibility S deserves. I present two kinds of cases intended to illustrate this category, and argue that there is presumptive reason to think that testimonial injustice with due credibility exists. (...) I show that if it is denied that ultimately these cases exemplify testimonial injustice without credibility deficit, then either they must be taken to exemplify a novel kind of epistemic, non-testimonial injustice, or they bring to light a significant exegetical result. (shrink)

This chapter defends the view that manipulated behaviour is explained by an injustice. Injustices that explain manipulated behaviour need not involve agential features such as intentionality. Therefore, technology can manipulate us, even if technological artefacts like robots, intelligent software agents, or other ‘mere tools’ lack agential features such as intentionality. The chapter thus sketches a comprehensive account of manipulated behaviour related to but distinct from existing accounts of manipulative behaviour. It then builds on that account to defend the possibility (...) that we are being manipulated by technology. (shrink)

This chapter charts various ways that religious persons and groups can be perpetrators and victims of epistemic injustice. The practices of testifying and interpreting experiences take a range of distinctive forms in religious life, for instance, if the testimonial practices require a special sort of religious accomplishment, such as enlightenment, or if proper understanding of religious experiences is only available to those with authentic faith. But it is also clear that religious communities and traditions have been sources of epistemic (...) injustice, for instance, by conjoining epistemic and spiritual credibility in ways disadvantageous to ‘deviant’ groups. I focus mainly on the major monotheistic religions, culturally dominant in the modern West. (shrink)

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing, discursive injustice :440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion. The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words (...) is distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression. (shrink)

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention (...) to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

This chapter has two aims. First, I distinguish between two forms of testimonial injustice: identity-based testimonial injustice and content-based testimonial injustice. Second, I utilize this distinction to develop a partial explanation for the persistent lack of diverse practitioners in academic philosophy. Specifically, I argue that both identity-based and content-based testimonial injustice are prevalent in philosophical discourse and that this prevalence introduces barriers to participation for those targeted. As I show, the dual and compounding effects of identity-based (...) and content-based testimonial injustice in philosophy plausibly contribute to a lack of diversity in the social identities of practitioners and the discourses in which practitioners are engaged. (shrink)

It is practically inevitable that even the best-intentioned public officials occasionally inflict unjust harm on people who should not have to suffer it. They mistakenly arrest innocent suspects, and convict innocent defendants. They erroneously adopt and enforce criminal laws that unduly restrict our freedom. They vote for, implement, and enforce tax laws that unfairly burden some citizens. And yet it is widely assumed that, as long as such officials act in good faith, and follow certain institutional rules, we aren’t permitted (...) to protect the innocent victims of their mistakes by inflicting defensive harm on the officials. As a result, those victims may have to suffer injustices that we could, in principle, prevent. This is so even though, if a private person imposed similarly unjust harm, and did so on the basis of mistaken judgments that were equally in good faith, and just as reliable as the institutional judgments guiding the official, we could permissibly harm that person to defend the victim. This essay considers whether, and how, this asymmetric treatment can be justified. After some ground-clearing that sharpens the question, it briefly considers the dominant explanation offered by political philosophers, which focuses on how resisting official mistakes would impact innocent third parties (most obviously, one’s fellow citizens). Finding these explanations wanting, the essay turns to a less frequently considered alternative: under certain conditions, defending the innocent victim against the official’s mistake is unfair to the official who would be harmed in the process. In particular, if officials act for their subjects (in a quite specific sense), then we may, as a matter of fairness, be barred from harming the officials to protect those subjects from (some of) the unjust harms that officials erroneously inflict. This account chimes with familiar views in the history of political thought that take legitimate political power to be held in trust for the people, and legitimate governments to stand in fiduciary relations to their subjects. It explains why officials may in principle have special moral protection that private persons usually lack, and why we may have to put up with officials’ mistakes even if they inflict injustice on innocent persons. But it also reveals how demanding the conditions are under which officials have such protection, and why many existing legal and political institutions lack the legitimacy, and their officials the special moral protection against defensive harm, that they purport to have. (shrink)

I argue that epistemic injustice manifests not only in the content of our concepts, but in the spaces between them. Others have shown that epistemic injustice arises in the form of “testimonial injustice,” where an agent is harmed because her credibility is undervalued, and “hermeneutical injustice,” where an agent is harmed because some community lacks the conceptual resources that would allow her to render her experience intelligible. I think that epistemic injustice also arises as a (...) result of prejudiced and harmful defects in the inferential architecture of both scientific practice and everyday thinking. Drawing on lessons from the philosophy of science, I argue that the inferential architecture of our epistemic practices can be prejudiced and wrongful, leading to a variety of epistemic injustice that I am calling “inferential injustice.” This type of injustice is fully structural; it inheres in our epistemic practices themselves rather than as a direct result of an individual’s action. For this reason, cases of inferential injustice are importantly different from extant cases of epistemic injustice and are especially hard to track. We need a better understanding of inferential injustice so that we can avoid and ameliorate cases such as the ones I present here. (shrink)

Technologies that deploy data science methods are liable to result in epistemic harms involving the diminution of individuals with respect to their standing as knowers or their credibility as sources of testimony. Not all harms of this kind are unjust but when they are we ought to try to prevent or correct them. Epistemically unjust harms will typically intersect with other more familiar and well-studied kinds of harm that result from the design, development, and use of data science technologies. However, (...) we argue that epistemic injustices can be distinguished conceptually from more familiar kinds of harm. We argue that epistemic harms are morally relevant even in cases where those who suffer them are unharmed in other ways. Via a series of examples from the criminal justice system, workplace hierarchies, and educational contexts we explain the kinds of epistemic injustice that can result from common uses of data science technologies. (shrink)

This article applies philosophical work on epistemic injustice and cognate concepts to study gender and racial disparity in financial markets. Members of disadvantaged groups often receive inferior financial services. In most jurisdictions, it is illegal to provide discriminatorily disparate treatment to groups defined by gender and skin colour. Racial disparity in financial services is generally considered to be discriminatory. The standard view among most regulators is that gender disparity is not discriminatory, though. Through an analysis of various exemplary cases, (...) I propose testimonial injustice as a candidate explanation for some of the existing forms of racial disparity found in financial services. I show how prejudices about gender and finance decrease epistemic self-confidence, and how this leads to gender disparity. And I consider particularly intractable forms of self-fulfilling testimonial injustice. (shrink)