When and Why Is Social Kind Membership Morally Wrong? On the Moral Foundations of Ontic Injustice

Abstract This paper argues that Katharine Jenkins’s theory of ontic injustice lacks a fully satisfactory conceptual and moral foundation. Specifically, it fails to provide a compelling account of when and why social kind membership constitutes a moral wrong. I first critique the tension in Jenkins’s framework between an implicit commitment to moral essentialism and an overly positivist ontology of social kinds. I then advocate for moderate practice idealism, which employs counterfactual constitutive standards to better distinguish between just and unjust social kinds. Next, I analyze Jenkins’s account of the wrong-making features of ontic injustice, reconstructing it into three distinct approaches: the expressive harm account, the respect-based account, and the improvement-claim account. While each offers valuable insights, I argue that none provides a sufficiently robust moral foundation of ontic injustice.