Affective injustice and fundamental affective goods

Nevertheless, despite the nascent state of the literature, the topic of affective injustice appears to be ripe for philosophical exploration.Although the term "affective injustice" was coined relatively recently, the emotional burdens of oppression have long been of great interest to philosophers who research social identity and inequality. 1 The work of these philosophers suggests that our emotions and moods are not merely private and personal but, rather, are bound up in a wide variety of social processes and, as such, can be a site of both the experience and the perpetration of injustice.Moreover, the recent explosion of philosophical research on epistemic injustice-that is, the injustice faced by people specifically in their capacity as knowers-has illustrated the philosophical value of theoretically isolating and naming particular categories of harm and disadvantage brought about by unjust actions and practices, particularly when those harms can be invisible because they are internal and related to the mind.In the relatively short time since the publication of Miranda Fricker's ( 2007) seminal book on the topic of epistemic injustice, a vibrant subfield of philosophical inquiry has emerged, exploring issues such as testimonial injustice, hermeneutic injustice, epistemic resources, epistemic responsibility, epistemologies of ignorance, and their connections to racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. 2 It is not difficult to imagine a comparable development of the philosophical inquiry into the topic of affective injustice, once a more developed framework is available to facilitate the collection of the many insights relevant to the investigation of affective injustice that currently remains scattered in what may appear to be unrelated texts.At the same time, the comparison to epistemic injustice reveals some of the philosophical complexities that make inquiry into affective injustice particularly challenging.One source of difficulty is the lack of clarity regarding the normative standards by which we should evaluate people's emotional lives.If we grant that a given circumstance has harmed someone in their capacity as an affective being, an adequate explanation of this fact requires that we first explain what it might mean for a person's emotional life to go well or poorly.Analogous questions regarding the nature of epistemic harm are somewhat easier to answer, insofar as it is relatively straightforward to determine what is good for a knower-namely, the circumstances and capacities that facilitate their grasp of truth-and on this basis, we can evaluate particular epistemic practices and the conditions that influence those practices.But there is no philosophical consensus regarding what it would mean to do well or poorly as an affective being. 3 With this in mind, the central aim of this article is to facilitate philosophical inquiry into affective injustice by specifying the concept of affective injustice, clarifying the conditions on something being an affective injustice, and drawing a sketch of the scope of the phenomenon in a more thorough and systematic manner than has been previously attempted.In section two, I argue that affective injustice should be defined as a state in which individuals or groups are deprived of "affective goods" which are owed to them.This way of understanding the concept of affective injustice directs theorists to examine which affective goods may be fundamental and which subsidiary goods may be most necessary for their provision.Then in the remaining sections, I identify two possible fundamental affective goods, subjective well-being and emotional aptness, and I discuss the various forms of affective injustice that may be related to the deprivation of these affective goods.In this way, I hope to show that my proposed understanding of the general concept of affective injustice can shed new light on the particular types of affective injustice described in the extant literature, while also allowing us to identify further types that have not been theorized to the same extent.