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[A paper on labeling events in social-political discourse]
Abstract: Philosophical research on labels has focused almost exclusively on those applied to people, yet we label events just as pervasively and consequentially. Black Americans’ protests are called “riots,” post-9/11 torture becomes “enhanced interrogation,” and invasions of other countries are recast as “military operations.” This paper analyzes such expressions as a stand-along phenomenon, Event Labels, that cannot be captured by existing accounts. Taking “riot” as a paradigm, I identify two features of Event Labels demanding explanation. The first is their communicative capacities: how a seemingly descriptive term frames the participants and reshapes the narratives. The second is the contextual variability of their additional content: how the same label communicates radically different content across contexts. To address these puzzles, I lay out a general framework of how Event Labels operate: they denote eventualities, a semantic category whose conceptual structure grounds their distinctive capacities to include implicit agents and activate event schemata, while a compounding mechanism between linguistic associations and social stereotypes explains how these general capacities are exploited to communicate different content across contexts. Linguistically, this account challenges kindhood-based theories of labeling and favors a framing-based analysis. Normatively, it uncovers a structural form of linguistic harm that operates independently of speaker intention. (revise and resubmit)
[A paper on hermeneutical injustice]
Abstract: This paper develops a novel and unifying account of hermeneutical injustice. I argue that hermeneutical injustice should be characterized as injustice caused by a society’s dominant hermeneutical resource, namely, the aggregate of prevailing social meanings established through the society’s sense-making conventions. Such a resource causes injustice when it unfairly hinders some individuals from participating as equals. Descriptively, this account unifies a wide range of cases under a single framework, encompassing injustices that arise from both the absence and the presence of particular interpretive tools. Normatively, it relocates the wrong of hermeneutical injustice from epistemic incapacity to unequal standing: it is injustice that originates in an epistemic system but wrongs victims qua equals, not qua knowers. This normative claim explains why a primary hermeneutical harm is neither necessary nor sufficient for hermeneutical injustice. On this account, hermeneutical injustice earns its theoretical value not by showcasing a sui generis wrong, but by identifying a distinctive and underappreciated site where systematic injustice occurs: the hermeneutical conventions we live by. (under review)
"It Was A Different World": How Social Structure Wrongs
Abstract: This paper articulates structural wrong. Social structures—understood as systems of conventions and norms—are normative systems that evaluate and prescribe behaviors, shaping what is the optimal course of action within individuals’ choice architecture. But norms of a non-ideal society do not always prescribe the normative status of behaviors in accordance with moral principles. Instead, they often license harmful behaviors, placing them at more normatively favorable positions within some individuals’ choice architecture than they ought to occupy. I argue that when norms license harmful behaviors, they wrong the victims of these behaviors by obscuring or invalidating the claims victims are entitled to make against such behaviors. Specifically, a social structure can wrong these victims by (1) creating systematic ignorance about what they are owed, and (2) granting perverse exemptions to behaviors that harm them. Structural wrong, I argue, is second-personal (Darwall 2006) in the following sense: what unjust norms interfere is not merely the victims’ well-being, but also their second-personal practical authority to press claims grounded in their standing with others as moral equals. (draft available)
Early-stage projects
Labels as Frames
Motivated by the creativity and flexibility of what labels can communicate, I develop a general framework of how labels categorize and essentialize social members as an alternative to currently dominating kindhood-based accounts. This account draws on psycholinguistic, cognitive and sociological theories of frames. (in progress)
A Role-Based Account of Responsibility for Structural Injustice
Motivated by the observation that individuals contribute differently to structural injustice, I argue that it is implausible to hold them as equally responsible based on their membership of the society. I develop a role-based account to explain the fine-grained difference of individuals’ moral and political status in an unjust system. (in progress)