J Soc Philos. 2021;00:1–17. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/josp | 1 © 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC Received: 17 January 2021 | Accepted: 7 May 2021 DOI: 10.1111/josp.12428 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Affective injustice and fundamental affective goods Francisco Gallegos Department of Philosophy, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA Correspondence: Francisco Gallegos, Department of Philosophy, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA. Email: gallegft@wfu.edu 1 | INTRODUCTION In societies like ours, people who are victims of injustice may face a wide variety of morally objection- able burdens and harms. Most obvious, perhaps, are the practical, social, and political disadvantages brought about by unjust conditions and actions. But in addition to these, there are emotional costs of injustice that can take an immense toll on individuals and communities. What is the nature of the emotional harms and burdens that arise from injustice? Do these harms and burdens constitute a dis- tinctive form of injustice in their own right? If so, what precisely makes them unjust? These questions are central to the philosophical investigation of “affective injustice”—that is, injustice faced by people specifically in their capacity as affective beings (Archer and Mills 2019, 75). Philosophical inquiry into affective injustice examines how certain kinds of morally objection- able actions, practices, and circumstances bring about harms and disadvantages specifically related to emotions, moods, feelings, affective dispositions, and other “valenced” states. Such harms and disad- vantages might consist of distressing experiences of fear, anger, sadness, and despair. They might also include deeper changes to the very shape of one’s emotional life through trauma, burnout, mental ill- ness, and the systematic misdirection of one’s emotional responses as a result of ideology, gaslighting, or other influences. These and other emotional and affective harms and disadvantages may be caused by the stress, suffering, and limitations associated with such things as poverty and financial precarity; structural and interpersonal racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression; bullying and emotional abuse; school or work settings that are emotionally exhausting or traumatizing; pernicious norms governing the experience and expression of affective states; or emotional manipulations embedded in physical and digital environments designed to enrich some at others’ expense. The philosophical literature on affective injustice is currently in a nascent state. Several explicit treatments of the topic have been offered (Srinivasan 2018; Whitney 2018; Plunkett 2020; Archer and Matheson 2020), but there has been no systematic overview of the conceptual terrain. While a plausible conception of affective injustice has been offered, the notion of “an injustice faced by some- one specifically in their capacity as an affective being” is quite general, and it remains unclear how we should specify this concept. In particular, the extant literature contains no developed account of the conditions on something being an affective injustice. As a result, it remains unclear how various treatments of affective injustice are related to one another or how to present or future disagreements among theorists might be adjudicated.