Justificatory Injustice: Epistemic Injustice in the Availability of Reasons

Most people have a need to regard their significant life choices as justified. More than that, they want to be able to give acceptable justificatory reasons to the people in their social milieu. In this paper, I argue that structural disadvantage can lock people into a situation in which they struggle to appeal to their best reasons. I start out with a paradigmatic example inspired by Jennifer Morton’s work on disadvantaged students aiming at upwards mobility and identify a struggle that has more than one cause but amounts to a distinctive experience: that you have objectively good reasons for a life choice, which, however, are not available to you because of your social position. I analyse this ‘unavailability’ of a reason with the help of existing literature on epistemic injustice, in particular hermeneutical injustice, and coin the new term ‘justificatory injustice’. While it can be described as epistemic injustice broadly conceived, justificatory injustice goes beyond epistemic access in a narrow sense and is entangled with features distinctive of practical justification taking place in a concrete social milieu. Justificatory injustice, I argue, can only be remedied in a more integrated justificatory community, which requires equality of condition, also in economic terms.