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structural identity prejudices

📖 Definitions

"From the epistemic point of view, what is bad about this sort of hermeneutical marginalization is that it renders the collective hermeneutical resource structurally prejudiced, for it will tend to issue interpretations of that group’s social experiences that are biased because insufficiently influenced by the subject group, and therefore unduly influenced by more hermeneutically powerful groups (thus, for instance, sexual harassment as flirting, rape in marriage as non-rape, post-natal depression as hysteria, reluctance to work family-unfriendly hours as unprofessionalism, and so on). Further, it is generally socially powerless groups that suffer hermeneutical marginalization, and so we can say that, from the moral point of view, what is bad about this sort of hermeneutical marginalization is that the structural prejudice it causes in the collective hermeneutical resource is essentially discriminatory: the prejudice affects people in virtue of their membership of a socially powerless group, and thus in virtue of an aspect of their social identity. It is, then, akin to identity prejudice. Let us call it structural identity prejudice." (Fricker 2007, 154-55).

🔗 Relations

📚 References

  • Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001.