A CRITIQUE OF HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE

LAURA BEEBY

Recent work at the junction of epistemology and political theory focuses

on the notion of epistemic injustice, the injustice of being wronged as a
knower. Miranda Fricker (2007) identifies two kinds of epistemic injus-
tice. I focus here on hermeneutical injustice in an attempt to identify a dif-
ficulty for Fricker’s account. In particular, I consider the significance of
background social conditions and suggest that an epistemic injustice
should not rely on other forms of disadvantage to achieve its status as an
injustice. Thus reformulated, the notion of epistemic injustice can help us
to achieve an even deeper understanding of the relationship between
knowledge and privilege.

According to Miranda Fricker’s account (2007), hermeneutical in-

justice is the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social
experience obscured from collective understanding.1 The best way
to understand what this means is through an example. Fricker uses
the true story of events that happened to a woman called Carmita
Wood as the paradigm example of hermeneutical injustice.2
Carmita Wood worked for a North American university in the ear-
ly 1970s, at a time when significant numbers of women had not been
members of ‘the professions’3 long enough for us to develop a nu-
anced understanding of professional gender relations. At a time when
we had no concept of what sexual harassment was, Carmita Wood’s
boss made unwanted sexual advances to her in their place of work.
Carmita did everything she could to avoid or alleviate the situation
before succumbing to stress and trauma and quitting her job. Her
subsequent claim for unemployment insurance was denied because
she could not name or describe to her (or anyone else’s) satisfaction
1
See Fricker (2007, pp. 154–5) for variants of this definition, both of which include the
above account.
2
Fricker takes this example from Susan Brownmiller’s In Our Time (1990).
3
Fricker cites journalism, politics, academia and the law as examples of the professions
(2007, p. 152).

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the reason for her unemployment. This moment, the moment when
Carmita struggled and failed to find words to describe her experi-
ence, was the point when she became a victim of hermeneutical in-
justice. She could not find words to describe her experience because
that experience, one we now understand as sexual harassment, was
‘obscured from collective understanding’. Carmita eventually found
a women’s group that fostered discussion of women’s experiences in
the workplace. She discovered that her experience was not uncom-
mon. Members of this group chose to name their shared experience
‘sexual harassment’, and they used this name in a successful cam-
paign to make sexual harassment illegal. Carmita Wood’s story is
also an account of the origins of the term ‘sexual harassment’.
What does Fricker do with this example? To begin with, she argues
that there is something called a ‘collective hermeneutical resource’ in
place at the beginning of Wood’s tale. This resource contains tools
that facilitate an understanding of our social experience. In this case,
we are interested in understanding the workplace, so the resource
might contain information about gender roles, names for jobs (‘sec-
retary’, ‘boss’) and tools (‘typewriter’), concepts (work), and expec-
tations about how people might behave in the office. Fricker’s point
is that the resource did not contain terms or concepts that Carmita
Wood and her contemporaries could employ to understand and de-
scribe Carmita’s experience of sexual harassment. This is not to say
that the collective hermeneutical resource had no terms or concepts
available for use at that time. The resource certainly contained the
idea that some bosses engaged in ‘chasing around the desk’ behav-
iour. Perhaps it contained the belief that female employees who
found such behaviour objectionable lacked a sense of humour. This is
conjecture. What we know is that there were resources in place, and
Carmita’s experience demonstrates that these resources were in defi-
cit. As Fricker puts it, there was a hole in the resource where the term
‘sexual harassment’ should have been (2007, pp. 150–1).
Carmita’s ‘Aha!’ moment, the moment she shared with her
women’s group when they discovered that they all had similar expe-
riences with harassment in the workplace, was important. In that
moment, Carmita went from having unclear thoughts about why
she quit her job to having clear thoughts about the relevant similari-
ties between her case and the cases of other women in the group.
The women in that group were able to recognize ways in which
their individual experiences were alike, and were then able to

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 A CRITIQUE OF HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE 481

