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Introduction
In recent years, a number of important contributions to moral, social, and political philosophy have identified distinctive forms of injustice that had not previously been explicitly defined. These have concerned phenomena such as knowledge—for example, Miranda Fricker's (2007) account of ‘epistemic injustice’—and communication—for example, Rebecca Kukla's (2014) account of ‘discursive injustice’. In this article, I identify a distinctive form of injustice that concerns the social construction of human kinds. I show that an individual can be wronged by the very fact of being socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind—kinds such as wife, slave, woman, black person. Since this wrong operates through social ontology, I term it ontic injustice. I show that ontic injustice is a distinctive, pervasive, and interesting type of injustice that merits attention from moral, social, and political theorists.
I begin by showing that there is an implicit consensus among different accounts of social ontology that what it is to be a member of a certain social kind is, at least in part, to be subject to certain social constraints and enablements. I then offer a definition of ontic injustice, explain the nature of the wrong it involves, show how the concept can be applied to particular cases, and demonstrate what we stand to gain from incorporating ontic injustice into our conceptual repertoire.
1. Constraints and Enablements in Accounts of Social Ontology
Many prominent accounts of the ontology of social kinds explicitly hold that being a certain kind of social entity is, in some sense, a matter of being subject to certain social constraints and enablements. Probably the most well-known example of this is Searle's account of institutional facts (1996; 2011). Searle focuses on those social facts that are the products of human institutions, such the facts that certain people are husbands, judges, and presidents. He holds that in order for it to be a social fact that some individual is a husband, a judge, or a president, that individual must have certain ‘conventional deontic powers’. Conventional deontic powers are socially created permissions, duties, and so on that an individual has in dependence upon collective intentionality. If members of a society collectively recognize people who have been through a certain ceremony (a marriage,...