Justice and Doxastic Handicaps

ABSTRACT It is tempting to suppose that the reason why the world remains profoundly unjust is that not enough of us hold the correct beliefs about the demands of justice and/or are motivated to bring it about. As Allen Buchanan shows, however, this is to miss a crucially important part of the picture: agents' mistaken beliefs about what it takes to achieve justice can seriously hamper prospects for such achievements. In this article, I expand on Buchanan's taxonomy of mistaken beliefs about what it takes to achieve justice, and I bring his account (so expanded) to bear on the notion of epistemic justice.