Conceptual Injustice

In recent years, there has been significant interest in injustices that do not consist in inflicting physical or material harm on others, but operate in more subtle ways, e.g. by targeting our status as epistemic agents. In a similar fashion, this paper aims to bring to the forefront a currently overlooked kind of injustice that occurs in relation to our concepts: conceptual injustice, which is characterised by wrongful in- or exclusion from the application of a concept. The first part of the paper is concerned with spelling out the notion, discussing its characteristic wrongs, and with tracing it in a number of examples. In the second part, I discuss conceptual injustice in relation to connected but different forms of injustice, such as epistemic injustice. This highlights the advantages of having the notion on hand: it enhances our understanding of other forms of injustice like hermeneutical injustice, and allows us to capture a ‘remainder of injustice’ for which we could not account otherwise.