What is the role of subjective experiences in social criticism? Distinguishing between first and second order justice

Abstract

Over the last decades, different approaches linked to decolonial tradition have shifted the pendulum of critique from claims of universality towards individual accounts and experiences. However, in what we can call “narrative turn”, the moral justifications for first-person perspectives are not always evident. In this paper, I explore the boundaries of epistemic relevance regarding the role that subjective accounts and experiences play in the critique of injustice. For that, I start by inverting the question of objectivity in the critique considering the particularity of different experiences. The issue, in this case, is the position from where philosophers speak in their attempts to describe experiences of suffering. With regards to first-person standpoint, the question that is at stake is whether philosophers are capable of describing others’ experiences. In these terms, how can we share experiences of injustice after all? Next, I argue that there ought to be, in the debate, a distinction between two dimensions of justice. According to usual distinctions of “first- and second-order” approaches, I insist that theoretical claims related to the narrative turn refer to demands of first-order justice: it is about moral recognition of individuals’ epistemic claims, opening to the possibility to confront defective notions of universality and blind spots in theories of justice. However, these claims do not have justification criteria themselves, requiring, thus, normative dependencies which are external to experiences – these are situated in second-order justice. I argue, then, that this model has the advantage of incorporating the insights of decolonial theories without neglecting the potential for the critique of injustice.