Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T17:01:10.903Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ontic Injustice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2020

KATHARINE JENKINS*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF [email protected]

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.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

References

Ásta, . (2018) Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartky, Sandra. (1979) ‘On Psychological Oppression’. Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 10, 190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bettcher, Talia Mae. (2007) ‘Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion’. Hypatia, 22, 4365.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calvert, Randall L. (1998) ‘Rational Actors, Equilibrium, and Social Institutions’. In Knight, Jack and Sened, Itai (eds.), Explaining Social Institutions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 5793.Google Scholar
Cudd, Ann E. (2006) Analyzing Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwall, Stephen L. (1977) ‘Two Kinds of Respect’. Ethics, 88, 3649.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dembroff, Robin. (Forthcoming) ‘Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender’. Philosophical Topics.Google Scholar
Eadie, Jo. (1993) ‘Activating Bisexuality: Toward a Bi/Sexual Politics’. In Bristow, Joseph and Wilson, Angelia R. (eds.), Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Politics (London: Lawrence & Wishart), 139–70.Google Scholar
‘Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Katharine Jenkins’ “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman,” with précis by Talia Bettcher’. PEA Soup (blog). January 27, 2016. http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2016/01/ethics-discussions-at-pea-soup-katharine-jenkins-amelioration-and-inclusion-gender-identity-and-the-.html.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. (2014) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frye, Marilyn. (1983) ‘Oppression’. In Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom: Crossing Press), 116.Google Scholar
Greif, Avner, and Kingston, Christopher. (2011) ‘Institutions: Rules or Equilibria?’ In Schofield, Norman and Caballero, Gonzalo (eds.), Political Economy of Institutions, Democracy and Voting (Berlin: Springer), 1343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hampton, Jean. (1992) ‘Correcting Harms versus Righting Wrongs: The Goal of Retribution’. UCLA Law Review, 39, 16591702.Google Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. (2012a). ‘Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?’ In Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (New York: Oxford University Press), 221–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. (2012b) ‘Social Construction: Myth and Reality’. In Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (New York: Oxford University Press), 183218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honneth, Axel. (1996) Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: Polity.Google Scholar
Jeffers, Chike. (2013) ‘The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois's “The Conservation of Races”’. Ethics, 123, 403–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Katharine. (2015) ‘Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman’. Ethics, 126, 394421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Katharine. (2016) Ontic Injustice (PhD diss., University of Sheffield).Google Scholar
Kapusta, Stephanie Julia. (2016) ‘Misgendering and Its Moral Contestability’. Hypatia, 31, 502–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapusta, Stephanie Julia. (2018, August 9) ‘Trans*feminism: How Trans Issues and Feminism Overlap.’ By Nathan Eckstrand. Blog of the APA. https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/08/09/transfeminism-how-trans-issues-and-feminism-overlap/.Google Scholar
Kukla, Rebecca. (2014) ‘Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive Injustice’. Hypatia, 29, 440–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKinnon, Catharine A. (1991) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mallon, Ron. (2016) The Construction of Human Kinds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mikkola, Mari. (2016) The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and Its Role in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. (1910) ‘Mill's Statement [6 March 1851]’. In Elliot, Hugh S. R. (ed.), The Letters of John Stuart Mill (London: Longmans, Green), 1:158–59.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles W. (1999) The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Pettit, Philip. (1996) ‘Freedom as Antipower’. Ethics, 106, 576604.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, John. (1996) The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Searle, John. (2011) Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Serano, Julia. (2013) Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive. Berkeley: Seal Press.Google Scholar
Wittig, Monique. (1996) ‘The Category of Sex’. In Leonard, Diana and Adkins, Lisa (eds.), Sex in Question: French Materialist Feminism (London: Taylor & Francis), 2530.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. (2011) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar