ABSTRACT:One recent body of work has concerned medicalization and how it can create epistemic injustice. It focuses on medicalization as a hermeneutical process that shapes the conceptual framework(s) we use to refer to some conditions/experiences. In parallel, some scholars with lived experience of madness have started to explore the epistemic harms suffered by the Mad community. Building on this, I argue that the process of medicalization in psychiatry affects the Mad community in a specific way that has been overlooked (...) in the literature on medicalization and epistemic injustice. That is, medicalization can create what is called "contributory injustice." This form of injustice occurs when marginalized communities have been able to create alternative hermeneutical resources, but these resources are dismissed or discredited by the dominant group. I argue that the emerging field of Mad Studies is a victim of this type of injustice when Mad experiences are unilaterally medicalized. (shrink)

I explain the notion of contributory injustice, a kind of epistemic injustice, and argue that it occurs within psychiatric services, affecting those who hear voices. I argue that individual effort on the part of clinicians to avoid perpetrating this injustice is an insufficient response to the problem; mitigating the injustice will require open and meaningful dialogue between clinicians and service user organisations, as well as individuals. I suggest that clinicians must become familiar with and take (...) seriously concepts and frameworks for understanding mental distress developed in service user communities, such as Hearing Voices Network, and by individual service users. This is especially necessary when these concepts and frameworks explicitly conflict with medical or technical understandings of users’ experiences. I defend this proposal against three objections. (shrink)

This paper offers some further support to Federico Picinali’s argument, in «Evidential Reasoning, Testimonial Injustice and the Fairness of the Criminal Trial», that a trial is unfair when assessments of relevance and probative value includes an epistemic injustice, namely a testimonial injustice. It has been argued that there are barriers to establishing testimonial injustice in specific cases, such as the ones Picinali surveys. This paper argues that even if we accept that there are concerns about establishing (...) the occurrence of a testimonial injustice in the cases Picinali identifies, we can reformulate the epistemic injustice that renders the trial unfair as a contributory injustice. Reformulating the epistemic injustice as a contributory injustice evades the concerns we might have with establishing testimonial injustice allowing Picinali’s broad argument that a trial is unfair when an assessment of evidence includes an epistemic injustice—contributory or testimonial—to remain intact. This reformulation also offers new propositions on how to combat epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a special case of epistemic injustice that I call ‘structural contributory injustice’. This conception aims to capture some dimensions of how policy—separately from individual agential interactions—can generate epistemic injustice at a group level. I first locate the case within Kristie Dotson’s original conception of contributory injustice. I then consider one potential case of structural contributory injustice—namely, the policy problem of significant financial risk burden on students considering university (...) in the USA. Finally, I consider potential policy reforms in response to this injustice. (shrink)

Introduction In their contribution, Ugar and Malele 1 shed light on an often overlooked but crucial aspect of the ethical development of machine learning (ML) systems to support the diagnosis of mental health disorders. The authors restrain their focus on pointing to the danger of misdiagnosing mental health pathologies that do not qualify as such within sub-Saharan African communities and argue for the need to include population-specific values in these technologies’ design. However, an analysis of the nature of the harm (...) caused to said populations once their values remain unrecognised is not offered. Building on Ugar and Malele’s considerations, we add a further perspective to their analysis by showing the need to design considering intended values to avoid the occurrence of epistemic injustices. 2 First, we argue that failing to acknowledge the hermeneutical offerings of the populations interacting with these systems can qualify as _contributory injustice_.shrink)

This article aims to give an analysis of the phenomena of unjust misappropriation of marginalised groups’ terms online, using the example misappropriation of ‘woke’ from the Black community on Twitter. I argue that using terms such as these outside their original context warps their meaning, decreasing the intelligibility of the experiences of the marginalised agents who use them when attempting to express themselves both within their community and without. I intend to give an analysis of this phenomena, with the expectation (...) that understanding it better will provide a crucial step in combatting it. To this end, I argue it can be understood as a specialised form of what Kristie Dotson calls ‘contributory injustice’, injustices which involve the suppression of a marginalised community’s existing hermeneutical resources, combined with a specific consequence of what Boyd and Marwick call ‘context collapse’, the removal of social norms created through the homogenising effect of social media sites like Twitter. The result is a novel misappropriation phenomenon, I label ‘Context-Collapsed Contributory Injustice’ or ‘CC.CI’. This type of misappropriation is particularly harmful due to it being faster-acting than historical varieties of misappropriation. Furthermore, unchecked continual cases of CC.CI can cause a novel from of what Miranda Fricker calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’, which is demarcated from standard cases by its ability to reintroduce conceptual lacunas through undermining existing hermeneutical resources. I finish by disambiguating cases of CC.CI from natural meaning change and critically analysing some existing philosophical treatments of “woke”. (shrink)

