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Ontic Injustice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2020

KATHARINE JENKINS
KATHARINE JENKINS*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF [email protected]
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Abstract

In this article, I identify a distinctive form of injustice—ontic injustice—in which an individual is wronged by the very fact of being socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind. To be a member of a certain social kind is, at least in part, to be subject to certain social constraints and enablements, and these constraints and enablements can be wrongful to the individual who is subjected to them, in the sense that they inflict a moral injury. The concept of ontic injustice is valuable in three main ways: (1) it draws our attention to the role played by social kinds in enacting wrongful constraints and enablements; (2) it clarifies our options for developing accounts of the ontology of particular social kinds, such as gender kinds; and (3), along with the related concept of ‘ontic oppression’, it helps us to understand and respond to oppression.

Keywords

Social constructioninjusticemoral injurysocial kindsgender kinds
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 188 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2020

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Footnotes

This article began life as part of my dissertation (Jenkins 2016) of the same title, which benefited enormously from the wise guidance of my supervisors, Jennifer Saul and Miranda Fricker, and the generous comments of Rae Langton, my external examiner. I have presented versions of this article at seminars at the University of Cambridge, the University of Nottingham, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Glasgow, and at conferences, among them Non-Ideal Social Ontology I (University of Stockholm), Defective Concepts (University of Leeds), and Social Ontology 2018 (Tufts University); I am grateful to the audiences at each of these events for stimulating discussions. I thank the following people for their detailed comments and discussion: Ásta, Johan Brännmark, Åsa Burman, Chike Jeffers, Arto Laitinen, Kate Ritchie, and Aness Webster. Finally, I thank two anonymous referees for this journal for their extremely constructive comments, which materially improved the article.

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