Temporal Injustice: Reclaiming Limited Time

• In Event: Philosophy and Current Public Issues

Abstract

What is the relationship between time and injustice? That is the question this paper addresses, by sketching an account of temporal injustice. Temporal injustice is the kind of injustice that arises when time is taken away from an agent illegitimately. The idea is roughly that time is something that belongs to us, a scarce resource that we own. Accordingly, its seizure must be justified. This holds true for other goods that are often the subject for questions of distributive justice: goods like income, wealth, and power. But what is unique about time, and also for goods like power or self-respect, is its peculiar nature, the fact that it is a non-material good.​​ This presents a puzzle for articulating a theory of temporal injustice. Whereas we can measure injustice with respect to income—the kind of injustice we see when workers are not fairly compensated for their work—measuring injustice with respect to time is more tricky, if only because time is not something that can be materially evaluated. I argue that time should be theorized from the perspective of injustice because it is the condition of the possibility for any meaningful action, for any pursuit or project we undertake. This makes time a relevant political problem given that politics is about action in time. Therefore, being denied time is being denied the capacity to be a political agent.

Author

• Joseph Rodriguez, Duke University