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Structural Injustice and Massively Shared Obligations
Author(s) -
Schwenkenbecher Anne
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of applied philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.339
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5930
pISSN - 0264-3758
DOI - 10.1111/japp.12431
Subject(s) - injustice , collective action , distributive property , action (physics) , collective responsibility , law and economics , sociology , distributive justice , position (finance) , economic justice , political science , epistemology , law , business , philosophy , politics , physics , mathematics , finance , quantum mechanics , pure mathematics
It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations vis‐à‐vis large‐scale injustice? In this article, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed, and unorganised groups of people are often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense.