Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

You can wrong people through how you treat them. You can wrong people through how you think about them. But can you wrong people through how you perceive them? I argue that you can, and that such perceptual wronging underwrites pervasive social injustices. This proposal rests on specific claims about perception and about wrongdoing. Regarding perception, I argue that perceptual content is rich and includes features such as salience, affordances and high-level kinds. Regarding wrongdoing, I argue that even though perceptual processes are relatively automatic, a subject can nevertheless be responsible for how they perceive the world. I then reflect on what this might mean for our understanding of structural injustice.