It is a chilly morning in December. A young woman steps out from a convenience store near the bus station. She is confused and worried and does not understand why she was turned away. It had been her normal routine to top up her bus pass at this store, but this morning was different. They would not serve her. They said something to explain, but she does not understand the language here in this Swedish city, and she does not know English either. Now she stands outside the store with her bus pass and a fist full of coins that she had saved to pay for the top-up. Cash is the only kind of money she has. She sleeps rough and gets by on whatever people drop in her cup as they pass by. Most of it she sends to her family back home, in a deprived area of an Eastern European country. It’s a gruelling life, and she is tired. By now, she has learnt which parts of this city to avoid, so she takes the bus to spots where she knows that people are less abusive and more willing to give. So, what is going to happen now?
We met her that morning. She recognised us from the neighbourhood and came up, hoping for an explanation. We tried but failed, since we do not share a language with her. What this young woman—we will call her Ana—did not know was that from that day, the top-up cards had been discontinued and replaced by a new digital payment system, an app that you download to your smartphone and link to a debit or credit card. Making a payment on the app requires that you log in with an electronic ID available only to Swedish bank customers, the BankID.Footnote 1 For most people, the new app is convenient, efficient, and perfectly in line with how we already behave as digitally savvy consumers. But topping up your bus pass over the counter had been the last remaining way to use cash money to pay for bus fares, so people like Ana—who do not have a payment card, an electronic ID, or even a bank account—could now no longer take the bus.
Ana will not know this, but our brief encounter that morning was a spark that initiated a new research project.Footnote 2 Leaving her there with no explanation felt awful, as well as politically enraging. But we also felt stupid. How could it be that we had not thought about this before? In a modern welfare state, a societal change is introduced that seems perfectly mundane to the majority while completely excluding the most marginalised of the poor from a vital public service. How could this be allowed? And how could it happen with no debate whatsoever?
Political philosophers who are trained in the analytical tradition have been taught one of the most intuitively obvious criteria of socioeconomic justice: the Rawlsian principle that the distribution of those social goods that everyone needs—opportunities and economic resources, as well as the “social bases of self-respect”—should be to the benefit of those who are worst off.Footnote 3 Part of what justice requires is that institutional arrangements do not strip people of their sense of self-worth. But the new regulations that made it impossible for people like Ana to take the bus are a practical instantiation of an arrangement that has disadvantages only for those who are already among the worst off.
Ana’s predicament is not merely a straightforward distributive issue. She is desperately poor, but her poverty is part of a precarious life situation that, in this case, has excluded her from using the only workable payment system, even though she did have money for the fare. It’s just that her money was of the wrong kind. What sort of problem is that? Does it fall under the purview of socioeconomic injustice?
The theories of economic injustice that traditionally have dominated the field in political philosophy focus on wealth and income levels as the direct currency of justice, formulating principles for under what circumstances and for what purposes a certain redistribution of resources is legitimate. These are indeed crucial questions, but they leave a lot of things out (even if we stay within matters of the economy), such as the conditions for inclusion as an economic agent in the society in which you live. If the economic infrastructure is organised in such a way that existing disadvantages are worsened, surely that is an economic injustice in itself. But this is complicated terrain. People in disadvantaged circumstances can be negatively affected by societal arrangements and re-arrangements—like the digitisation of the payment market—in numerous and multifaceted ways that will be largely opaque for those in more privileged positions who take such changes in their stride. Decisions are taken by people who might not know or care about what it is like to be Ana, or what matters to you if you are.
This complexity is increasingly being recognised in the philosophical literature.Footnote 4 Matters of economic injustice cannot be separated from social conditions of inclusion and recognition and the quality of relationships, nor from epistemic conditions of who in society is heard, listened to, and believed.Footnote 5 Fully acknowledging the crucial importance of this development within philosophy, we here specifically engage with the methodological challenges that follow if philosophy of socioeconomic injustice really wishes to understand and incorporate disadvantaged experiences. Based on our own interdisciplinary research on digital exclusion, what we develop and suggest in the following sections is a field-based approach, incorporating ethnographic data, critical analysis of social norms, and a normative commitment to epistemic recognition of marginalised voices.
