Abstract
What could have we been, had we lived surrounded by a richer existential landscape? Work in social epistemology teaches us that a deficient number of collective conceptual resources can constitute injustice and is associated with a lack of intelligibility (for different subjects, and at both individual and collective levels) and communication problems. In particular, in the literature on hermeneutical injustice, researchers explore how insufficient resources can impede the (collective and/or individual) understanding of critical experiences. This impediment is said to constitute a form of (epistemic) injustice (Fricker 2007). The present work explores how deficient collective conceptual resources can prevent subjects not just from understanding but also from having critical experiences and building their identities in specific ways. Missing existential opportunities have to do with thoughts, desires, and experiences we could have had, which we never did, and which would have formed our identities differently. At least some of those missing existential opportunities constitute an injustice, a hybrid of epistemic and existential injustice, for a person is prevented from being what they could have been otherwise. Epistemic-existential injustice is caused by unjust power distribution, and it limits a person's experiential and existential landscape in a morally relevant way.