In this article, we investigate how distressing background feelings can be subject to social injustice. We define background feelings as enduring feeling states that condition our perceptions of everyday situations, interpersonal dynamics, and the broader social milieu. While phenomenological psychopathology has long addressed such affective phenomena, including anxiety, guilt, and feelings of not belonging, the intersection with social injustice remains largely unexplored within the framework. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of existential injustice into phenomenological psychopathology. Existential injustice (...) pertains to the unjust formation, perpetuation, and treatment of background feelings. We contend that distressing alterations in these feeling states can stem from, or be perpetuated by, unjust social structures and practices. Existential injustice manifests as a felt inadequacy of one’s background feelings, reflecting broader societal disparities and inequities. Drawing on themes from social psychiatry, we illustrate the utility and explanatory power of the concept through two concrete examples. By shedding light on the ways in which societal dynamics shape distressing affective experiences our analysis underscores the importance of integrating aspects of social injustice into the study of affective phenomena in phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)

This paper proposes the notion of evaluative injustice as a distinct kind of injustice. Evaluative injustice occurs when someone is evaluated with regard to whether one satisfies the ideal associated with a social role one occupies, and the evaluation is characterized by an unjust failure of appraisal respect. This kind of injustice is importantly distinct from other kinds of injustice recently theorized, in particular epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) and ontological injustice (Jenkins 2023). It is distinct insofar as it is how (...) one is evaluated with respect to a given ideal that accounts for the injustice in question. After analyzing the nature of the phenomenon of evaluative injustice (section 2), this paper discusses the multiple different forms it can take (section 3) and argues that the wrong of all instances of evaluative injustice can be understood in terms of appraisal respect (Darwall 1977) (section 4). Throughout, the paper highlights various theoretical benefits the notion of evaluative injustice affords us. (shrink)

Situated affectivity investigates how natural, material, and social environmental structures, so-called ‘scaffolds,’ influence our affective life. Initially, the debate focused on user-resource-interactions, i.e., on cases where individuals (‘users’) actively structure the environment (‘resource’) in beneficial ways, setting up scaffolds that allow them to solve routine problems, modify their means of coping with challenges, or avail themselves of new affective competences. More recently, cases of mind invasion have captured philosophers’ attention where the ways others structure the environment affect, or invade, people’s (...) minds, typically without their awareness and with harmful consequences. This paper contributes to recent discussions about the variety of phenomena that can count as ‘scaffolded affectivity’ in general and ‘scaffolded affective harm’ in particular. It also addresses the emerging question of how harmful affective scaffolds can come to have a grip on people’s minds, despite their detrimental consequences. We first disentangle some misconceptions and illustrate how diverse (harmful) affective scaffolds can be. In contrast to recent approaches that have characterized scaffolds in largely descriptive terms, we then identify factors that can help explain why a given scaffold is effective in modifying people’s minds. We also try to shed light on why some agents and some social structures are especially likely to experience or cause scaffolded affective harm, respectively, by arguing that user-resource-interactions and mind invasions are not independent, but intimately intertwined and mutually reinforcing, especially in the digital domain. We conclude with a speculative suggestion for further research. (shrink)