A Structural Explanation of Injustice in Conversations: It's about Norms

Abstract

In contrast to individualistic explanations of social injustice that appeal to implicit attitudes, structural explanations are unintuitive: they appeal to entities that lack clear ontological status, and the explanatory mechanism is similarly unclear. This makes structural explanations unappealing. The present work proposes a structural explanation of one type of injustice that happens in conversations, discursive injustice. This proposal meets two goals. First, it satisfactorily accounts for the specific features of this particular kind of injustice; and second, it articulates a structural explanation that overcomes their unattractiveness. The main idea is that discursive injustice is not the result of biased interlocutors, but of problematic discursive norms.