The encounter with Ana took place in Malmö, one of the larger cities of Sweden, and Malmö also came to be the field site for the research project Cash. A few things are worth noting about the Swedish context: it is highly digitised and increasingly unequal.
Sweden is known for its system of general, tax-funded welfare, but is also a country that places a lot of faith in market solutions. Substantial parts of the public sector—including schools, transport, and healthcare—have been marketized. Segregation in terms of housing, education, and health is increasing, as is economic inequality, partly as a consequence of tax reliefs on top earnings, wealth, and inheritance.Footnote 6 Poverty rates are still low but growing, and a startling feature is that poverty is five times as common among residents who have migrated to Sweden compared to residents born in the country. Poverty is racialised everywhere, but in Sweden, the disparity is bigger than in any other country in the European Union.Footnote 7
A factor to keep in mind is that when inequalities grow, people on different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum gradually lose touch with each other’s realities. One counterintuitive aspect of this phenomenon that has been shown in survey studies is that the bigger the economic inequalities, the more likely it is that those inequalities are attributed to individual effort and dedication, rather than to structural factors like discrimination or fiscal effects.Footnote 8 Individualisation of the responsibility for one’s own socioeconomic fate is part and parcel of neoliberal economic ideology, and it affects the context of our research in a specific way.
The digitisation of payment markets, and of access to public services generally, is effortlessly normalised into the everyday life of digitally savvy and economically secure groups, while adding to the hardships of those who are already disadvantaged because of poverty, disability, age, precarious migration status, or other factors. Digital exclusion is a function of how responsive social institutions are to the variety of needs that are explained by such factors. It needs to be framed as an amenable problem of justice to which the institutions of society are obligated to provide fair and inclusive solutions. But when responsibility is individualised, digital exclusion tends instead to be framed as a lack of individual skill and willingness to adapt to the new normal.
The high level of digitisation of the economy and of public services is explicitly pursued as official policy, and Swedes are, on the whole, early adopters of digital technologies. New ways of integrating digital technology into daily life are normalised fast and largely uncritically by institutions and private users alike.Footnote 9 The overarching goal of the new national digitisation strategy is to make Sweden “best in the world” in digitisation.Footnote 10 The strategy aims for digital services to be inclusive and accessible, and suggested solutions are inclusive tech design and skills training for people who are not already digitally literate. The problem is represented as technical and individual.Footnote 11 Nothing in the strategy acknowledges the exclusive effects of socioeconomic circumstances. But if you cannot access digital services or make digital payments because you are too poor to afford the gear or to be granted the necessary bank services, then no user-friendly app design or digital-skills training will help you.Footnote 12
Our research project Cash, which was sparked by the startling fact that poor and digitally excluded people no longer could take the bus in Malmö, is a study into the lived experiences of people who depend on cash in a country where cash is increasingly not accepted as a means of payment, and where over-the-counter services for paying bills are virtually non-existent.
We aimed to achieve three things: first, to provide solid, qualitative empirical findings about how people who live in poverty and depend on cash payments navigate the outskirts of the digitised economy. Second, we seek to contribute to theories of socioeconomic injustice with an approach working from the ground up, recognising that people who live in deprivation and precarity are epistemic agents whose knowledge is philosophically relevant and cannot be replaced by thought experiments or stylised description. Third, we have strived to provide public testimony of these injustices, aiming to impact both the discourse and the policies around the issues we have studied. This means that outreach and public communication are integrated parts of the research. In effect, we wanted to give a voice to a group whose experiences are typically neither heard nor valued. We came to refer to our method as field-based philosophy.Footnote 13
The next section explains our approach in relation to public political philosophy. Sections 3–5 introduce three characteristics of the method we are developing. Our focus is mainly on methods for integrating marginalised public voices in political philosophy, rather than the equally important question of communicating results with various publics. In the concluding section, we do, however, add some reflections on communication for the public good.
