Making Sense of Incidental Hermeneutical Injustice: The Problem of Incidental Marginalisation

Abstract Miranda Fricker articulates the notion of incidental hermeneutical injustice (HI) and invokes the case of Joe Rose from the novel Enduring Love to illustrate it. Critics have objected that incidental hermeneutical injustice as described by Fricker sits uneasily with her choice of Joe Rose as its central illustration. We claim that this reveals a key problem at the heart of any attempt to make sense of incidental HI: it seems difficult to reconcile the point that a victim of incidental HI is hermeneutically marginalised , as required by Fricker’s definition of HI, with their privileged social standing, which is implied by the incidental nature of the HI to which they allegedly fall victim. We call this the problem of incidental marginalisation . Clanchy circumvents this problem by significantly revising Fricker’s original account, but, we argue, at the expense of the plausible idea that HI is an injustice . We explain how supplementing Fricker’s original account with overlooked resources which Fricker herself provides can resolve the problem of incidental marginalisation, yielding a coherent, useful and defensible notion of incidental hermeneutical injustice that preserves the key ideas of Fricker’s original definition.