Premium
Agency, Complicity, and the Responsibility to Resist Structural Injustice
Author(s) -
Aragon Corwin,
Jaggar Alison M.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of social philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.353
H-Index - 31
eISSN - 1467-9833
pISSN - 0047-2786
DOI - 10.1111/josp.12251
Subject(s) - complicity , injustice , agency (philosophy) , citation , collective responsibility , social injustice , political science , sociology , law , social science , politics
Philosophers working on global ethics pay increasing attention to wrongs that result from everyday social practice. They look beyond the actions of individual “bad apples,” the failings of corrupt states, and the practices of supposedly “illiberal” cultures to provide increasingly comprehensive accounts of the global structural processes that produce and perpetuate injustice. Structural analyses reveal connections among wrongs that at first sight appear unrelated to each other and show how the actions of individuals can contribute to injustice at local, national, regional, and even global levels. However, although these accounts illuminate the empirical situation, the ethical picture remains blurred. How, if at all, are individual citizens morally responsible for injustices rooted in the structure of the global order? This paper builds on Iris Marion Young’s work to offer an answer based on people’s complicity with unjust structural processes.