1. Doing public political philosophy in the field
Public political philosophy is not a fixed concept with a predetermined set of methods. It is an evolving practice and methodology among scholars committed to developing and communicating normative political theory in a way that is empirically informed, engages with current public issues and the practicalities of politics, and aims to shift the discourse and do good for affected or disadvantaged communities.Footnote 14 The field-based way of philosophically grappling with contentious societal issues, from the ground (or street) up, that we outline in this article is our way of doing public political philosophy. Rather than formulating abstract principles that are then applied onto reality, we strive to proceed from analyses of real-life inequalities and lived experiences of exclusion, acknowledging that this will affect what principles of socioeconomic justice need to be able to account for.Footnote 15
In the context of a highly stylised and abstract mainstream in political philosophy, this could look like a radical departure. But, as we have noted, there is a growing recognition of the complexities of what matters for socioeconomic justice. Some of that work can be slotted under the heading of public political philosophy, even if that might not be the self-identification of everyone doing political philosophy or normative political theory with this mindset.Footnote 16
How should philosophers identify what matters for justice? A well-known distinction in political philosophy when it comes to approaching that question runs between ideal and non-ideal theory.Footnote 17 Ideal theories of justice proceed from abstract, idealised circumstances, ostensibly to sift out contingencies and interests that are regarded as philosophically irrelevant. Non-ideal theories, on the other hand, instead of abstracting away from contingent circumstances and lived experiences of disadvantage as well as privilege—and how circumstances affect mindsets and attitudes—regard such factors as moral starting points: that which normative theory needs to make sense of. Non-ideal theory proceeds from the description of actual concerns and the realisation that such circumstances that are seen as morally irrelevant in ideal theories of justice could very well be decisive factors in shaping people’s lives and opportunities. The critique is that by deliberately disregarding the complexities of the realities in which people experience injustices as well as inflict them on others, ideal theory lacks the conceptual resources to address or even acknowledge them.Footnote 18 In its most general description, non-ideal theory is a normative philosophy that is sensitive to empirical facts, and our field-based work is in line with it.
So what can methods under the wide label of non-ideal theorising look like? Several variations are emerging in the literature. Jonathan Wolff has developed “engaged philosophy” as a method that starts in a practical dilemma or a pertinent issue that needs to be addressed, rather than with a theory that is then applied onto the practical world.Footnote 19 Engaged philosophy works towards a solution gradually, via historical and international comparisons, and with a critical eye to the risk of status quo bias that will always be there if we want solutions to be policy-relevant. Ackerly and Cabrera have introduced “grounded normative theory” as an umbrella term for empirically informed political philosophy.Footnote 20 Grounded normative theory sets out to either test or build theory in an empirically sensitive way. The theory building variant critically engages with epistemic hierarchies, recognising affected communities as intellectual partners whose lived experiences provide philosophically pertinent data. The theorist is alert to lived injustices that do not “fit” under existing concepts. We have not explicitly oriented ourselves towards the theory building variant of grounded normative theory, but we recognise that there are affinities.
Being “empirically informed” is a wide category. Our method is based on ethnographic fieldwork. Herzog and Zacka have argued for the introduction of “ethnographic sensibility” to normative inquiry, as a way for the theorist to be an “observer,” through “paying attention to the situated experience of ordinary moral agents.”Footnote 21 Herzog and Zacka use “ethnographic” in the same sense as we do: as not necessarily requiring deep and long-term immersion, but rather as a frame of mind in the engagement with one’s site or other data. The ethnographic mind is interested in interpreting and understanding people’s perceptions, ideas, and ascription of meaning to their experiences of institutions, practices, and expectations. For an ethnographically sensitive normative theorist, such interpretations give new insights into what principles of socioeconomic justice need to be able to contend with, challenge preconceptions of normality, and provide lived instantiations of what abstract values like “dignity” or “freedom of choice” mean in different life situations.Footnote 22
Let us make a reflection at this stage. The newfound interest in empirical data—including ethnography—among political philosophers is absolutely to be welcomed, but it comes with the risk of reinventing the wheel. After all, testing and building theory from empirical data has been done by scholars in social science and cultural studies all along. A difference is the focus on normativity and drawing normative conclusions, both in terms of normative principles and what they should be like, and the reasonableness of normative expectations on people in different life situations. Actively engaging in political normativity and in public discourse about injustice is something that ethnographers and grounded theorists in social science tend not to do.Footnote 23 Philosophy provides new tools in that sense, but a degree of humility is warranted.