The paper argues that some tools from the epistemic injustice literature can be fruitfully applied to the debate on epistemic decolonisation. The first step for such a project is to defuse recent misgivings about the liberatory potential of epistemic injustice scholarship. I group these misgivings under the slogan ‘Epistemic injustice is white-people stuff’, or ‘the WPS challenge’, for short, and use them to set desiderata for good theorising with epistemic injustice tools. I then look at three (...) such tools – epistemic oppression, white ignorance, and contributory injustice – and argue that they advance theorising epistemic decolonisation while meeting the three desiderata. If the argument works, its implications for the topic of this special issue are that we don’t need to decolonise epistemic injustice; we can instead use the tools of the epistemic injustice literature to advance the decolonisation project. (shrink)

This paper identifies the phenomenon of conceptual competence injustice, a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when a marginalized epistemic agent makes a conceptual claim and is illegitimately regarded as having failed to grasp one or more of the concepts expressed in her testimony. The notion of a conceptual claim is given a deflationary account that is coextensive with the class of a priori knowable claims. This study reveals a form of oppression that severely hinders marginalized epistemic agents (...) who seek to create or communicate conceptual knowledge. Conceptual competence injustice is compared and contrasted with three other forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and contributory injustice. The final section investigates a number of damaging effects that conceptual competence injustice has on marginalized persons pursuing a career in academic philosophy. (shrink)

While much has been said on the connection between dominant rationality standards and systemic oppression, the specific role of logic in supporting epistemic injustice has not received much explicit attention. In this paper I highlight several ways in which it is possible for logic – as a discipline, as a particular system and as a gloss for rational common sense – to be implicated in epistemic injustice. Concrete examples are given for testimonial, content-based, hermeneutical and contributory injustices. (...) I conclude by elaborating on how the need to address these injustices affects the attitudes we should carry toward logic. (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)

Recent works by feminist and social epistemologists have carefully mapped the contours of epistemic injustice, including gaslighting and prejudicial credibility deficits, prejudicial credibility excesses, willful hermeneutical ignorance, discursive injustices, contributory injustice, and epistemic exploitation. As we look at this burgeoning literature, attention has been concentrated mainly in four areas in descending order of emphasis: phenomena of epistemic injustice themselves, including the nature of wrongdoings involved, attendant consequences and repercussions, individual and structural changes for prevention or mitigation, (...) and restorative, restitutive, or retributive responses. This project urges greater attention to the last of these, and to that end offers a relational approach to epistemic justice drawing upon Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and reparative justice. In developing and enacting better epistemic practices, how can such practices be made meaningfully restorative: not only recognizing the prospects for epistemic improvement, but responding to the perpetration and experience of epistemic injustice with effective epistemic amelioration? (shrink)

We expand on Della Croce’s ambition to interpret “epistemic injustice” as a specification of non-maleficence in the use of the influential four-principle framework. This is an alluring line of thought for conceptual, moral, and heuristic reasons. Although it is commendable, Della Croce’s attempt remains tentative. So does our critique of it. Yet, we take on the challenge to critically address two interrelated points. First, we broaden the analysis to include deliberations about hermeneutical injustice. We argue that, if due (...) consideration of epistemic injustice is to require more than negative ethical obligations in medicine, dimensions of hermeneutical injustice should be explored as an avenue to arrive at such positive duties. Second, and relatedly, we argue that this may encompass moral responsibilities beyond the individual level, that is: positive obligations to take action on a structural level. Building on Dotson’s concept of “contributory injustice” and Scheman’s concept of “perceptual autonomy,” we suggest that the virtues of testimonial and hermeneutical justice may provide additional content not only to negative prohibitions of action (i.e. non-maleficence) but also to positive requirements of action, like respecting patient autonomy. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how (...) the institution of asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

This paper characterizes a phenomenon I call ‘binarism grammatical lacuna’ (BGL). BGL occurs when non-binary sex and gender identities are forced to choose between being he or she by the grammar of a language owing to the sex/gender binary. Although hermeneutical injustice (HI) lies at its core, given that non-binary communities come up with hermeneutical devices to overcome unintelligibility and these tools are discredited, a variety of epistemic injustices, besides HI, intertwine in BGL. I address contributory injustice, (...) pragmatic competence injustice, testimonial injustice, and testimonial smothering. Section 1 introduces the phenomenon by portraying it as an ensemble of epistemic injustices. Section 2 elucidates the variety of HI at the core of BGL by examining the case of mainstream Spanish, and section 3 reveals it as producing the primary harm of HI. Section 4 studies the relationship between grammar, ideology, and language use, calling attention to the fact that grammatical lacunae are performatively reenacted in daily speech acts. Section 5 explores the agential dimension of BGL, examining responsibilities. In addition to addressing some of the forms of epistemic injustice that might intertwine in BGL besides HI, I portray non-marginalized users of binary grammar when addressing non-binary people as hermeneutical misfirers. (shrink)

