While there is an abundance of philosophical literature on justice, there is far less literature within political philosophy on the topic of injustice. I think one common assumption these approaches share is that injustice is simply the absence of justice; call this the absence thesis. This assumption becomes more peculiar juxtaposed to social and political struggle for justice, which quite commonly begins with cries of injustice. Injustice is an importantly distinct philosophical notion from justice – it can explain how justice fails to be realized in interesting and sophisticated ways, and, I argue, track our efforts to realize just social worlds, in ways that paradigmatically ideal and nonideal approaches to justice by themselves cannot. In this essay, I focus specifically on the question of how theories of justice can guide action in social worlds with systematic oppression. I ultimately argue that action-guiding theories of justice that evaluate worlds with systematic oppression must represent features of injustice. If a theory fails to represent features of injustice, it will fail to guide action in these worlds. That representation of such features is necessary gives us reason to think, in certain circumstances, that the absence thesis is false. / Master of Arts / While there is an abundance of philosophical literature on justice, there is far less literature within political philosophy on the topic of injustice. However, I think that injustice is an importantly distinct philosophical notion from justice – it can explain how justice fails to be realized in interesting and sophisticated ways, and, I argue, track our efforts to realize just social worlds. In this essay, I focus specifically on the question of how theories of justice can guide action in social worlds with systematic oppression. In answering this question, I argue that we must take knowledge about particular phenomenon of injustice and oppression seriously when thinking about how we can progress from nonideal worlds ripe with injustice – like our actual world – to more just worlds. I bring into conversation more traditional ideal theory in political philosophy with theory that focuses more on the nonideal – the actual conditions of injustice – especially the thought of W.E.B DuBois. When thinking about what makes our societies just, or thinking about what is important to know when we attempt to go from our own nonideal circumstances to create a more just world for ourselves, knowledge of justice or what an ideally just society will look like is not enough to guide us to those circumstances. Until we understand the circumstances of injustice, we will not know what ideals can guide us to more just circumstances.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78009 |
| Date | 09 June 2017 |
| Creators | Cooper, Dominick Robert |
| Contributors | Philosophy, Moehler, Michael, Wodak, Daniel, Patton, Lydia K., Matheis, Christian |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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