Our field-based way of doing public political philosophy is distinguished by three factors: first, ethnographic field work with people whose lives and circumstances are significantly affected by the issue that is being studied.Footnote 24 The ethnographic data are treated as philosophically significant sources of knowledge. The second feature is a critical analysis of how social norms and power relations shape how the issue in question is framed in the relevant context and how norms affect expectations and perceptions of normality. The third is a normative commitment to giving epistemic recognition to marginalised experiences. Philosophers need to have a reflective understanding of the risk that one may be inadvertently complicit in epistemic injustices by not accounting for what it is like to live among the worst-off. A guiding question is what we can understand differently about socioeconomic injustice, and what it means and requires, if we proceed from the realities of disadvantage and precarity, and take testimonies of lived experiences seriously.Footnote 25
Before elaborating on these three features, we wish to acknowledge that field-based philosophy of this kind is but one of many different ways of developing normative political philosophy with sensitivity to empirical realities and with ambition to gain public impact and make a societal difference. The latter is—in our estimation—what makes an engaged approach into a variation of public political philosophy. We do not claim that this should be the preferred way; it is one way, and it might not be for everyone. It is a time-consuming and ethically challenging way of doing research. It is inherently interdisciplinary since it requires philosophers to team up with scholars with ethnographic expertise. This is a huge benefit. From a research ethical point of view, knowing your limitations is a crucial virtue.
A pragmatic reflection, to which we will return, is that the substantial public interest that our research and the issue that we have studied has elicited—both nationally and internationally—depends almost entirely on the field work. The fact that we have been able to substantiate our normative conclusions and our critique of current policy with interview data from the field has made all the difference in terms of public impact.
We will now move on to discussing three distinctive characteristics of field-based philosophy, the way we are developing it.
2. Getting to experiential knowledge through field work
Engaging philosophically with ethnographic data does go against the grain of a common assumption that political philosophy is a non-empirical exercise, independent of contingent circumstances: for moral or political principles to be commanding guides to action, they need to hold a priori and be justifiable by reason alone. Normative judgements—ought statements—have, on this assumption, an unequivocal world-to-word direction of fit: that is, they are not meant to reflect or record the world.Footnote 26 The world should change to fit the judgement. But in reality, normative theory always involves the description of the world, albeit often stylised descriptions that result from processes of abstraction and are already, in some sense, theory-dependent.
Descriptions of the kind of complex phenomena that make up circumstances in which issues of justice arise are never neutral. A problem in normative philosophy is when the description of the world on which it depends is not made explicit and might not even be reflectively held by the philosopher themselves. This is part of the gist of Mills’ critique of ideal theory.Footnote 27
An example is “luck egalitarianism,” famously criticized by Elizabeth Anderson in an early contribution to empirically informed philosophical theorising.Footnote 28 Luck egalitarianism says that inequality (of resources, welfare, or opportunities) is just if it is the outcome of choices or preferences of the persons affected, but unjust if it is the outcome of processes beyond their control. So, if I earn less than another because I have chosen to work part-time, our difference in wages is not unjust, which sounds reasonable. There will always be examples where luck egalitarianism gives perfectly plausible conclusions, but the position is predicated on an implicit description of the world such that distributive outcomes are always in principle traceable to and possible to assess in terms of individual choices. But that is just not true. It is particularly not true that the less advantaged you are, which means that luck egalitarianism prioritizes privileged experiences in its implied description of the world. It also brackets the fact that choices and preferences are shaped by the circumstances people are in and what they have become accustomed to expecting of life.Footnote 29
Another aspect of empirically uninformed, implied descriptions of the world in theories of socioeconomic justice is a narrow conception of what a relevant resource is and a preconceived idea that relevant resources are predictable: economic resources typically equal income and wealth, with the assumption that the existence of money is stable. But Dietsch has shown that political philosophers ignore—or maybe do not understand—how money functions in the modern economy, where the main forms of money are credit and debt. Access to credit is therefore one of the most significant economic resources, which creates a distributive bias in favour of already privileged, credit-worthy groups.Footnote 30 This means that a theory of distributive justice that does not account for the complexity of economic reality and the distributive effects of credit and debt will find inequalities to be less than they actually are.
