Thinking Responsibly about Structural Injustice

• In Event: Responding to Structural Injustice

Abstract

Structural injustice broadly refers to objectionable outcomes produced by generally accepted social structures for members of particular social groups. These outcomes ought to be remedied – but by whom, and why? In this talk, I will defend a negative and a positive claim in response to this question. The negative claim is that neither of the two leading views in the structural injustice literature, the liability model and the social connection model, offer a plausible answer to this question, particularly with regard to the issue of blame. I suggest that this failure stems from an intractable dilemma about blameworthiness for one’s contribution to structural injustice given the complexity of social structures. The positive claim is that when theorizing responsibility for structural injustice, we should therefore shift our focus from the structure-agency relationship to the distinctive features of agents’ structural positions, namely power, privilege, and interest. I argue that this positional model of responsibility offers a more useful framework for thinking about issues of blame, motivation, and remedial action that hamper political efforts to remedy structural injustice.

Author

• Hochan Kim, Nuffield College, University of Oxford