Abstract
It has recently been argued that to tackle social injustice, implicit biases and unjust
social structures should be targeted equally because they sustain and ontologically
overlap with each other. Here I develop this thought further by relating it to the
hypothesis of extended cognition. I argue that if we accept common conditions for
extended cognition then people’s implicit biases are often partly realized by and so
extended into unjust social structures. This supports the view that we should counteract
psychological and social contributors to injustice equally. But it also has a significant
downside. If unjust social structures are part of people’s minds then dismantling these
structures becomes more difficult than it currently is, as this will then require us to
overcome widely accepted ethical and legal barriers protecting people’s bodily and
personal integrity. Thus, while there are good grounds to believe that people’s biases and
unjust social structures ontologically overlap, there are also strong ethical reasons to
reject this view. Metaphysical and ethical intuitions about implicit bias hence collide in an
important way.