Additionally, the scarcity of resources that significantly affect a disadvantaged life is a more complex and less tangible phenomenon than a focus on monetary resources implies. We found that one of the most significant resources that affected the daily lives of our research participants was time. Time is a scarce resource in a socioeconomically disadvantaged life, but poor people’s time is typically not valued.Footnote 31 Ana can no longer take the bus, so she needs to walk to wherever she needs to be. Anyone who cannot log on to digital services and who needs assistance outside of the streamlined digital default—they might even need to talk to a human person—will be up against practical hurdles but will also be normatively perceived as slow consumers of other people’s more valuable time.
Description is not innocent, and philosophers should be worried by the fact that implied, unexamined descriptions of reality tend to favour privileged circumstances.
The ethnographic sensibility that characterises field-based philosophy is a counter measure to this tendency.Footnote 32 It is, in a sense, deliberately biased in the other direction: by epistemically privileging disadvantaged circumstances and lived experiences in the description of reality, one can gain new insights and directions of thought in terms of what injustice can be and what it is like to live through it.
By empirically studying how people who depend on cash money because they are poor are pushed out of the official, highly digitised economy and how that affects the social world the way they see it, we sought new insights into what a conception of socioeconomic injustice needs to account for. This is not the context to describe our empirical process and results in detail, only to make a few methodological reflections and comment briefly on some of the emerging themes that we found to be crucial insights into how such injustices are experienced.Footnote 33
One thing to remember is that people who live in poverty and with intersecting disadvantages have already learnt to navigate in hostile circumstances and have—often for perfectly understandable reasons—limited or no trust in public institutions. They might not report the problems that the researcher, with their outside view, expects to hear about. Being interviewed because you have been identified as disadvantaged is in itself a precarious position, and our interviewees were careful not to come across as pitiful or needy. On the whole, it seemed less sensitive for them to report problems that could be linked to disability—like poor eyesight—than to poverty. We concluded most interviews with a question about what would help them, or what societal changes they would like to see that would make things easier for them. This was the question they were most reluctant to answer. We were told of many social interactions where they felt a loss of dignity. Some of them expressed a wish that people in stores or other services would be more helpful, responsive, and kind, but no one voiced any expectation at all that society would or could change in a way that would be better for them.
There is a lesson here. Living with daily economic and social hardships is to live in a constant state of stress that narrows a person’s field of vision.Footnote 34 Planning for longer than the next day might be impossible, and “society” will appear as a wholly external thing that you cannot do anything about. This contributes to the invisibility of these experiences and of how the world is perceived and negotiated from a precarious vantage point or within a marginalised life-world.
Clearly, it is not the job of interviewees who have been selected because they live in poverty to interpret or evaluate things for researchers interested in developing public political philosophy. The analysis and theorisation will always be the researchers’ responsibility. Additionally, to the extent that we want that process to be collaborative and inclusive, it is also the researchers’ responsibility to make it so, which takes time and trust. We came away feeling that we had underestimated the sheer toll involved in trying to reflect and problematise the circumstances that shape and determine a difficult life situation, only because someone asks you questions in an interview. There are also costs in terms of dignity. Generally, there was a reluctance to talk about their own situation as unjust or as something that society should do something about, particularly among interviewees with a life history of hardship and whose socioeconomic marginalisation is severe. They take pride in managing day to day, and do not expect “society” to do anything for them. “I gave that up a long time ago,” as one of them told us, an elderly woman with disabilities who gets by on selling a street magazine.
It takes resilience and pride not only to get by but also to retain a sense of self and meaning on the outskirts of digitised society. The ethnographic sensibility that allows you to see and theorise injustices in a different way—truer to the complexities of the marginalised experience—comes with the ethical responsibility to acknowledge the epistemic power in such capacities. A philosophical knowledge base of experiential knowledge and lived realities is ideally co-created by researchers and participants. One aspect of that is to uncover social expectations and perceptions of normality that might be opaque to the privileged experience but effectively position people in exclusion as incapable and deviant. This requires critical analysis of social norms.
