Yiyun Pan
Sun Yat-sen University
Miranda Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice treats the wrong as “subjectless”: because it arises from gaps in collective interpretive resources rather than individual wrongdoing, the injustice operates through purely structural power, which Fricker takes to mean that no individual agent is culpable for the injustice. This paper argues that the absence of culpability does not entail the absence of responsibility, and contests Fricker’s slide from structural diagnosis to exculpatory silence on the question of individual responsibility. The tension is exemplified in her appeal to the “virtuous hearer,” which presupposes precisely the kind of individual responsibility the subjectless thesis leaves unacknowledged.
The paper’s central claim is that individual responsibility survives the structural character of hermeneutical injustice. The claim is defended through three arguments. First, the normative ground of responsibility, constituted by reactive attitudes prior to conceptual articulation, is not dissolved by a hermeneutical gap. Second, responsible agency is itself conditioned by epistemic requirements; ignorance is therefore not an excuse but a potential site of failure. Third, hermeneutical injustice is sustained not simply by the absence of interpretive resources but also by the active refusal of dominantly situated knowers to engage with resources developed by marginalized groups—a failure that is agential, not purely structural. Drawing on Talbert’s tripartite framework, I specify that the responsibility at stake is accountability rather than blameworthiness. This accountability, following Young’s social connection model, is best understood as shared, forward-looking, and collectively actionable. Structure does not foreclose individual responsibility; it reframes it.
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SOPhiA 2026 