Claudia Gâlgău

In this paper, I introduce the concepts of ontic erasure and moral social kinds to account for a type of ontological injustice that extends beyond Katharine Jenkins’s notion of ontic injustice. While much of critical social ontology has focused on how oppressive structures constitute wrongful race and gender kinds, this paper explores how oppressive structures constitute wrongful forms of seemingly neutral moral kinds, such as the refugee. Moral social kinds are anchored in practices that function to manage justice-related resources according to operative conceptions of justice, with the kind ‘refugee’ as a paradigmatic example. Ontic erasure refers to situations where moral social kinds are wrongful because they also track features that are irrelevant from the perspective of justice, and as a result, often only safeguard the moral entitlements of those who are socially privileged. Ontic erasure wrongs individuals who, due to this bias, fail to be socially constructed as members of a moral social kind. At its worst, ontic erasure, like ontic injustice, amounts to moral injury that puts people at risk of life-threatening violence and destitution.

This paper focuses on social structural explanations of injustice and the ontological commitments of theorists who develop them. I first show that theorists can develop structural explanations and social position concepts without committing to a critical social ontology of oppression or to a view of race and gender as constitutively socially constructed kinds. I also develop a pluralist account of social position concepts that can accommodate the full range of social ontological commitments that theorists may hold. Then, I argue that structural explanations of injustice developed from a position of oppression agnosticism are morally and epistemically problematic. They carry a high risk of perpetrating identity-based hermeneutical injustice, and perpetuate an understanding of structural intersectionality that has been widely problematised. Even ethically motivated oppression agnosticism, as an attempt to respond to one’s situated ignorance and to practice epistemic humility, is therefore problematic.