3. A critical analysis of social norms
The second feature of field-based philosophy is critical analysis of how social norms and power relations shape how the issue in question is framed and understood in the relevant context. We do not follow Carol Bacchi’s method for critical policy analysis, but find inspiration in its main premise: whatever is proposed as the solution to something contains an implicit representation (“problem representation”) of the problem that needs to be changed and, by extension, what is not seen or recognised as a problem in need of change.Footnote 35 There will, inevitably, be normative consequences of whatever problem representations that shape the social perception of an issue.
This is pertinent for philosophical discussions about injustice generally. Framing something as an issue of justice—that is, as an issue over which judgements in terms of justice or injustice have applicability—implies two things: first, that the issue in question is—at least in principle—amenable to change, directly or indirectly. A distribution of resources can be changed directly by redistribution. A genetic health condition that is genuinely incurable is an issue of justice since it is indirectly amenable to change—for example, in the allocation of health resources to care and research, and in the adaptation of society and services to accommodate various health needs. Second (but logically this comes first), there needs to be an unbiased, open, and well-informed appreciation of the fact that social norms, perception, and ideology can make certain phenomena appear, be normalised as, or taken for granted as determined and unchangeable, even if they are not, at least not indirectly. This comes in tandem with the need to appreciate that the discursive power to shape perceptions of what is inevitably the case—and so not an issue of justice—is itself an issue of justice to which political philosophers need to be alert. Being in a position such that you can make people accept as true or inevitable that whatever harms them is immutable to change and so cannot be unjust—only unfortunate—is indeed powerful. So as not to perpetuate unjust perceptions of normality and inevitability, public political philosophy needs to proceed from a critical appraisal of such processes.
We suggest the concept “constructed incompetence” to make sense of the lived consequences of this kind of structural injustice. To exemplify from our own research, people who live in cash dependence because of socioeconomic precarity are, in themselves, as capable as they were before digitisation, but through an infrastructural change—over which they have no control—they are now incapable of doing even some of the most ordinary things, like buying a bus ticket or paying a bill. The injustice of this obstacle is further exacerbated by the lack of public recognition that it counts as a legitimate problem to which society’s institutions should provide a solution.
One opaque social norm in need of critical analysis is technological determinism. Technological determinism can be understood and evaluated in different ways.Footnote 36 We use it as the entrenched idea that technology and technological advances follow their own internal logic and determines social change and behaviour.Footnote 37 Importantly, technological determinism has normative implications; that is, the alleged fact that technological advances determine social change is perceived as not only inevitable but also good.Footnote 38 Challenging the technology will therefore be seen as not only futile, but also a mistaken and reactionary endeavour.
We have mentioned that time stood out as a crucial yet underappreciated factor of injustice in our empirical results. Time is an unequally distributed resource, which is wrapped up in a social norm about efficiency and skill. People in digital exclusion are institutionally positioned such that they cannot live up to that norm. Digital payments and digital access to public services can be done at any time while simultaneously doing other things. You can shop, book a doctor’s appointment, or pay your bills online while watching your kids in the playground, on the bus ride home from work, or in the middle of the night if that suits you better. But if you are cash-dependent and have no means for digital access to services, you need to wait in line. You might be dependent on physically visiting whatever public office whose digital service you cannot access, which means that there will be other things you cannot do because you have run out of time already. From the perspective of the digital norm, all this walking and waiting and doing one thing at a time is unproductive, but if it is what you need to do in order to get by, then it is productive for you. Whenever we see people waiting in line outside a food bank, this should tell us that poor people’s time is not considered to be worth anything.
The global and rapid trend towards digitisation of public services and payment systems, in combination with the introduction of automated decision-making in those services on which vulnerable people depend—like social benefits—is testimony to an uncritical internalisation of a norm among policymakers.Footnote 39 As Victoria Adelmant has shown, the rolling out of digital-first policies is fact-resistant to the prevalence of serious and large-scale harms, partly due to the fact that the harms largely affect “low rights environments”—that is, groups who do not know what their rights are or lack the resources to voice complaints.Footnote 40
Societal changes that look like advances and might be easily soaked up by most people construct new behavioural expectations and ideas about what “normal” people value and are capable of doing. Conversely, they construct already disadvantaged people as incompetent. The digitisation of the payment market is an infrastructural change such that the economic institutions are organised in a way that makes it impossible for people who are digitally marginalised to function practically as economic agents and to live up to expectations of normal economic behaviour. In a cynical remark on the high value accorded to freedom of choice in modern societies, one of our participants asked how it can be that the choices that matter to poor people—like being allowed to pay with the only kind of money that is available to you—are not considered important.
