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Metaphysics and social justice
Author(s) -
Griffith Aaron M.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
philosophy compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.973
H-Index - 25
ISSN - 1747-9991
DOI - 10.1111/phc3.12594
Subject(s) - metaphysics , economic justice , epistemology , sociology , subject (documents) , social philosophy , social justice , social psychology , law and economics , law , political science , social relation , social science , psychology , philosophy , computer science , library science
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that aims to give a theoretical account of what there is and what it is like. Social justice movements seek to bring about justice in a society by changing policy, law, practice, and culture. Evidently, these activities are very different from one another. The goal of this article is to identify some positive connections between recent work in metaphysics and social justice movements. I outline three ways in which metaphysical work on social reality can make a contribution to movements seeking social justice, viz., (1) by providing basic categories and concepts useful for clarifying and defending claims made by social justice movements; (2) by offering accounts of the natures of social categories, structures, and institutions that these movements seek to change; and (3) by contributing to “unmasking” or “debunking” projects that reveal putatively natural arrangements to be social in nature and hence subject to moral critique, alteration, and possibly eradication.