project forward and describe what more experiences of this kind

might be like. The ability to generalize from one individual experi-
ence to a kind of experience shared in common by many people is
valuable. It is an ability that brings with it a kind of validation, an
increase in what Fricker calls ‘cognitive confidence’, and an in-
creased communicative facility. With this ability, Carmita could see
that she wasn’t just lacking a sense of humour. Others found her
boss’s behaviour objectionable, and this validation enabled Carmita
and her colleagues to do something vitally important. Because they
could all identify what they would come to call ‘sexual harassment’,
this meant that they could all talk about it and understand each oth-
er’s experiences. In other words, Carmita was able to overcome her
experience of hermeneutical injustice.
Now consider two additional features of Fricker’s account. First,
hermeneutical injustice only occurs in a climate of hermeneutical
marginalization. People are hermeneutically marginalized when they
are excluded from the generation of shared social meanings (Fricker
2007, p. 153). As noted earlier, the majority of academics, lawyers,
businesspeople and journalists were not women. Women, therefore,
did not play an equal role in the generation of shared social mean-
ings with respect to the workplace. For example, most bosses were
not women in 1970s America, and therefore our understanding of
who the bosses were and what they did was unduly influenced by
men. In this sense, Fricker argues, Carmita lived in a climate of
hermeneutical marginalization.
Second, hermeneutical injustice does not occur until the individu-
al makes a doomed attempt to render her experience intelligible.
There was no hermeneutical injustice in Carmita Wood’s case until
she stood in the unemployment insurance office and failed to come
up with something to write in the appropriate box on her claims
form. Although Fricker’s paradigm example concerns sexual harass-
ment, Carmita Wood’s experience of sexual harassment is not an in-
stance of hermeneutical injustice. The hermeneutical injustice here is
her experience of being unable to understand and communicate
about sexual harassment.
We are now in a position to understand the drawbacks of Frick-
er’s account. Fricker describes Carmita Wood as a victim of herme-
neutical injustice while arguing that her harasser is not, because a
harasser’s experience of hermeneutical injustice is importantly dif-
ferent from that of a harassee.

©2011 The Aristotelian Society

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482 LAURA BEEBY

In the present example, harasser and harassee alike are cognitively

handicapped … neither has a proper understanding of how he is treat-
ing her—but the harasser’s cognitive disablement is not a significant
disadvantage to him. Indeed, there is an obvious sense in which it suits
his purpose. (Fricker 2007, p. 151)
For Fricker, both people cannot be victims of hermeneutical injus-
tice because there must be some kind of asymmetry between victims
and non-victims. If both people were victims, we would lose the
sense that there is something unfairly disadvantageous about Carmi-
ta’s situation. For this reason, Fricker draws our attention to the
background social conditions present in 1970s North America. Car-
mita and her harasser share an equal cognitive handicap, but Carmi-
ta is also a woman living in a sexist society. Her harasser is not, and
this is where Fricker finds her asymmetry.
It is here that my worries with Fricker’s position begin. Fricker
admits that Carmita and her harasser suffer from the same cognitive
disadvantage (2007, p. 151) because of the gap in the communal re-
source. Neither has the words or concepts needed to understand an
experience of sexual harassment. In other words, both might have
been affected by a climate of hermeneutical marginalization. Both
were vulnerable to failures of understanding and communication.
Both might be victims of hermeneutical injustice, depending on how
you tell their respective stories.
Fricker argues that this seeming equality of resource poverty does
not tell the full story. Carmita was wronged in a way that her harasser
was not, and she was more vulnerable to the background conditions
of sexism as well. Much here depends upon the role of background
sexism in our assessment of both harasser and harassee’s struggles
with the communal resources. In (at least) one sense, the harasser
does have an unfair advantage. Due to the prevailing social structures
and the fact that men dominated the workplace, the communal re-
sources may have contained more information about the harasser’s
non-harassing experiences in the workplace. This understanding may
have given him confidence and other epistemic advantages. However,
he had no more of a complete understanding of his harassing behav-
iour than Carmita did. He suffered less as a result of his harassment,
certainly. In terms of advantages and disadvantages, he may have suc-
ceeded in behaving badly and harming Carmita in order to seek his
own ends. But these are not epistemic advantages. It is not, for exam-
ple, that the harasser knows things Carmita cannot or does not know

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 A CRITIQUE OF HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE 483

about sexual harassment. With respect to their knowledge of or be-

liefs about their situation, both are equally disadvantaged by the def-
icit in the resource.
Fricker’s account provides a nice illustration of the fact that our
epistemic practices have ethical import. She has captured the sense
that there is something unfair about our epistemic practices in terms
of what happened to Carmita Wood. However, I have the following
worry about Fricker’s way of putting the ethical and political to-
gether with the epistemic: according to Fricker, Carmita and her
harasser both suffer the same cognitive disadvantage because of the
deficit in their shared hermeneutical resource. However, Carmita is
a victim of hermeneutical injustice and her harasser is not. This
leads me to think that the source of the injustice and inequality in
Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice is in the background so-
cial conditions of sexism, and not in anything distinctly epistemic.
This in turn raises the worry that we are talking about an injustice
that has epistemic implications, and not a distinctly epistemic injus-
tice. If what’s at issue is that Carmita is a victim of sexism in a way
that her harasser is not, then this situation has epistemic implica-
tions, certainly. But is it an example of a distinctly epistemic injus-
tice? In terms of epistemic advantages, Fricker herself is careful to
note that both harasser and harassee lack relevant knowledge in this
case. For Fricker, this lack of knowledge is inextricably bound up
with the background conditions of sexism in the workplace that
Carmita had to contend with. Carmita dealt with a knowledge defi-
cit and a work climate that was already structured in such a way as
to make her success more difficult. The harasser, on the other hand,
had only to contend with the knowledge deficit. The work climate
was structured to ensure his success. Knowledge and sexism may be
inextricably bound together in this case, but it is not clear that they
are bound in the way Fricker suggests.
For one thing, it is important to note that hermeneutical injustice
involves no culprit.4 It is a purely structural notion, dependent on
the power relations present in our social structures and not on any
one agent. This idea goes some way towards explaining the impor-
tance of background social conditions as catalysts for moments of
injustice. As such, we must keep in mind the fact that, in the case of