In order to see how structural injustices are created in the economy, political philosophers need to be critically alert to how the normalisation of expectations that are mundane to the majority but might be impossible for a disadvantaged minority has the consequence of eliminating options that are valued only by those people whose interests are too marginalised to matter in policymaking.
4. Epistemic recognition of marginalised experiences
The third feature of field-based philosophy is a recognition of the epistemic aspect of marginalisation and constructed incompetence.
We have already mentioned that philosophical approaches to socioeconomic injustice have traditionally tended to focus on only a limited set of these issues, thus disregarding many of the complex ways in which the economy and the organisation of public services impact people’s lives. Your economic circumstances do not only decide what you can afford to buy, they shape your social existence in all sorts of ways, like how you are perceived by others and how responsive institutions and policies are to your interests. The economy is a social and normative sphere in which our daily lives are played out, and certain realities are only visible from a subordinated perspective and disadvantaged lived experiences.
Field-based philosophy is normatively committed to giving epistemic recognition to marginalised experiences, for two reasons. One reason has to do with the public ambition of our research, where we aim to impact public policy and debate by giving a voice to groups who are usually not heard. The other reason stems from the critical self-reflection that it is incumbent upon any public scholar to engage in, also in philosophy: Do our ostensibly objective and carefully deliberated assumptions give due regard to the complexity and heterogeneity of disadvantaged experiences? Do we understand—beyond calculations of assumed distributive effects—what it is like to live among “the worst off” and does our philosophy reflect that?
The concept “epistemic injustice” was developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker and has gained a lot of well-deserved traction in the intersection between epistemology and ethics and as an aspect of socioeconomic injustice.Footnote 41 The fact that power operates in the social world such that some experiences and some lives are silenced, disregarded, and trivialised has been and remains a foundational insight in feminist epistemology, but this is a generalised social phenomenon in our unequal world and should not “only” be a feminist concern. Epistemic injustice is not to be believed, trusted, or understood because of prejudices linked to your marginalised social position. But it is also to be silenced by dispersed social norms, implying that people like you have no standing and no voice. Trying to communicate your concerns is therefore pointless and comes with the social risk of losing your dignity. Fricker emphasizes that this is a specific form of injustice that needs to be understood politically and socially. Epistemic and ethical practices are socially situated; people stand in relations of social power to each other, and power is a socially situated capacity to determine what happens in social life and to control the actions of others. This can happen through active intervention or through structural influence, for instance, if certain controlling norms are dispersed throughout the social system.
In a socially marginalised person’s life, epistemic injustice happens when you try to communicate your needs to someone in authority but are distrusted because of prejudices against the social group you are associated with. But crucially, epistemic injustice also happens when you do not even consider communicating your needs because you want to avoid the humiliation of being ignored, and when you are habituated to the marginalised life and all your energies goes into surviving. No one is interested anyway.
For Fricker, prejudice is part of the definition of epistemic injustice, but that is unnecessarily narrow and assumes human interaction. We found that epistemic injustice can be the outcome of routine procedures or bureaucratic logic, independently of any attitudes held by actors in powerful positions. One aspect of the digitisation of services is that there is no human interlocutor at all, not even a prejudiced one. If the concept does not allow for that, then important instances of epistemic marginalisation in our current world will be missed.Footnote 42
The importance of time for lived experiences of digital exclusion is relevant here as well. Our participants know what it takes, and how much time it takes, for them to do all that stuff that the rest of us do effortlessly and in an instant, but there is no recognition of this kind of knowledge. This neglect of disadvantaged experiences is a public epistemic injustice, on top of the hardship itself. When economic and public institutions are organised in such a way that people who are already disadvantaged in other ways also need to use up more of their time for normal tasks, as well as having their time undervalued, there is both a distributive and an epistemic injustice that will be invisible from a privileged standpoint. Theories of justice that do not account for how normative expectations take a certain socioeconomic status as given represent a philosophical epistemic injustice by treating experiential knowledge that only people in disadvantaged circumstances have as morally irrelevant or by not attending to it at all.Footnote 43
The fact that our method for field-based philosophy includes, as one of its distinctive features, epistemic recognition to marginalised experiences is explicitly a method for countering epistemic injustice in relation to the issue that is being investigated. This means that field-based philosophy has a dual aim: to impact public policy and opinion, and to impact how political philosophy is done. Epistemic injustice is not only something that happens out there in the social world that we are analysing; epistemic injustice is also committed by philosophers whose theories do not account for the knowledge and experiences of people who live disadvantaged lives, and what matters to them.
