Imperfect Cognitions

Benjamin Elzinga recently completed his PhD at Georgetown University with a dissertation on epistemic agency. His research interests include epistemology, the problems of free will, and the philosophy of mind. In this post, he presents work he recently published under the title " Hermeneutical Injustice and Liberatory Education ". In the 50s and 60s, women joining the U.S. workforce and members of the broader society in some sense lacked the conceptual skills for making sense of sexual harassment. Through the practices of the U.S. women’s liberation movement, especially through the organization of consciousness raising groups and speak-outs in the early 70s, feminists developed these resources and encoded them into the legal system. According to Miranda Fricker this is an instance of recognizing and to some extent addressing a problem of hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when members of a certain group are unjustly prevented from developing and distributing import

This post is by Thomas Mulligan , a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics . He talks about his new book, Justice and the Meritocratic State . A striking feature of the philosophical debate about justice is that our most popular theories are rejected by the people who would have to live under them.   Since the 1970s, libertarianism and egalitarianism have dominated political philosophy despite being unpalatable to the public; we know, for example, that “empirical studies provide almost no support for egalitarianism, understood as equality of outcomes, or for Rawls’s difference principle” ( Konow 2003 : 1199). The goal of this book is to provide a theory of justice that is consonant with human intuition and more conceptually compelling than these competitors on the right and the left.  Although you wouldn’t know it from our politics, there is deep normative agreement about the structure of a just economy.  Human beings across lines o