The Ontic Injustice of Social Class: Towards an Anthropological Critique

Abstract In this paper, I argue that Katharine Jenkins’s concept of ontic injustice can be extended to apply to the case of social class, thereby helping to address the abiding class-ignorance of the social ontology field that Åsa Burman has recently diagnosed. Ontic injustice, as a moral wrong inflicted on a person in being socially constructed as a certain kind, requires both an account of the ontology of that kind and of the specified normative entitlement infringed. This paper satisfies both of these by supplying a social ontology of class as an embodied social identity centered on group-defining differential relationships towards work. Through an analysis of the necessary preconditions for class-differentiated work, I derive a normative standard of the human as a being capable of rationally coordinating and developing itself in multiple distinct ways. Combining these elements results in what I dub the Anthropological Critique of the ontic injustice of social class which applies to the wrong perpetrated in any sort of class society. In carrying out this exercise, several minor incongruencies motivate proposing further modifications to the ontic injustice concept as Jenkins sketches it. These include softening the emphasis on the wrong of ontic injustice being adequately elaborated in property and rights terminology and acknowledging that consideration for factors like the epigenetics of social kinds defined by ontic injustice sometimes entails that the injustice consists of both an abstract moral injury and an effect upon the life of those included in the relevant social kind.