Feasibility, Epistemic Injustice and the Political Practice

The principle that ‘ought implies feasible’ has gained wide acceptance in political philosophy: one cannot be obligated to do what is infeasible for one to do. In practice, feasibility judgments are meant to be used as normative constraints. Some suggest that this should be of concern for practical politics: infeasible proposals should be excluded from democratic deliberation. While theoretically compelling, this idea faces problems when it is considered in practical circumstances; the very circumstances where it is meant to apply. In this article, we highlight this problem through the concept of epistemic injustice. First, we argue that the existence of epistemic injustice implies that our feasibility judgments in politics are systematically wrong, something we refer to as the Epistemic Worry. Second, we argue that this fact reinforces ideology and power structures by structuring democratic deliberation around the proposals of powerful groups. We refer to this as the Political Worry. Having shown this, we argue for a methodological claim: the feasibility debate should move in a more practical direction in order to be conducted in ways that are epistemically justified and democratically legitimate—thereby avoiding feasibility being used as a tool for the powerful. Thus, our contribution is to initiate a shift from abstract theorizing to situated practice, showing that the legitimacy of feasibility depends not only on conceptual soundness but also on its fair application under practical circumstances.