Whether in the form of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, or contributory injustice, epistemic injustice is characterised an injustice rather than simply an epistemic harm because it is often motivated by an identity prejudice and exacerbates existing social disadvantages and inequalities. I argue that epistemic injustice can also be utlised against some members of privileged social identity groups in order to preserve the dominant status of the group as a whole. As a case-study, I (...) analyze how the harms to male victims of sexual violence is exacerbated by the failure of the law to recognise the rape of men as a crime and the failure of other people to recognise the testimony of male rape victims as credible. Analyzing shifts in the legal concept of rape and examples from Project Unbreakable, I uncover how these failures of recognition undermine the victims’ status as legal, moral, and epistemic subjects and inflict epistemic injustice against them. (shrink)

In this paper, I look to draw novel connections between critiques of drill and epistemic injustice by addressing the question of whether the critical scrutiny of drill constitutes an epistemic injustice. I argue that these critiques constitute two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. We see testimonial injustice in how courts and police do not give credibility to drill artists’ testimonies about the storylike nature of their songs, and these credibility (...) deficits are based in racist stereotypes about black criminality and believability. We see contributory injustice in how courts and police, through wilful ignorance, see drill music as violent and criminal rather than expressive and fictional – as drill artists do – which thwarts drill artists’ ability to contribute to shared knowledge. (shrink)

Calls for compensation are heard in many countries all over the world. Spokespersons on behalf of formerly oppressed and dominated groups call for compensation for the deeply traumatic injustices their members have suffered in the past. Sometimes these injustices were suffered decades ago by members already deceased. How valid are such claims to compensation and should they be honoured as a matter of justice? The focus of this essay is on these issues of compensatory justice. I want to look at (...) the issue from the perspective of the eradication of systematic poverty affecting particular groups—where injustices of the distant past can reliably be identified as one of the major contributory factors to people’s current poverty. In the paper I will examine the following issues: (1) What kind of injustices qualify to be remedied by means of compensatory justice? (2) Should there be a limit to how far back in history one should go to compensate for injustice? (3) How can an injustice from the distant past be reliably identified as a cause of current problems? (4) Who should be compensated? (5) Who is responsible for compensation? (6) What form should compensation take? (7) Is the concept of compensatory justice backward looking or forward looking? I will argue for a moral obligation to the effect that serious injustices, perpetrated long ago against a group of people and caused them to be poor, ought to be compensated by society in a variety of ways to the original victims (if still alive) and their descendants. (shrink)

Smartphone apps might offer a low-threshold approach to the detection of mental health conditions, such as depression. Based on the gathering of ‘passive data,’ some apps generate a user’s ‘digital phenotype,’ compare it to those of users with clinically confirmed depression and issue a warning if a depressive episode is likely. These apps can, thus, serve as epistemic tools for affected users. From an ethical perspective, it is crucial to consider epistemic injustice to promote socially responsible innovations within digital (...) mental healthcare. In cases of epistemic injustice, people are wronged specifically as epistemic agents, i.e., agents of the production and distribution of knowledge. We suggest that epistemic agency relies on different resource- and uptake-related preconditions which can be impacted by the functionality of passive self-tracking apps. We consider how this can lead to different forms of epistemic injustice (testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory injustice) and analyze the influence of the apps’ use on epistemic practices on an individual level, in mental healthcare settings, and on the structural level. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the relevance of the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer for contemporary feminist scholarship on epistemic injustice and oppression. Specifically, I set out to argue for the Gadamerian notion of hermeneutical openness as an important hermeneutic virtue, and a potential remedy for existing epistemic injustices. In doing so I follow feminist philosophers such as Linda Martín Alcoff and Georgia Warnke that have adopted the insights of Gadamer for the purpose of social and feminist philosophy. Further, (...) this paper is positioned in relation to a recent book chapter by Cynthia Nielsen and David Utsler in which they argue for the complementarity, and intersecting themes and concerns of Gadamer's hermeneutics and Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice. However, Nielsen and Utsler solely focus on Fricker's conception of epistemic injustice and the two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, that she identifies. In this paper I expand their analysis by considering other forms of epistemic injustice such as wilful hermeneutical ignorance and contributory injustice. Thus, this paper contributes to the budding literature on the relevance of Gadamer's work for the debates pertaining to epistemic injustice and oppression by expanding such analysis to other forms of epistemic injustice, and by further arguing for the strength of Gadamer's work in terms of offering relevant insights for the reduction and remedy of existing epistemic injustices. (shrink)

Motivating reforms to address discrimination and exclusion is important. But what epistemic practices characterize better or worse ways of doing this? Recently, the phenomena of implicit biases have played a large role in motivating reforms. We argue that this strategy risks perpetuating two kinds of epistemic oppression: the vindication dynamic and contributory injustice. We offer positive proposals for avoiding these forms of epistemic oppression when confronting racism.

