Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Structural Transformation

ABSTRACT

This author’s reply responds to five main issues raised by the commentators. The first two issues regard the concept of structural injustice and agents’ responsibility for it. What kind of responsibility is generated by structural injustice? How is it distinct from responsibility related to the liability of agents for interactional injustice? Addressing these issues requires clarifying how my understanding of structural injustice draws on and differs from Iris Marion Young’s account. A third issue addressed in this reply regards the question of what institutional and structural reforms or initiatives would promote emancipatory versus regressive responses to structural injustice. This question is particularly sharp in the case of redressing the injustice and alienation of settler colonial social structures on Indigenous peoples. A fourth issue relates to the question of what useful role states and international law, especially human rights law, may play in making progress towards eliminating various forms of structural injustice, such as those related to gender oppression. This response will finally address a fifth issue about reconciliation as a regulative ideal, and whether my conception of reconciliation as non-alienation of various kinds invites a tragic reading of the pursuit of reconciliation in politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural injustice
• Iris Marion Young
• colonialism
• settler colonialism
• responsibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ According to the Interim Report of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, ‘Indigenous women are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than any other women in Canada, and 16 times more likely than Caucasian women.’ The Report also notes that Indigenous women are seven times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be victims of serial killers (Canada 2017, 8).

² Rainer Forst has recently clarified that alienation is morally objectionable when it entails a loss of moral autonomy, or ‘a denial of standing or, in the extreme, losing a sense of oneself as a rational normative authority equal to all others’ (Forst, 2017, 525). The remedies for such ‘noumenal’ forms of alienation are social self-determination and non-domination, or what I would term structural justice. He distinguishes this account of alienation from ‘ethical alienation’, which focuses on individuals’ loss of capacity for self-realization in the achievement of a good or authentic life. The overcoming of such alienation involves self-realization and self-affirmation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435–2013–0788].