This week's post is by Alexander Edlich, and Alfred Archer and is based on their paper Rejecting Identities: Stigma and Hermeneutical Injustice. Alexander Edlich's work focuses on ethics, social philosophy, and moral responsibility. He is the author of The Scope of Moral Protest: Beyond Blame and Responsibility (Springer, 2025) and research papers in different areas of ethics and social philosophy. Alfred Archer is an Associate Professor of philosophy at Tilburg University. He is the co-author of Extravagance and Misery: The Emotional Regime of Market Societies (Oxford University Press 2024); Why It’s Ok to be a Sports fan (Routledge 2024) and Honouring and Admiring the Immoral: An Ethical Guide (Routledge 2021). He is currently writing a book on ethics and sportswashing for Routledge’s Ethics and Sport series.
Alexander Edlich Alfred Archer
The standard story about hermeneutical injustice is familiar: people are harmed because appropriate conceptual resources are missing. For example, without the concept of sexual harassment women who experienced persistent unwanted sexual attention were unable to fully understand and communicate their experiences (Fricker 2007). We argue there is another route to the same harm. Sometimes the resources are on the table—but people refuse to use them because doing so would mean owning a stigmatized identity.
We start with Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1983 [2016]). The adolescent narrator has every reason to describe himself as “homosexual”: there is clear evidence in his desires and actions, and the concept is available to him. Using it would also deliver epistemic and practical benefits to him. Yet he actively avoids it, because the label is saturated with stigma. What results isn’t a conceptual gap, it’s a rejection of helpful concepts driven by stigmatization. The hermeneutical landscape is navigable—but terrifying.
Two further cases show the pattern applies more broadly. First, addiction: people often decline the “alcoholic/addict” label not because these concepts are inappropriate to their cases, but to keep distance from a spoiled identity. They do not want to think of themselves as an addict because of the stigma attached to addiction. This often makes it harder to access help. Second, intimate partner violence: survivors—women and, especially, men—frequently resist identifying as victims because the label threatens status, competence, or masculinity; the costs include forfeited help and muted testimony. In each case, helpful concepts exist and are known, but stigma functions as a barrier to applying them to oneself, and thus also prevent communication and uptake.
These cases show how stigma can make otherwise apt self-ascriptions practically intolerable, so agents steer toward narratives that preserve standing or hope—“it’s just a phase,” “it isn’t really abuse” —to avoid stigma. This is motivated cognition: the evidential landscape has not vanished, nor are conceptual resources absent, but helpful descriptions come at a heavy cost.
The harm here is not epistemic bad luck. When social arrangements attach stigma to an identity, they make the uptake of accurate self-descriptions unduly costly. This is a structural wrong: people are denied the benefits of understanding and communicating their situation because the wider discursive context discourages it. In this way, people are unjustly prevented from accessing conceptual resources to describe their identities. While these resources are present, and the corresponding identities do feature in social discourse, it is precisely those people who may identify with them who are disincentivised to talk about them.
This form of hermeneutical injustice may have an additional wrongful effect. Stigmatised concepts can “tightlace”: they push people to accept mistaken self-conceptions that license overdemanding norms (be straight; be invulnerable) and makes affected individuals complicit in erasing their identities from discourse.
This is a case study of how oppression and hermeneutical injustice function not only through discursive patterns. They also operate through victims’ own non-ideal cognition and thereby deeply interfere with their processes of making sense of themselves and their position in the social world. Therefore redress for hermeneutical injustice cannot stop at supplying adequate concepts; it must also ensure that people are not disincentivised from using helpful hermeneutical resources.
We start with Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1983 [2016]). The adolescent narrator has every reason to describe himself as “homosexual”: there is clear evidence in his desires and actions, and the concept is available to him. Using it would also deliver epistemic and practical benefits to him. Yet he actively avoids it, because the label is saturated with stigma. What results isn’t a conceptual gap, it’s a rejection of helpful concepts driven by stigmatization. The hermeneutical landscape is navigable—but terrifying.
Two further cases show the pattern applies more broadly. First, addiction: people often decline the “alcoholic/addict” label not because these concepts are inappropriate to their cases, but to keep distance from a spoiled identity. They do not want to think of themselves as an addict because of the stigma attached to addiction. This often makes it harder to access help. Second, intimate partner violence: survivors—women and, especially, men—frequently resist identifying as victims because the label threatens status, competence, or masculinity; the costs include forfeited help and muted testimony. In each case, helpful concepts exist and are known, but stigma functions as a barrier to applying them to oneself, and thus also prevent communication and uptake.
These cases show how stigma can make otherwise apt self-ascriptions practically intolerable, so agents steer toward narratives that preserve standing or hope—“it’s just a phase,” “it isn’t really abuse” —to avoid stigma. This is motivated cognition: the evidential landscape has not vanished, nor are conceptual resources absent, but helpful descriptions come at a heavy cost.
The harm here is not epistemic bad luck. When social arrangements attach stigma to an identity, they make the uptake of accurate self-descriptions unduly costly. This is a structural wrong: people are denied the benefits of understanding and communicating their situation because the wider discursive context discourages it. In this way, people are unjustly prevented from accessing conceptual resources to describe their identities. While these resources are present, and the corresponding identities do feature in social discourse, it is precisely those people who may identify with them who are disincentivised to talk about them.
This form of hermeneutical injustice may have an additional wrongful effect. Stigmatised concepts can “tightlace”: they push people to accept mistaken self-conceptions that license overdemanding norms (be straight; be invulnerable) and makes affected individuals complicit in erasing their identities from discourse.
This is a case study of how oppression and hermeneutical injustice function not only through discursive patterns. They also operate through victims’ own non-ideal cognition and thereby deeply interfere with their processes of making sense of themselves and their position in the social world. Therefore redress for hermeneutical injustice cannot stop at supplying adequate concepts; it must also ensure that people are not disincentivised from using helpful hermeneutical resources.