Standard accounts of shame characterize it as an emotion of global negative self‐assessment, in which an individual necessarily accepts or assents to a global negative self‐evaluation. According to nonstandard accounts of shame, experiences of shame need not involve a global negative self‐assessment. I argue here in favor of nonstandard accounts of shame over standard accounts. First, I begin with a detailed discussion of standard accounts of shame, focusing primarily on Gabriele Taylor's standard account. Second, I illustrate how Adrian Piper's experience (...) of groundless shame can be portrayed as 1) both a rational and an irrational experience of shame, in accordance with Taylor's account as a paradigm model of standard accounts of shame, and 2) as a rational experience of shame when taken in its own right as a legitimate, rational account of shame. Third, without denying that some experiences of shame either are or can be irrational experiences of shame, I elucidate how standard accounts of shame can act as mechanisms of epistemic injustice, and in doing so can transmute the righteous indignation of the marginalized by recasting them as shameful experiences. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an epistemic evaluation of the harms that result from the widespread marketing of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests. While genetic tests are a valuable accessory diagnostic tool when ordered by a medical practitioner, there are different implications when they are sold directly to consumers. I aim to show that there are both epistemic and non-epistemic harms associated with the widespread commoditization of DTC genetic tests. I argue that the epistemic harms produced by DTC genetic tests have (...) been disregarded in discussions on the topic. Drawing on the notion of contributory epistemic injustices, I highlight two pertinent epistemic harms: (1) a failure to uptake an individual’s articulations about their identity and (2) the presiding reductionist framework dismisses useful hermeneutical resources. I then propose ways to mitigate these harms. (shrink)

This article examines the senses in which solidarity is a matter of acting “for our sake” and what its relationship to human flourishing is, in the three contexts of human solidarity, political solidarity and societal solidarity. It distinguishes between bottom-up and top-down relations between our good and my good and links these to different aspects of well-being. In the moral context of human solidarity and “the party of the humankind”, the idea of “all for one and one for all” illuminates (...) some aspects of morality that do not come to fore in standard individualistic moral theories, which do not need the notion of solidarity in answering the questions they pose. Political solidarity is in two ways related to moral relationships: all forms face the question of whether they are morally justifiable, but some are further motivated by prevailing injustice and wrongness. In the context of social solidarity, there are two positions that should be prevented from arising: the contributory excluded and the extremely wealthy. In addition to questions of justice and morality, what is at stake are considerations of social solidarity, and via that, the relational aspect of flourishing of the individuals. (shrink)

This paper has two goals. The first is to argue that the field of bioethics in general and the literature on ideal vs. nonideal theory in particular has underemphasized a primary problem for normative theorizing: the role of conditioning principles. I define these as principles that implicitly or explicitly ground, limit, or otherwise determine the construction and function of other principles, and, as a result, profoundly impact concept formation, perception, judgment, and action, et al. The second is to demonstrate that (...) ableism is one such conditioning principle and that it undermines the field of bioethics and the practice of biomedicine from achieving the aim of justice as fairness. After briefly addressing the history and critiques of principlism in bioethics, I lay out and defend my account of conditioning principles. I then argue that ableism is one such principle and demonstrate it at work through an analysis of a storied debate between Eva Kittay, Peter Singer, and Jeff McMahan. In conclusion, I contend that the ethical and philosophical dangers of conditioning principles are too easily exacerbated by ideal theory frameworks, and I do so by demonstrating how they are especially liable to generate epistemic injustice, especially contributory and hermeneutical injustice. (shrink)

