Universalism and parasitic injustice

Abstract A common criticism of supposedly Enlightenment ideals is that, in the light of racial, gendered, and colonial injustice, they have never actually been universal. This article proposes a novel set of methodologies for testing the universalizability of normative ideals by attending to patterns of parasitic injustice , or the ways in which normative ideals such as freedom and equality are premised upon access to the labor, bodies, or resources of others in ways that make them nonuniversalizable. Assessments of injustice that focus on disparity, asymmetry, or exclusion tend to take supposedly normative ideals as an appropriate measure of success, and to map justice in terms of equal access to these ideals. A parasitic injustice framework demonstrates that if such ideals are structured through entitlement to the labor, unfreedom, or inequality of others, then they treat an extractive pattern as a normative standard and fail to address the root causes of the injustice. By drawing on Kantian political philosophy, feminist analyses of care chains, and discourses of disparity from the COVID‐19 pandemic, this article maps a set of methodological resources for recognizing and grappling with parasitic forms of injustice by reconceptualizing the content of normative ideals such that they are indeed universalizable.