Exclusion and Erasure: Two Types of Ontological Oppression

Ergo

Abstract

In recent social metaphysics, philosophers have described forms of injustice that hold partly in virtue of metaphysical considerations: ontological oppression, ontological injustice, categorical injustice, and so on. The goal of this paper is to introduce another form of metaphysical injustice: ontological erasure. Ontological erasure occurs when an individual is wronged in virtue of it being indeterminate whether they are a member of a socially constructed group. My primary example of erasure concerns gendered groups that do not account for the possibility of trans people. In such cases, it is not that trans identity is considered and rejected; rather, the category of trans identity is ignored entirely.

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