Over the past decade, feminist philosophers have gone a long way toward identifying and explaining the phenomenon that has come to be known as epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is injustice occurring within the domain of knowledge (e.g., knowledge production and transmission), which typically impacts structurally marginalized social groups. In this paper, we argue that, as they currently work, algorithms on social media exacerbate the problem of epistemic injustice and related problems of social distrust. In other words, (...) we argue that algorithms on social media recreate and reify the conditions that lead to some groups being systematically denied the full status of knowers, thereby corrupting the epistemic terrain and, with it, systems of social trust and cooperation. We argue that algorithms do this in two ways—namely, via what we are calling algorithmic targeting and algorithmic sorting. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Stephen Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm offers an in-depth analysis of the ethical facets of climate change. In this paper, I contend that he nonetheless overlooks an important structural layer to climate vulnerabilities and injustices because he analyzes them implicitly interactional. I argue that climate change should rather be understood as a form of structural injustice as outlined by Iris M. Young. In this reading, the unjust socio-economic structural processes that give rise to climate change, the production and (...) consumption of fossil fuel energy, are at their core marked by (i) oppressive and dominating power relations that position agents (ii) intersecting with other structural constraints. Crucially, (iii) these structural processes arose historically, persist over time, and entrench the burden on those suffering in the future. This viewpoint improves our understanding of how the climate crisis unfolds over time in a way that augments Gardiner’s analysis. The structural approach can advance the climate justice debate both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice calls attention to an important sort of moral and intellectual wrongdoing, that of failing to give others their intellectual due. When we fail to recognize others’ knowledge, or undervalue their beliefs and judgments, we fail in two important respects. First, we miss out on the opportunity to improve and refine our own sets of beliefs and judgments. Second—and more relevant to the term “injustice”—we can deny people the intellectual respect they deserve. Along with (...) describing the wrong of epistemic injustice, Fricker proposes that epistemic justice is a virtue we “can, and should, aim for in practice”. But I argue that there are two major problems. First, it is not clear that it is reasonable to imagine there is any such stable disposition—that is, any such virtue—as the sort of justice she imagines. Second, even if there could be such a virtue, her theory of epistemic justice does not provide good guidance for avoiding epistemic injustice. While it could.. (shrink)

Abstract: If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger (...) that saturates the silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in widespread injustice through our everyday actions, which I call ‘structural wrongs’. To do justice to these facts, I argue that we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. While summative criticism functions to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark, formative criticism aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way. I show that the negative sanctions (...) associated with summative responses are only justifiably imposed under certain conditions when persons exercise their agency wrongly — conditions that do not always hold for structural wrongs. Yet even in such cases we can still use formative responses, which are warranted whenever agents fall short of moral ideals. Expanding our repertoire of moral criticism to include both summative and formative responses enables us to better appreciate both the powers and limitations of our agency, and the complexity of moral life. (shrink)

Trust is central to the therapeutic relationship, but the epistemic asymmetries between the expert healthcare provider and the patient make the patient, the trustor, vulnerable to the provider, the trustee. The narratives of pain sufferers provide helpful insights into the experience of pain at the juncture of trust, expert knowledge, and the therapeutic relationship. While stories of pain sufferers having their testimonies dismissed are well documented, pain sufferers continue to experience their testimonies as being epistemically downgraded. This kind of epistemic (...) injustice has received limited treatment in bioethics. In this paper, we examine how a climate of distrust in pain management may facilitate what Fricker calls epistemic injustice. We critically interrogate the processes through which pain sufferers are vulnerable to specific kinds of epistemic injustice, such as testimonial injustice. We also examine how healthcare institutions and practices privilege some kinds of evidence and ways of knowing while excluding certain patient testimonies from epistemic consideration. We argue that providers ought to avoid epistemic injustice in pain management by striving toward epistemic humility. Epistemic humility, as a form of epistemic justice, may be the kind disposition required to correct the harmful prejudices that may arise through testimonial exchange in chronic pain management. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice, as a species of epistemic injustice, is when members of marginalized groups are unable to make their experiences communicatively intelligible due to a deficiency in collective hermeneutical resources, where this deficiency is traditionally interpreted as a lack of concepts. Against this understanding, this paper argues that even if adequate concepts that describe marginalized groups’ experiences are available within the collective hermeneutical resources, hermeneutical injustice can persist. This paper offers an analysis of how this can happen (...) by introducing the notion of hermeneutical excess: the introduction of additional concepts into collective hermeneutical resources that function to obscure agents’ understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized groups. The injustice of hermeneutical excesses happens not due to hermeneutical marginalization (the exclusion of members of marginalized groups from the construction of hermeneutical resources), but rather hermeneutical domination: when members of dominant groups have been inappropriately included in the construction of hermeneutical resources. By taking as exemplary cases the concepts of “reverse racism” and “non-consensual sex” this paper shows how such excesses are introduced as a kind of defensive strategy used by dominant ideologies precisely when progress with social justice is made. (shrink)

