The Injustice That Went Unspoken
On epistemic injustice and moral sanctuary
Carlson is an avid chess player. Some might call him a prodigy. He plays each of his games with remarkable sharpness and creativity. His opponents are often baffled by his unorthodox moves.
But Carlson has a weird playstyle. When he’s playing as black, he never castles. As such, he has lost more games playing as black than any other professional chess player. One could say he’s famous for his “Bong Clouds.” Yet, that never stopped him from achieving greatness and enjoying the game. He seems happy even when he loses the game.
When asked why he never castles as black, Carlson just smiled and replied, “That’s just how things are for me. I never castle as black.” After that, no one questions him further.
The truth is: Carlson was taught since young that only white pieces have “castling rights.” He was taught that if one plays as black, one can’t castle. But Carlson was clever. He retorted, “Why can’t black castle? Isn’t that unfair?”
His mentor cunningly replied, “No, you can’t think of it this way. Since white starts first, it has the right to castle, and black doesn’t.” Carlson naively believed his coach ever since.
To fabricate this lie further, his mentor never allowed him to watch games where black castled. Carlson was denied of finding out the fairway of playing chess. And for every game Carlson didn’t castle as black, his mentor secretly gets paid by avid watchers who love to see “Bong Clouds.”
Though fictional and highly unrealistic, I think we can all agree that something’s very wrong about this story. But in this essay, I want to convince you that this farse has disturbing similarities to many transactions of everyday life. In other words, most of us are the Carlsons playing the game of chess.
Why Don’t We Disclose Our Salaries?
There’s a taboo — I believe — in most societies that stops us from disclosing our salaries to others. It also surprises me that we have laws to protect us from any ramifications of disclosing our salaries. In other words, our employers can’t fire us for telling our coworkers, colleagues, or anyone else our pay.
There are many reasons this taboo exists. For one, people don’t want to feel inferior (or accidentally superior.) Nor do we really want to make others feel the same way. This is also the reason why we don’t share our grades in school. Either it makes you feel good about yourself and make others feel bad, or it makes you feel bad.
But another reason — the more disturbing one — is that our employers don’t want us to question our pay. If a colleague doing a similar job gets paid substantially more or less than you do, it’s natural for either of you to file a dispute. This often results in the employer having to pay off the disparity. It also makes the employer look utterly stupid.
Recently, I had a similar dispute with my employer. I’m working in a tuition center which offers advanced mathematics courses. Several occasions have made me question the price of these courses. And those several occasions, I explicitly asked my employer how much he’s charging our clients (i.e., students.)
Now, some people genuinely believe that I had no right to know. I’ll not attempt to address these people. What followed each of these attempts (to get my employer to tell me how much our clients pay) is a tactical evasion. In short, he deliberately avoided telling me.
When I finally found out how much our clients were charged, I immediately complained to my employer about the “laundering.” I got a significant raise in my paycheck — and a rather quick raise.
A Different Kind Of Inequality And Injustice
In this essay, I wish not to discuss my experiences but to highlight a form of inequality that exists in our everyday life (one may read my detailed account here.) Importantly, it’s a form of inequality that those power deliberately (and ironically unconsciously) perpetuate.
It’s the kind of inequality and injustice that the avid chess player Carlson is subjected to. Though somewhat happy with his life, I’d wager very few of us would say what he’s going through is anything fair or just.
Most of us think of inequality and injustice as a form of physical treatment. Today, this physical maltreatment manifests as either psychological or spiritual violence. This violence need not truly manifest. It exists effectively as a threat. Consequently, this threat of violence prohibits certain groups of people from participating in some form of physical activity.
An example of this would be to deny a certain group of people from voting or working. Prohibiting gay marriage is yet another example of how a threat of violence bars certain groups of people from participating in certain social and political activities.
These forms of inequalities are often quite obvious: certain groups of people cannot participate in certain socio-political activities for some often arbitrary reason. We can see the disparity. And it’s not that these groups of people choose not to participate. Often, they want to, but they’re prohibited from doing so because of a threat of violence.
What’s important in all these examples is that we know the disparity. We experience, in many ways, how many gay people cannot access certain socio-political spheres of activities (e.g., marriage.) We also know that women are generally paid less than men. We know that the poverty cycle exists: that the rich become richer while the poor stay poor. We know that 1% of our population holds more than 50% of the world’s wealth.
