Agency, Complicity, and the Responsibility to Resist Structural Injustice

Structural Injustice and Massively Shared Obligations

“…Why do I focus on (3)? Few of us have the power and influence to individually make a direct difference to the kind of problems I am concentrating on here, as per (1). Regarding (2), clearly, group agents such as states, national and international organisations, and corporations and, therefore, their members have duties to address global challenges.…”

“…According to Corwin Aragon and Alison Jaggar, 'structural injustice is an emergent property of social practices' where 'typically unplanned and often unforeseen interaction of a variety of systemic factors' generate 'nested networks of constraints and opportunities'. 1 According to Iris Marion Young, structural injustice exists when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them. 2 Structural injustice, then, is collectively caused in that it results from and is constituted by everyday actions of millions of people operating within unjust social institutions.…”

Frontiers of Responsibility for Global Justice

“…One could think that, for it to be viable, any conception of task responsibility ought to acknowledge that the urgency and extent of obligations will vary depending on what triggers them, on a scale that goes from deliberate action to plain disengagement (Larrère , in this issue). In this regard, various articles in this issue discuss the concept of complicity as a defensible way to account for situations where the absence of resistance may alone be considered blameworthy (Held ; Aragon and Jaggar ; Sangiovanni ; all in this issue).…”

“…The problem is that being equally loosely tied to every other member of a global community may not provide sufficient motivation to care about distant others’ standards of life or labor conditions. As several articles of this issue point out, if one wants to argue that people do have positive obligations toward each other at the global scale, one must account for the ways in which a person may indeed feel a responsibility to act for the well‐being of distant others or on the structural processes that affect it (Held ; Tan ; Aragon and Jaggar ; McKeown ; all in this issue). That is, one must account for the particular circumstances in which awareness, care, and moral feelings may arise among people who do not stand in any significant sort of relationship to one another.…”

“…Much of the present global situation is the result of states’ deliberate past injustices, such as slavery, colonization, and the misappropriation of non‐renewable resources (Tan ; Butt ; Eckersley ; Lu ). In this regard, the fact that several contributions investigate the role of causal participation in generating task responsibility (Larrère ; Aragon & Jaggar ; Sangiovanni ; McKeown ; all in this issue) sheds an interesting light on the difficulty of entirely disconnecting backward‐ and forward‐looking conceptions of responsibility.…”