Ontic Injustice (Special Edition MOPP, deadline March 31st, 2024)

Moral Philosophy and Politics (MOPP) Special Issue: Ontic Injustice

Guest Editors: Christine Bratu (University of Göttingen), Mirjam Müller (HU Berlin)

In her book „Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality“ (OUP 2023), Katharine Jenkins establishes ontic injustice as a distinct type of injustice to which moral, social and political philosophers have not yet paid enough attention. According to Jenkins, ontic injustice occurs when an individual A is wronged by being socially constructed as member of some kind K because the constraints and enablements that constitute being a member of K do not appropriately track what is morally owed to A. Referring to the concept of ontic injustice, we can argue for instance that in a society where gender and race kinds constitutively involve relations of domination and subordination, people are wronged simply in virtue of being socially constructed as women and/or as Black. This wrong is independent of how they experience their kind membership subjectively and independent of whether they suffer any actual damages to their material or psychological wellbeing as a result of being constructed as a member of K. 

For this special issue, we invite submissions that engage with the theory of ontic injustice as argued for in „Ontology and Oppression“, as well as submissions that take ideas about ontic injustice in significantly new directions. Issues addressed can include:

• What are examples of ontic injustice and which phenomena can we only understand adequately by conceptualizing them as instances of ontic injustice?
• How does ontic injustice relate to other types of injustices such as hermeneutical injustice, marginalization or discrimination and to other philosophical concepts such as Judith Butler’s idea of subjectivation?
• Is ontic injustice indeed a distinctive kind of injustice or can it be reduced to other kinds of injustices we are already more familiar with?
• (How) can the idea of ontic injustice do justice to the intersectionality of oppression?
• What understanding of social construction does the concept of ontic injustice imply?
• How can the idea of ontic injustice help us in our intellectual and political struggles for emancipation?

Papers should be between 3.000 and 12.000 words in length and should be submitted by March 31st, 2024. All submissions will undergo MOPP’s double-blind refereeing process. Papers will only be accepted for publication if they are approved for publication by both the guest editor and the journal's founding editors. Papers will be published ahead-of-print right after acceptance.

The journal’s manuscript submission site can be accessed at
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mopp.