The contrast between third- and first-personal accounts of the experiences of autistic persons has much to teach us about epistemic injustice and epistemic agency. This paper argues that bringing about greater epistemic justice for autistic people requires developing a relational account of epistemic agency. We begin by systematically identifying the many types of epistemic injustice autistic people face, specifically with regard to general assumptions regarding autistic people’s sociability or lack thereof, and by locating the source of these epistemic (...) injustices in neuronormativity and neurotypical ignorance. We then argue that this systematic identification pushes us to construe epistemic agency as resulting from a fundamentally relational and dynamic process between an individual, others around them, and their social, cultural, or institutional environment, rather than as a fixed and inherent property of individuals. Finally, we show how our relational account of epistemic agency allows us to introduce the novel concepts of epistemic disablement and epistemic enablement. We argue that these two concepts allow us to more accurately track the mechanisms that undermine or facilitate epistemic agency, and thereby to better understand how epistemic injustice arises and to design more effective interventions to foster greater epistemic justice for autistic people. (shrink)

In many Western capitalist economies, private indebtedness is pervasive, but it has received little attention from political philosophers. Economic theory emphasizes the liberating potential of debt contracts, but its picture is based on assumptions that do not always hold, especially when there is a background of structural injustice. Private debt contracts are likely to miss their liberating potential if there is deception or lack of information, if there is insufficient access to (regular forms of) credit, or if credit is (...) overly expensive. Markets for private debt can be mechanisms of structural injustice: rather than playing a neutral role, they reinforce injustices, because the failures of debt to be liberating disproportionately hit individuals in disadvantaged positions. By individualizing what are in fact structural problems, private debt can contribute to stigmatization, social exclusion and oppression. What is at stake, from a perspective of structural justice, is not only the distribution of income, but also the distribution of risk. The problems of private debt markets therefore require political attention. In addition to fighting the structural injustices that form the background condititions of private debt, it is also worth addressing private debt markets themselves. (shrink)

Do consumers’ ordinary actions of purchasing certain goods make them complicit in global labour injustice? To establish that they do, two things much be shown. First, it must be established that they are not more than complicit, for example that they are not the principal perpetrators. Second, it must be established that they meet the conditions for complicity on a plausible account. I argue that Kutz’s account faces an objection that makes Lepora and Goodin’s better suited, and defend the (...) idea that consumers are complicit in at least two of the ways distinguished by the latter. In the final section of the paper, I consider whether consumers’ responsibility for complicity in global labour injustice is likely to be as strong as responsibility from another source, namely benefiting from that injustice. (shrink)

While there is a steadily growing literature on epistemic injustice in healthcare, there are few discussions of the role that biomedical technologies play in harming patients in their capacity as knowers. Through an analysis of newborn and pediatric genetic and genomic sequencing technologies (GSTs), I argue that biomedical technologies can lead to epistemic injustice through two primary pathways: epistemic capture and value partitioning. I close by discussing the larger ethical and political context of critical analyses of GSTs and (...) their broader implications for just and equitable healthcare delivery. (shrink)

When one takes an intersectional perspective on patterns of oppression and domination, it becomes clear that familiar forms of systemic injustice, such as misogyny and anti-Black racism, are inseparable. Some feminist theorists conclude, from this, that the systems behind these injustices cannot be individuated—for example, that there isn’t patriarchy and white supremacy, but instead only white supremacist patriarchy. This chapter offers a different perspective. Philosophers have long observed that a statue and a lump of clay can be individuated although (...) inseparable, and that statues and lumps of clay do different explanatory and predictive work for the same causal outcomes. This chapter suggests that the same is true of systems such as patriarchy and white supremacy. These systems, like the injustices they produce, are inseparable. But they can be individuated, and when they are individuated, they do different explanatory and predictive work. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that, although neglected so far, there is a strong link between generics and testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice is a form of epistemic injustice that “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word”. Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a category or about its members without specifying what proportion of the category members possess the predicated property. We argue that generics are especially suited (...) to cause testimonial injustice for three reasons. First, generics elicit an “inferential asymmetry” :1452–1482, 2010). That is, generics are accepted even if only a few individuals possess the predicated property but are, nonetheless, taken to refer to almost all the members of the category. This peculiar combination makes generics particularly apt to cause testimonial injustice. High resistance to counter-evidence is a crucial feature of prejudice, the cause of testimonial injustice, and the more highly predictive a generalization the more it will be employed in concrete situations, leading to instances of testimonial injustice. Second, generics seem to play a key role in leading people to develop essentialist beliefs : 273–301, 2010; Rhodes et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci 109: 13526–13531, 2012). Subjects holding such beliefs treat categories as warranting strong generaliations over their members. Therefore, they will be more likely to rely on prejudice while dealing with the category members. Finally, generics are outstandingly common in everyday speech. Hence, their noxious effects are amplified by their diffusion and should not be underestimated. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one’s predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on (...) epistemic injustice is therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as those classed as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Social justice demands that we attend carefully to the epistemic terrains we inhabit as well as to the epistemic resources we summon to make our lived experiences tangible to one another. Not all epistemic terrains are hospitable—colonial projects landscaped a good portion of our epistemic terrain long before present generations moved across it. There is no shared epistemicterra firma,no level epistemic common ground where knowers share credibility and where a diversity of hermeneutical resources play together happily. Knowers engage one another (...) on a politically saturated,unlevel knowing fieldwhere members of dominant groups work to forcibly maintain their epistemic home-terrain advantage. I use the metaphor of the unlevel knowing field to capture these oppressive epistemic structures. The unlevel knowing field is a hungry place where all knowledge that fails to nurture and sustain dominant ways knowing risks being dragged onto the dominator's epistemic home turf to be mined, coopted, consumed, or destroyed. Knowledge and willful ignorance circulate with equal vigor in this hungry world. From the standpoint of oppressed/resisting peoples, the unlevel knowing field is a minefield, an epistemic twilight zone, which must be traversed with considerable care and endless attention. The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms. Repeated acts of injustice weather our bodies, dull our minds, weaken our hearts, and traumatize the spirit of our communities. They create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into our being. Epistemic oppression is a cruel thief. It is disorienting, exhausting, and deadly. It triggers anger, anxiety, depression, and resistance. It steals our time, energy, and attention away from more beautiful things. (shrink)

