Editorial

The past several decades have witnessed a surge in critiques of justice theory in the liberal tradition. While there is no overarching agreement, critiques by Western and non-Western feminists and by gender, race, disability, post-colonial, and other anti-oppression theorists share certain features. First, they tend to reject ideal theory – arrived at by abstracting from real life contexts so as to identify principles that delineate what justice demands once and for all. Instead, these critics engage in ‘theorizing’ that takes the details of people’s lives in contexts of relations of power and oppression to be central to understanding and alleviating injustices. An important contribution of this theorizing shapes the second feature: identifying injustices that have fallen through the cracks because they are embedded in norms taken for granted in mainstream justice theory. A third common thread presents challenges to liberal conceptions of the self, agency, and moral judgment as well as to what counts as public versus private, reason versus emotion, and moral versus political. The fourth thread is the defence of a relational conception of the self in place of liberal individualist conceptions. Selves are born into relationships and shaped by norms, institutions, and structures that determine needs, opportunities, and life prospects. These factors are especially important for identifying injustices suffered by those who are marginalized. The fifth ties all the threads together: the fundamental importance of attending to the assumed norms, institutions, and structures that sustain and perpetuate relations of power and oppression.

Together these themes provide insights into the kinds of injustices emerging from and shaped by histories and contexts of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, capitalism, and so on. To do justice to injustice is to acknowledge that the ideal of ideal theory is too removed from real world circumstances of great inequalities in power between developed and developing countries; former colonizers and those colonized who continue to suffer injustices; and the rich and poor within and across borders where institutional structures of racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism still prevail. This special issue, Injustice: Foundational, Structural, and Epistemic Issues, sets out to examine some of these injustices and their effects on people at the global, national, and local levels.

Originally coined by Miranda Fricker in Epistemic Injustice: Ethics and Politics of Knowing, ‘epistemic injustice’ captures the connections between the epistemological and moral/political aspects of injustice in contexts of oppression. Fricker began this inquiry by distinguishing between two kinds of epistemic injustices, testimonial and hermeneutical. The former describes the ‘wrong done to someone specifically in her capacity as a knower’ (2007, 20). Testimonial injustice captures the ways in which credibility is negatively affected by prejudice on the part of the hearer based on the social identity of the speaker. Hermeneutical injustice is structural in form and ‘occurs at a prior stage when a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experience’ (2007, 1). While many of the authors in this volume acknowledge Fricker’s path-breaking contribution to theorizing about injustice itself, they also develop new insights and applications that highlight specific foundational, structural, and epistemic features of injustice. Even if Fricker’s account failed to answer all objections or capture all instances of epistemic injustice, spaces have been opened up for identifying and understanding the range of injustices missing in traditional theories of justice. In short, each of the papers in this volume explores answers to questions about the epistemic and moral/political implications of injustices embedded in foundations and reflected in structures.

The first three papers investigate injustices that are assumed in dominant epistemic and moral frameworks. Sarah Clark Miller examines injustice at the foundational level where liberal theory has grounded the concept of dignity in an individualist conception of the self. Miller argues that dignity is best conceived as grounded in a relational conception of the self, one that highlights the dependency and interdependency of agents interacting with others to figure out how best to meet their own needs and those of others. Miller uses the capacity to care to argue that it is a distinguishing moral power, one that provides the normative foundation for engaging us in dignifying practices of responding to others. On Miller’s account, the concept of dignity would be meaningless in a world without human relations.

Holly Longair examines the injustices that emerge when people from developed countries judge people in developing countries as suffering from false consciousness or what is now termed ‘adaptive preferences’. Longair argues that we need to pay attention to the dominant structures and epistemic frameworks that shape what theorists and practitioners from developed countries claim to know about how to improve lives or empower people in developing countries. Longair sketches an account of deliberative participation that can work to have development practitioners respect the agency and values of those whose lives they aim to improve. Engagement with those judged as adapting to and perpetuating their own deprivation draws attention from agents as such to the structures and institutions (local, national, and global) that shape their lives. In the third paper, Seetal Sunga discusses systemic inequalities and injustices emerging from Canada’s century long practice of forcefully removing indigenous children from families and communities and having them educated in schools that destroyed their language and culture. Sunga suggests that policies designed to remove these inequalities and injustices keep the underlying injustice intact. The foundational/structural injustice rests in the assumed dyad of white settler/colonized, state/individual at the heart of liberal theory and still evident in contemporary theories of recognition and vulnerability. This assumed dyad means that indigenous voices and claims are not heard by the state and their ways of knowing and being are denigrated and rejected. Sunga challenges the idea that power should rest only with the state in devising policies intended to address injustices emerging from Canada’s history and identity as a white settler colony.

The final three papers along with the critical commentary also uncover injustices embedded in the structures and knowledge making foundations of liberal theory and neo-liberal policies. Each of these authors applies these insights to a particular context or issue. Emiliana J. Mwita and Susan P. Murphy examine policies designed to address gender injustice in developing countries. They argue that epistemic injustices are evident in these one-size-fits all educational policies that fail to take into account factors crucial to understanding and undermining gender norms in specific contexts. They provide details of educational patterns and experiences in a specific region of Tanzania to highlight the range of structural factors that affect agents in this rural, resource poor context. Ami Harbin explores epistemic injustices underlying policies of policing and sentencing in the United States, policies that embed racist assumptions about who commits crime and, thereby, who should be policed and imprisoned. Harbin challenges the racialized structures and institutions that embed assumptions by white people that these policies are needed to make them feel safe and be secure. Harbin’s account of safety as a shared good opens spaces for uncovering racialized feelings and beliefs and transforming racialized structures that protect white people by endangering others. Michael D. Doan critically examines injustices that underwrite the increasingly popular intervention laws in US states and cities facing fiscal distress. Doan examines these emergency management laws in the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit in which he lives to argue that the well-known effects of foreclosures of homes and shutting off water supplies for non-payment of bills hide underlying injustices of silencing citizen protest and participation. Doan uses the concept of ‘epistemic redlining’ to highlight a form of epistemic injustice that is a group-based credibility discounting that reflects and perpetuates racialized subordination and dispossession. The final essay is my own critical commentary on Ami Harbin’s Disorientation and Moral Life. The book is an excellent example of the work being done to extend the boundaries and applications of foundational, structural, and epistemic injustices. Against the standard literature that takes disorientation to be negative and harmful, Harbin explores the beneficial effects of those disoriented in contexts of oppression who gain insights into structural injustices.

This special issue began with co-organizing the North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP) conference held at Carleton University in July 2016 and the mini International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) conference that preceded it. There are a number of people I want to thank. Derek Clifford, co-editor of Ethics and Social Welfare, who trusted me to identify the theme under which some of the best papers at these conferences could be collected and stepped in at many stages throughout the project to help out. I am grateful to the following for their organizational skills that produced some fine papers at these conferences: Jay Drydyk, main organizer of the NASSP conference; Sally Scholz, president of NASSP; and Eric Palmer, president of IDEA. There are many others, but I will focus on thanking some of Carleton’s own who helped with the conferences: Sandy Kirkpatrick, Philosophy’s Departmental Administrator, and Amy Keating, Holly Longair, and Arielle Stirling, a few of Philosophy’s MA students. Lastly, it was a pleasure to work with the authors in this volume.

Notes on contributor

Christine M. Koggel is a professor of philosophy and graduate supervisor at Carleton University. She came to Carleton from Bryn Mawr College, where she was the Harvey Wexler Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for International Studies. Her main research and teaching interests are in the areas of moral theory, practical ethics, feminism, and social and political theory. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books, chapters in books, and journal articles.