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Structural Injustice
Structural Injustice
Power, Advantage, and Human Rights
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1
1.1. Structural Injustice 1
1.1.1. The World as We Find It 2
1.1.2. Theoretical Integration of Human Rights Violations
and Structural Injustice 3
1.1.3. Structural Injustice within and across States 3
1.1.4. Insights from Social Movements 5
1.1.5. When States Cannot or Will Not Respond to
Structural Injustice 6
1.2. Plan of the Chapters 7
CHAPTER 2 Well-Being 13
2.1. The Place of Well-Being in Our Theory 15
2.2. The Socratic and Structural Dependence Arguments 20
2.2.1. Socratic Reflection 22
2.2.2. Caveats and Clarifications to Our Method of Socratic
Reflection 23
2.2.3. The Structural Dependence Argument 26
2.3. The Core Elements 27
2.3.1. Health 28
2.3.2. Knowledge and Understanding 29
2.3.3. Personal Security 31
2.3.4. Equal Respect 33
2.3.5. Personal Attachments 37
2.3.6. Self-Determination 38
2.4. A Decent Human Life 42
2.5. An Alternative to Universal Endorsement Approaches to
Justification 44
2.5.1. Empirical Approaches and Minimalist
Conclusions 46
2.5.2. Interpretative Approaches 48
2.5.3. What a Justification for a Theory of Structural Justice
Should Seek to Achieve 50
2.6. Three Implications of the Roles of Our Conception of
Well-Being 53
2.6.1. Deprivation in Well-Being Is Not the Unique
Concern of Justice: What Is Distinctive About Our
Theory? 53
2.6.2. How Does Our Structural Justice Theory Deal with
Deprivation Not Caused by the Social Structure? 55
2.6.3. How Does the Connection Between Our Conception
of Well-Being and Human Rights Differ from Its
Connection to Unfairness Norms? 56
viii | Contents
4.2. Social Structural Components and Their Systematic
Influence 92
4.2.1. Defining Characteristics of Unjust Structural
Influences 92
4.2.2. Institutional Structures 97
4.2.3. Informal Structural Influences 98
4.2.4. Institutional and Informal Influences
Combined 100
4.3. Power, Advantage, and Social Position 101
4.3.1. Relative Position within Relations of
Production 102
4.3.2. Race 104
4.3.3. Gender 105
4.3.4. The Importance of Groups and of Intersectional
Group Memberships 107
4.4. Background Assumptions 108
4.4.1. Moderate Scarcity and Human Rights
Fulfillment 108
4.4.2. Closed Economic Systems 109
4.4.3. Free and Equal Citizenship 111
4.4.4. The Emergence of Injustice 113
Contents | ix
CHAPTER 6 The Responsibility of States 146
6.1. The Normative Uniqueness of State Agency and Its
Implications 148
6.1.1. Institutional Capacity 149
6.1.2. Political Legitimacy 151
6.1.3. Gaps in Responsibility for Human Rights and the
Principle of Moral Equal Protection 153
6.2. The Strong Statist Challenge 155
6.2.1. Normative Uniqueness Arguments 157
6.2.2. The Common Structure of Strong Statist
Arguments 160
6.3. National Self-Determination Arguments 162
6.4. The Principle of Interstate Reciprocity 167
6.4.1. Reciprocity and Fairness 169
6.4.2. Double Standards in Agricultural Trade Policy and
Climate Change 172
6.4.3. Conclusion 176
6.5. The Power of Non-State Institutions in the Current Global
Order 177
6.6. Conclusion 185
CHAPTER 7 Real-World Examples 187
7.1. National Sacrifice Zones: From Appalachia to Warren
County 188
7.1.1. The Legacy of Appalachia 190
7.1.2. Repeatable Patterns 194
7.2. The Globalization of Sacrifice Zones 196
7.2.1. The Natural Resource Curse 197
7.2.2. Do the Benefits Offset the Burdens? 199
7.2.3. The New Natural Resource Curse 202
7.2.4. Global Dumping and Outsourcing: Toxics and
Trash 204
7.3. Segregated Cities: “Two Societies, . . . Separate and
Unequal” 206
7.3.1. The Modern Origins of Segregated Residential
Housing Patterns 208
7.3.2. Geographic Dispersion and Reconcentration of
Poverty: 2000 to the Present 210
x | Contents
7.3.3. The Poor (Neighborhoods) Pay More (and Get
Less) 214
7.3.4. Policing 216
7.4. Urban “Slums”: The Proliferation of Informal Human
Settlements 220
7.4.1. Urbanization and the Urbanization of Poverty 220
7.4.2. Definitions and Characteristics of Slums 222
7.4.3. The Informal Economy 226
7.4.4. Multidimensional Deprivation 229
7.4.5. Power and Deprivation 230
7.5. Conclusion 232
CHAPTER 8 Resistance to Injustice: Activism and Social
Movements 234
8.1. Individual Responsibility in a Nearly Just Society 236
8.2. Means and Goals of Resistance in Less Ideal
Circumstances 238
8.2.1. Organizational Insights from the Ethics of Armed
Conflict 240
8.2.2. Naming and Shaming 242
8.2.3. Boycotts and Divestment Campaigns 243
8.2.4. Blockades, Data Hacks, and Other Violations
of Law 248
8.2.5. Self-Defense and Defense of Others 251
8.3. Targets of Resistance: Contributors and Beneficiaries 253
