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The Key To Social Justice

It’s not about our actions as much as it is about our values

Douglas Giles, PhD
12 min readApr 8, 2024
An example of recognition rectifying injustice

Before we talk about justice, we have to talk about the cause of injustice.

Prior to the year 1917, women were not allowed to vote across most of Europe, Canada, and the US. After decades of struggle, women in those countries finally won the right to full participation in their countries’ electoral processes. Still today, though, women have to struggle to rectify the gender pay gap and gain full legal rights over their own bodies.

For centuries, African human beings were trafficked to enslavement in the Americas. Still today, people of African ancestry (among other non-white peoples) suffer prejudice and discrimination. And “modern slavery” is still widespread throughout the world.

Homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain until 1967. Today non-heteronormative people still face persecution in many countries. People are condemned for being who they are, despite the fact that being who they are is not harming anyone.

These are just a few of many examples of society’s failures to treat people fairly and equally. Why do these and other similar injustices continue to happen? We say it is because of prejudice but what is prejudice? It is difficult to fight something that we cannot define and one of the important tasks in philosophy is understanding what is behind social phenomena like prejudice.

A theory that has garnered attention in philosophy is that we can understand acts of injustice in terms of recognition. According to this idea, prejudice or bigotry is fear fueled by ignorance, but mostly it is a misrecognition of another human that denies that person is worthy of ethical consideration. Justice and community itself rests on recognition, and misrecognition creates injustices.

Recognition is an attitude and action that we all intuitively understand from an early age but never much consciously think about. When recognition is lacking in human interactions, injustices are inevitable. From minor slights to structural, systemic injustices, misrecognition — the lack of recognition — is at the core of unjust actions and outcomes. I’ll explain.

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Douglas Giles, PhD
Douglas Giles, PhD

Written by Douglas Giles, PhD

Philosopher by trade & temperament, professor for 21 years, bringing philosophy out of its ivory tower and into everyday life. https://dgilesauthor.com/

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