H. Melisa Acar

This paper develops the concept of imaginative injustice as a form of epistemic injustice. While testimonial injustice concerns credibility deficits and hermeneutical injustice concerns gaps in collective interpretive resources, imaginative injustice targets a dimension of epistemic life: epistemic role-viability, the sustained possibility of regarding oneself as an ordinary participant in shared epistemic practices whose contributions could receive uptake. I argue that epistemic self-conception, the practical orientation through which subjects experience themselves as capable of participating in practices of knowing, is not merely an individual psychological capacity but is socially shaped and unevenly sustained. Imaginative injustice occurs when epistemic role-viability is systematically eroded along identity lines. This structural erosion can manifest experientially in two ways: uptake-atrophy, where agents continue to participate but lose the expectation of uptake, and participatory foreclosure, where epistemic participation itself ceases to appear viable. I distinguish imaginative injustice from testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, showing how it can both precede and result from them, and I identify the affective mechanisms through which this erosion operates, including shame, fear, and the social stratification of curiosity. The paper concludes by arguing that epistemic justice requires institutional conditions that secure equal epistemic role-viability across social positions, not formal access to speech.

This article develops a multidimensional account of the worth of human life and explores its implications for the philosophical foundations of human rights. It argues that traditional monistic accounts, whether theological, rationalist, autonomy-based, sentientist, or capability-oriented, capture important aspects of human value but remain limited when treated as exclusive foundations. In response, the article proposes a five-dimensional architecture of human worth composed of (i) biological vitality, (ii) sentient-affective life, (iii) moral capacity, (iv) cognitive-productive power, and (v) relational embeddedness. This structure is understood as interdependent and shared rather than as a set of capacities whose exercise determines moral status. The model explains equal human worth by grounding value in structural participation in the architecture of human life, rather than in the possession or performance of any single faculty. It also clarifies how human rights protect the biological, experiential, moral, cognitive, and relational dimensions of human existence. The article’s contribution is therefore not to replace existing human rights theories, but to offer a more integrative account of the human worth that such theories often presuppose.