5. Concluding reflections: communication for the public good
We strive to contribute to empirically informed political philosophy, as well as to impact public discourse and opinion. The fact that our approach to public political philosophy has this dual aim has implications for communication and publication strategies. If you aim for your normative theorising to have societal impact, then outreach and public engagement will be integrated parts of research, the communication of conclusions, and of the research process. For this reason, one needs to cultivate an eclectic approach to what a fruitful venue for research communication could be, in addition to established academic publication formats. We have written opinion pieces and a short report in accessible language, done radio and TV interviews, spoken to parliamentarians, and participated in widely circulated podcasts. Such outlets are low-hanging fruit for researchers aiming to shift public discourse; they do reach other audiences than the standard peer-reviewed article in an academic journal, but have their own exclusionary logics, not least given the digitization of the media landscape. By visiting public libraries and community groups, we have reached members of the public who might not listen to podcasts, and we have learnt a lot from such encounters as well, but inevitably and frustratingly, one runs up against one’s own limitations: our time is also limited.Footnote 44
In any public communication of research as a socially engaged normative theorist, one needs to be mindful regarding ethical responsibilities—a researcher is not a policymaker, nor a consultant—and alert to at least these two risks: that one ends up sanding off the critical edges of one’s conclusions in order to come across as more palatable or less threatening to the status quo, or—conversely—that one dramatizes one conclusions in order to fit the click-seeking media logic.Footnote 45 It is crucial for our intellectual integrity as scholars that we aim for engagement with a variety of publics, while retaining our commitment to doing critical, analytical work from a thoroughly deliberated and empirically substantiated standpoint.
The public interest in our research is—as we have mentioned—to a large extent due to the field work, that is, our interview study with people who depend on cash payments because they are too poor to manage in the digital economy. It is, of course, hugely rewarding that normative theorising about socioeconomic injustice, based on qualitative data, is striking a strong chord, but our ethical responsibility towards our participants is pertinent also in terms of how we communicate publicly.
People in disadvantaged circumstances are not obligated to give researchers a slice of their restricted time or to share their personal experiences with anyone. If they do, it is an act of trust. The participants in our project do not have a public voice and their knowledge is not valued in society; that is part of their predicament and so also part of our communicative responsibility. An ethical risk, though, is that one inadvertently contributes to a “politics of pity.”Footnote 46 Being engaged in matters of injustice will always involve emotions; responding emotionally—compassionately—to testimonies of hardship and exclusion is a normal human reaction. Evoking empathy is certainly an impact of some kind, but as a street-level, field-based normative theorist, you need to tread carefully, so that a perfectly reasonable emotional response to disadvantage does not obscure the need for political response and institutional change. Injustice is the lived experience of a structural problem. A virtue of empirically informed public political philosophy is to validate the lived experience so as to engender a better understanding of what the structural problems of justice are and what rectification of their effects require. Certain realities are only visible from a subordinated perspective and disadvantaged experiences. Discounting such perspectives and lived experiences is to contribute to upholding epistemic injustice, regardless of whether you are a policymaker, a political philosopher, or any other kind of researcher in the wide field of humanities.
Author contribution
Conceptualization; Methodology; Investigation; Writing - Editing and Reviewing: M.P., L.H.
Funding statement
This research received funding from the project “Cash—Human Rights and Social Sustainability in the Transition to a Cashless Society,” funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development under grant number 2020-01910, and the project “The Future of Human Rights in the Digitised Age (FRIDA),” funded by the Swedish Research Council under grant number 2024-01786.
Open access
