Political obligations for structural injustice

Date
2023-06
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Wringe, William Giles
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Bilkent University
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English
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Abstract

The answer to the question of what unorganized agents’ responsibilities can be regarding structural injustice has wide-ranging implications for almost anyone in the world. Global economic, social, and political connections relate agents to each other, and causal connections exist created by socio-structural processes that oppress and dominate some groups while benefiting others. Iris Young’s social connection model details how structural injustices are created by the inadvertent actions of people acting against the backdrop of their usual circumstances. This thesis analyzes her claim that structural injustice gives rise to political responsibilities. An essential part of her discussion is related to the notion of structure and the insight brought by its application to the socio structural processes that connect people. The thesis follows the framing of structural injustice and applies it to instances of structural injustice worsened by the pandemic and the measures taken to stop its spread. I argue that ordinary citizens’ moral and political phenomenology paints complex pictures that cannot be captured with purely interpersonal and moral models. The social connection model of Young illustrates such pictures but runs into a problem of source of normativity in prescribing political obligations for structural injustice. To alleviate this problem, I employ Margaret Gilbert’s theory of obligations and her argument for a nonmoral source of normativity. I conclude that her understanding of joint commitments is pervasive in social facts and social phenomena, and it gives normative force for a distinctively political normative source that grounds political obligations for structural injustice.

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