PANEL 5 / STRUCTURAL INJUSTICE: CONCEPTIONS AND NORMATIVE IMPLICATIONS
CONVENOR KRISTINA VASIC
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
Some injustice requires a structural explanation, one which looks at the background conditions of agency. Causes of a person’s disadvantaged position within society may seem prima facie to originate solely from her choices, but that cannot always be (and rarely is) a full picture. Those choices can be conditioned by stable background conditions, that is, the structure, which makes the realization of some choices costlier if not impossible. This bears on the ways such injustice can be rectified – making any individualized remedies seem like a mere band aid on a wound which is structurally-caused. What often strikes us about structural injustice is the apparent banality of it, the possibility to reach grossly unjust outcomes through seemingly innocuous everyday practices. This is what Iris Marion Young (2011) stressed in her account of structural injustice, which set the terms of the subsequent debates around the issue: “Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms (p. 52).” Young attributes no moral responsibility for structural injustice to agents who are not directly causally contributing to it or intending it. The type of responsibility that does devolve on agents, on her account, is political: agents should organize collectively with others embedded within the structure in order to change it.
This panel will engage with such a conception of structural injustice and explore normative
implications it has for moral responsibility, or blameworthiness, or reparation duties. Authors such as Alasia Nuti (2019) and Maeve McKeown (2024) have called for an integration of power analysis into the concept of responsibility for structural injustice, arguing that responsibility should be sensitive to the amount of power agents have in relation to a structure. In line with that, McKeown (2024) distinguishes between pure, avoidable and deliberate structural injustice.
A similar argument is made by Zsolt Kapelner (2021), who claims that those privileged by unjust social structures incur more demanding duties to counteract structural injustice than the non-privileged individuals. Others, like Andrea Sangiovanni (2018) argue that agents entangled within unjust social structures do bear moral responsibility for it although they may not be blameworthy. The debate around responsibility within unjust structures is sometimes focused more specifically on structures of domination (Gädeke, 2021). This panel invites contributions that engage with structural injustice along these lines. It welcomes proposals related but not limited to the following topics:
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
Some injustice requires a structural explanation, one which looks at the background conditions of agency. Causes of a person’s disadvantaged position within society may seem prima facie to originate solely from her choices, but that cannot always be (and rarely is) a full picture. Those choices can be conditioned by stable background conditions, that is, the structure, which makes the realization of some choices costlier if not impossible. This bears on the ways such injustice can be rectified – making any individualized remedies seem like a mere band aid on a wound which is structurally-caused. What often strikes us about structural injustice is the apparent banality of it, the possibility to reach grossly unjust outcomes through seemingly innocuous everyday practices. This is what Iris Marion Young (2011) stressed in her account of structural injustice, which set the terms of the subsequent debates around the issue: “Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms (p. 52).” Young attributes no moral responsibility for structural injustice to agents who are not directly causally contributing to it or intending it. The type of responsibility that does devolve on agents, on her account, is political: agents should organize collectively with others embedded within the structure in order to change it.
This panel will engage with such a conception of structural injustice and explore normative
implications it has for moral responsibility, or blameworthiness, or reparation duties. Authors such as Alasia Nuti (2019) and Maeve McKeown (2024) have called for an integration of power analysis into the concept of responsibility for structural injustice, arguing that responsibility should be sensitive to the amount of power agents have in relation to a structure. In line with that, McKeown (2024) distinguishes between pure, avoidable and deliberate structural injustice.
A similar argument is made by Zsolt Kapelner (2021), who claims that those privileged by unjust social structures incur more demanding duties to counteract structural injustice than the non-privileged individuals. Others, like Andrea Sangiovanni (2018) argue that agents entangled within unjust social structures do bear moral responsibility for it although they may not be blameworthy. The debate around responsibility within unjust structures is sometimes focused more specifically on structures of domination (Gädeke, 2021). This panel invites contributions that engage with structural injustice along these lines. It welcomes proposals related but not limited to the following topics:
- Responsibility (moral, political) and/or blameworthiness of agents in relation to unjust structures
- The role of power within unjust structures
- The scope of the concept of structural injustice, especially vis-à-vis structural domination
- How are structures of injustice to be changed?
- What grounds reparation duties?
