Book in Progress

A Theory of Structural Injustice (Under contract with Princeton University Press)

The concept of structural injustice is a source of continuing puzzlement and debate across a wide range of disciplines. Arguably the central puzzle is embedded in the phrase itself: as a claim of injustice, this concept looks normatively suspect unless it can be tethered to agents' wrongdoing, but tracing it back to such wrongdoing, of which there is surely plenty, threatens to undermine what seems especially structural about it.  This book develops a novel account of structural injustice that aims to clarify its essential features and unravel the ontological, normative, and political puzzles that have beset this concept.  A coherent and compelling theory of structural injustice, I argue, must foreground two facts: (1) social structures are nothing other than the creation of human agents and their actions, and yet they have emergent properties that are not simply reducible to specific agents and their actions, properties that exert a real constraining and enabling force on human affairs; and (2) social structures can be morally objectionable for several, often entangled reasons, from harmfully constraining one’s freedom to subordinating one to others in social hierarchies. Taking the structure/agency relationship and the interplay between freedom and equality as starting points for theoretical analysis, this book sheds new light on what structural injustice is, how it happens, why it is wrong or unjust, and what agents can and should do about these problems.