There are many different ways of maltreating people and there are several ways of classifying these. Recent moral and political theory has focused on four main types of maltreatment: causing suffering, restricting freedom, violating rights, and perpetrating injustice. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive categories, and, moreover, each is variably inclusive, depending on how it is interpreted. Thus the first can range from the infliction of pain and physical injury through cruelty to the frustration of various kinds of legitimate desires. The second can range from intended interference that prevents agents from realizing their express purposes to unintended limitations on their possibilities of choice. The third can remain confined to the infringement of the libertarian individual rights of voluntary transfer and exchange or expand to embrace the violation or lack of social, economic, and cultural and also group-based rights. The fourth can be limited to the maldistribution of goods or resources or capacities or else include other ways in which people are denied what is their due. More recently, moral and political theorists, among others, have sought to formulate a further category that would succeed in identifying a kind of maltreatment that, while it can perhaps be accommodated within all these four, is nevertheless ever more politically salient in virtually all contemporary societies.