However, it is entirely possible for the victim of such prejudices not to know that they’re subjected to said prejudice. Philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this hermeneutical injustice.
… hermeneutical injustice occurs … when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. [For example, it] might be that you suffer sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks that critical concept.
This is the kind of epistemic injustice that our fictional chess player Carlson experiences. He is being subjected to epistemic injustice, and yet, he has no idea that he is.
Moral Sanctuary As An Epistemic Injustice
Recently, I read many books that attempt to address certain injustices of society: Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules, Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, to name a few.
What strikes me as interesting in these books is that the kinds of injustice and inequality the authors are addressing are things that we take for granted. It’s the things that we naturally and intuitively assume to be the default, the norm insofar as we don’t even think that’s something wrong with them.
For instance, in Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, he critiques the philosophical foundation of meritocracy. Granted, it’s not the first time I read about such critiques (Singapore’s social studies made sure that I kept an “open mind” of its governance.) I’ve read about how meritocracy can favor the rich and powerful and stagnate social mobility. But in the end, it’s still one of the most practical instruments for social mobility and equity.
Sandel’s critique strikes at something subtler: he argues that the very idea of meritocracy is unfair. Ironically, meritocracy has its limitations. But never have I considered it philosophically unfair: it’s based on luck and spits in the face of those who are just unlucky.
I’ll omit the details of Sandel’s critiques. But one of the most important takeaways in his book is that no one today would genuinely say meritocracy is fundamentally unfair and unjust.
Like meritocracy, many things in society today are often immune to moral evaluations. Sure, we critique the limitations of meritocracy. But I’d wager very few of us would question the morality and ethics of meritocracy. The difference is between asking if writing with ink is messier and asking if writing in ink is morally right (i.e., that we ought to write with ink.)
Here, surely, we’d dismiss asking if morality has anything to do with our choices of writing instruments. That’s because we collectively decide that whether one chooses to write with ink or lead has no moral import. That choice has no moral importance and hence, is immune to moral evaluations.
But disturbing, we apply the same attitudes to many socio-political activities of our time. Often, when something’s normal, we dismiss any moral evaluations. For instance, it’s normal to queue at the bank and the market and wait to be served. So, almost no one asked if that’s really what we ought to do.
To illustrate, if someone only wants to purchase one item, and in front of her are three trolley-filled customers. She’d probably need to wait at least 15 minutes before she gets served. Can’t we agree that the best solution is to let her jump the queue and get her purchase done first? Collectively, we’d waste significantly less time in waiting. (Thankfully, most markets have express lanes.)
Nevertheless, it’s entirely possible for an entire society to not subject this normal practice to evaluation (moral or not.) It’s plausible that groups of people are willing to queue in line for hours on end without knowing that there’s a better way to distribute their resources (i.e., time.)
Normalities tend blind masses from evaluating their circumstances and way of life. I coined the term “moral sanctuary” to describe this social phenomenon. When an activity is normal, people tend not to question the morality and ethics of that activity.
I’ve written about my experience being subjected to such epistemic injustice previously and have garnered no few criticisms. I’ve argued that when an employer deliberately denies us access to information that could give us an edge in negotiation, we’re being unfairly treated.
When your employer deliberately tells you not to share your salaries, you’re subjected to epistemic violence. Similarly, when we collectively decide that disclosing our salaries to others is taboo, we’re granting this act moral sanctuary. By deliberately not disclosing our salaries, we deny others the opportunity to evaluate their worth. Unwittingly, we’re also denying ourselves the opportunity to evaluate our worth.
As such, when my employer consistently employed tactical evasions whenever I asked him about his charges, he denied me the opportunity to evaluate my worth. Sure, we may check the “market price” of our worth. But in doing so, we’re once again reverting to what’s “normal.” This is how much we’re normally paid, so we don’t really ask if that’s how much we should be paid.
If you’re interested in the idea of moral sanctuary, you might be interested to read this:
Finally, I’d like to thank Squeeze the Avocado for the prompt. Here’s the equality I advocate for: be honest and open about things. You never know how that information may liberate others and yourself.