This paper argues that vice-charging, the practice of charging other persons with epistemic vice, can itself be epistemically vicious. It identifies some potential vices of vice-charging and identifies knowledge of other people as a type of knowledge that is obstructed by epistemically vicious attributions of epistemic vice. The hazards of vice-charging are illustrated by reference to the accusation that parents who hesitate to give their children the MMR triple vaccine are guilty of gullibility and dogmatism. Ethnographic and sociological research is (...) used to make the case that this charge is, in a significant range of cases, epistemically unjust and hinders attempts to make sense of vaccine hesitancy. This epistemic injustice consists in the representation of vaccine hesitant parents as less than full epistemic agents. A case is made for a more tolerant and inclusive approach, not only to vaccine hesitancy but also to other forms of unorthodoxy or non-compliance. The primary objective in these cases should be to achieve Verstehen of seemingly alien outlooks and practices so that policy makers and practitioners in public services can more effectively educate a sceptical public about the risks of vaccine hesitancy. (shrink)

Those who bear the burdens of injustice and oppression are entitled to act in ways contrary to existing laws and institutions to secure their own entitlements and those of others. This article aims to articulate a Confucian perspective on resistance against injustice. There are reasons for thinking that the notion of resistance is fundamentally at odds with Confucian political thought. In this article, I move beyond this simple conflict/compatibility model and explore the complex relationships between resistance and Confucianism. (...) On one hand, some of Confucianism’s core commitments can be better attained in contemporary societies by allowing resistance; on the other, a Confucian perspective can offer insights into current discussions on the ethics of resistance. (shrink)

This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The Anti-Compounding Injustice principle or aci. Compounding injustice and the aci principle are likely to be relevant when analyzing the moral issues raised by “big data” and its combination with the computational power of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Past injustice can infect the data used in algorithmic decisions in two (...) distinct ways. Sometimes prior injustice undermines the accuracy of the data itself. In these contexts, improving accuracy will also help to avoid compounding injustice. Other times, past injustice produces real-world differences among people with regard to skills, health, wealth, and other traits that employers, lenders, and others seek to measure. When decisions are based on accurate data that itself results from prior injustice, these decisions can also compound injustice. This second dynamic has received less attention than the first but is especially important because improving the accuracy of data will not mitigate this unfairness. (shrink)

Current discussions of hermeneutical injustice, I argue, poorly characterise the cognitive state of victims by failing to account for the communicative success that victims have when they describe their experience to other similarly situated persons. I argue that victims, especially when they suffer moral wrongs that are yet unnamed, are able (1) to grasp certain salient aspects of the wrong they experience and (2) to cultivate the ability to identify instances of the wrong in virtue of moral emotions. By (...) moral emotions I mean emotions like indignation that reflect an agent’s ethical commitments and bear on her ethical assessments. Further, I argue that victims can impart their partial understanding of the wrong they suffer to others who are not similarly situated by eliciting moral emotions such as pity that are tied to broad notions of justice and fairness. (shrink)