4
See Fricker (2007, p. 10) for a discussion of the difference between structural power and
agential power.

©2011 The Aristotelian Society

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484 LAURA BEEBY

sexual harassment, the harasser is not a perpetrator of hermeneuti-

cal injustice. Instead, the injustice ‘erupts’ from a background of in-
equality and marginalization. In thinking about Carmita Wood’s
harasser, we have to keep in mind the fact that he might be both a
perpetrator of sexual harassment and a victim of hermeneutical in-
justice. I think it is possible that he might be both.
Imagine that the situation is as follows: both Carmita and her
harasser exist in a climate of hermeneutical marginalization. Both
suffer a cognitive disadvantage because of the gap in the collective
hermeneutical resources. Neither one has a sufficient understanding
of gender roles in the workplace. As a result, the harasser takes ad-
vantage of Carmita’s vulnerable position and sexually harasses her.
This action leads to all kinds of difficulty, pain, and hermeneutical
injustice for Carmita, and has very few obvious consequences for
the harasser. So far we are with Fricker. However, consider the fol-
lowing question: would the harasser’s behaviour have been different
if he had a sufficient understanding of gender roles in the work-
place? Was his social privilege responsible for putting him in an
epistemic position of ignorance and false confidence? Is he wronged
because his lack of knowledge led him to become the perpetrator of
an injustice, just as Carmita Wood is wronged because her lack of
knowledge prevented her from understanding and protesting
against her experience? I ask these questions not in an attempt to
excuse the harasser’s bad behaviour but to illustrate the fact that the
lack of knowledge that affected Carmita may also have affected her
harasser. In terms of a moral evaluation of this situation and its con-
sequences, there is no doubt that the harasser was in the wrong, and
my questions change nothing. However, in terms of a demonstration
that two people suffer from a lack of knowledge about something
valuable to them, these questions serve very well.
Fricker tells Carmita’s story while developing this example, not
the harasser’s story. This means that more attention is paid to the
more obvious and immediate consequences of sexism that were ex-
perienced by Carmita. But what if the harasser made a doomed at-
tempt to come to an appropriate understanding of gender roles in
the workplace? The fact that his struggle with the communal re-
source may have reinforced his bad behaviour instead of advocating
against it does not change the fact that he struggled with inadequate
epistemic resources. We should pay attention to the fact that both
individuals suffer from the same lack of knowledge. Then the har-

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 A CRITIQUE OF HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE 485

asser’s bad behaviour could, under certain circumstances, be seen as

a tragedy or injustice as well as an indication of undue privilege.
How can we reframe hermeneutical injustice such that we still
capture the gist of what Fricker has done but refine the account so
that it reflects a distinctly epistemic injustice? I suggest we move
away from a reliance on background social conditions. Why lean on
social conditions like sexism or racism, when the important thing is
that individuals in this scenario do not understand their experienc-
es? It does not seem as if we can map hermeneutical injustice onto
sexism in any clean, easy way. After all, Carmita is a victim of sex-
ism while her harasser is not, but both might be victims of herme-
neutical injustice. I think a more promising avenue might be one
where we place our epistemic requirements and capabilities at the
centre of the account. The idea that we require certain epistemic
goods in order to live a good life or that basic skills of self-under-
standing and communication are necessary parts of life in a just so-
ciety is either commensurate with or a reasonable extension of most
varieties of political liberalism.5 It is my view that an account of
epistemic injustice is both more interesting and more compelling if
the loss or privation of epistemic goods and skills is at its heart.
If we reformulate hermeneutical injustice in this way, what are
the consequences? We lose a tidy parallel with pre-existing concep-
tions of sexism and its attendant wrongs. However, we might gain a
more nuanced field of debate. For example, we might come to think
about the Carmita Wood story as evidence that sexual harassment
was poorly understood by everyone—both men and women. This
allows us to see the breadth of damage done by epistemic injustice:
both more powerful and less powerful people are epistemically com-
promised by distortions and deficits in the communal resource.

Department of Philosophy
University of Sheffield
45 Victoria Street
Sheffield s3 7qb
uk
l.beeby@shef.ac.uk
laurabeebyis@gmail.com

5
For sympathetic accounts, see Nussbaum (2000) and Sen (2009) on the capabilities
approach.

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Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxi, Part 3
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2011.00319.x
486 LAURA BEEBY

REFERENCES

Brownmiller, Susan 1990: In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New

York: Dial Press.
Fricker, Miranda 2007: Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Know-
ing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2000: Women and Human Development: The Capa-
bilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sen, Amartya 2009: The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin.

©2011 The Aristotelian Society

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxi, Part 3
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2011.00319.x