Bridget Pratt and Jantina de Vries1 have made an insightful contribution to enhancing epistemic justice in global health ethics. Their elaboration details intellectual (external) exclusion—described as non-representation—across three levels, and at its core, proposes inclusion to rectify this. To extend this work, we contend that it is worth probing the nuances and challenges associated with inclusion as a response to epistemic injustice. These include (A) the meaning of inclusion outside binary vocabularies of north and south; (B) the possibility of (...) forms of inclusion that produce exclusion and (C) inclusion as a politics of belonging with intellectual confinement as a possible epistemic harm. How the problem of injustice is described influences the substantive meaning of inclusion. In describing epistemic injustice, north and south (centre and periphery) are used as relational markers of power, inclusion, authority and exclusion. While this binary vocabulary is seductive, it can appear to confer proprietary rights to the concepts, theories and values described as originating in the global north (and south). However, such inscriptions of ownership are not always a correct reading of the problem. Sometimes, the ostensible western-ness and non-western-ness of ideas are taken for granted, particularly …. (shrink)

The corruption of public officials and institutions is generally regarded as wrong. But in what exactly does this form of corruption consist and what kind of wrong does it imply? Recent proponents of the “institutionalist approach” to political corruption have concentrated on those occasions when incentive structures distract institutions from their essential purpose and weaken public trust. The corruption of individual public officials has been less relevant to their work, except for when it leads to the erosion of the functioning (...) of institutions. From this perspective, a clear emphasis has been put on the consequences of corruption. In contrast, I argue that political corruption, whether individual or institutional, can be more fundamentally understood as a form of political injustice in which someone has violated the logic of mutual accountability that undergirds all relations of justice in rights-based systems. In this sense, political corruption occurs when public officials use their entrusted power of office for the pursuit of an agenda whose rationale may not be vindicated as coherent with the terms of their mandate. By focusing on the inherent qualities of corrupt political relations, I lay out a novel relational and deontological understanding of the inherent wrongness of political corruption as a form of unaccountable action. (shrink)

Temporary labor migration constitutes a significant trend of migration movements within the European Union, especially after the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargements. However, compared to other forms of TLM, intra-EU TLM has received scant attention from normative theorists. By drawing on Iris Marion Young's conception of structural injustice, this article analyzes the injustice of TLM within the EU. It argues that purely rights-based approaches are deficient and that a structural injustice approach is needed. The latter sheds light (...) on the formal and informal processes that place EU temporary migrants in a condition of vulnerability and reveals the multiple individual and collective agents participating in such processes. Moreover, such an approach offers important insights into the agency of migrants by showing how they themselves reinforce structural processes that put not only individual temporary migrants but also similarly positioned migrants and other members of the sending and receiving countries in a vulnerable position. A structural injustice approach does not deny that intra-EU temporary labor migrants should enjoy the rights and entitlements that they currently have in the host country as European citizens. Nor does it dispute that reducing the vulnerability of temporary migrants may require “special rights” accommodating the specific nature of their life plans. Instead, though such rights may be necessary, a structural injustice approach demonstrates how they are insufficient to tackle the injustice of intra-EU TLM and other forms of temporary labor migration more broadly. (shrink)

Family disputes over the diagnosis of brain death have caused much controversy in the bioethics literature over the conceptual validity of the brain death standard. Given the tenuous status of brain death as death, it is pragmatically fruitful to reframe intractable debates about the metaphysical nature of brain death as metalinguistic disputes about its conceptual deployment. This new framework leaves the metaphysical debate open and brings into focus the social functions that are served by deploying the concept of brain death. (...) In doing so, it highlights the epistemic injustice of medicolegal authorities that force people to uniformly accept brain death as a diagnosis of death based on normative considerations of institutional interests, such as saving hospital resources and organ supplies, rather than empirical evidence of brain death as death, which is insufficient at best and nonexistent at worst. In light of this injustice, I propose the rejection of the uniform standard of brain death in favor of a choice-based system that respects families’ individualized views of death. (shrink)

This paper aims to connect Stiegler’s reflections on theoretical computer science with his practical propositions for the design of digital technologies. Indeed, Stiegler’s theory of exosomatization implies a new conception of artificial intelligence, which is not based on an analogical paradigm (which compares organisms and machines, as in cybernetics, or which compares thought and computing, as in cognitivism) but on an organological paradigm, which studies the co-evolution of living organisms (individuals), artificial organs (tools), and social organizations (institutions). Such a perspective (...) does not compare human capacities to machine performances but studies the way in which the evolution of material and technical supports affects and transforms psychological, cognitive or noetic faculties (intuition, memory, understanding, imagination, sensibility, reason, etc.), as well as the constitution of different kinds of knowledge. This new theoretical paradigm implies a new ‘design’ for digital technologies, which considers their social role and their impact on psychological, cognitive or noetic faculties. (shrink)