8.3.1. The “All or None” Objection 254
8.3.2. Two Tiers of Targeting Considerations 255
8.3.3. First-Tier Considerations 256
8.3.4. Second-Tier Considerations 259
8.3.5. Passive Complicity in Injustices by Others 259
8.3.6. Anti-Democratic Conduct 261
8.3.7. Anti-Competitive Conduct 262
8.3.8. Accountability Avoidance 264
8.3.9. A Cautionary Note 266
8.4. Conclusion: Well-Being and Social Movements 267
Bibliography 271
Index 293
Contents | xi
PREFACE AND READERS’ GUIDE
T his book has its roots in an invitation from the University of Zurich to
participate in a two-day conference on our book Social Justice: The
Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy. It was held in
2012 and hosted by the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and the University
Research Priority Program for Ethics. The conference featured two dozen
speakers and commentators, representing a mix of academics and activists
from eleven countries. This volume is the result of our expansion and re-
finement of the ideas in Social Justice that so excited this group, and in
turn excited us.
For readers familiar with Social Justice, we note several ways in
which our thinking has evolved. In order to ward off a variety of poten-
tial misinterpretations, where we once spoke of “essential dimensions”
of well-being we now use the less problematic phrase “core elements.”
The earlier book was structured around the positive and negative aims of
justice, where the positive aim is to secure a basic level of well-being and
the negative aim is to prevent or combat densely woven, unfair patterns of
disadvantage. In a series of exploratory papers in the intervening years, we
referred to the theory’s twin aims. Ultimately, in Structural Injustice, we
opted for a twin focus on human rights and fairness norms.
We devoted a very brief section of Social Justice to how our conception
of well-being might be used to ground an interest theory of human rights.
This book picks up on that suggestion and uses our conception of well-
being to defend such a theory. We also establish extensive links between
human rights norms and structural fairness norms.
Our thinking about fairness norms has evolved considerably since
Social Justice. In that book, we used the phrase “systematic disadvantage”
to encompass a plurality of ways in which unfair patterns of advantage be-
come cemented into place. We left open the possibility that unfair patterns
of advantage emerge from the unintended, largely benign, uncoordinated
actions of individuals and institutions, while also devoting attention to
morally more complex patterns of interaction involving unfairness in re-
lations of power. In this book, we focus on the latter trajectory. We now
place greater emphasis on the inherent unfairness of certain power rela-
tions, and we highlight the instrumental role asymmetric power routinely
plays in creating and sustaining deep disadvantage.
In Social Justice, we claimed applicability of our theory to both do-
mestic and global contexts. Since that book went to press in 2005, much
has been written on this topic. It has required us to address powerful
arguments against the global extension of the fairness norms we propose.
In Structural Injustice we draw a careful distinction between the norms we
defend and the kinds of norms of justice that critics and some proponents
have in mind when they argue for or against global application of norms
of justice.
Finally, although we developed our theory in Social Justice in conversa-
tion with specific issues in public health and health policy, we indicated that
we believed our theory was not limited to health. In fact, we rejected the
general thesis that social justice fundamentally differs in its requirements
in “separate spheres,” along with the assumption that matters of struc-
tural justice could be addressed adequately in one sphere in isolation from
injustices in other sectors of social life. In this book, we make good on
these claims by putting forward a theory of structural injustice that is in-
tentionally freed from a special focus on health and that continues to em-
phasize the interconnected and interdependent relations between different
core elements of well-being and different kinds of structural unfairness.
There are also two features of Structural Injustice that were not pre-
sent in our earlier volume and that we want to note for all readers. First,
many of the chapters are accessible as stand-alone discussions of interest
to audiences with various levels of prior exposure to the justice literature.
Although the book is designed as a sequence of chapters through which
we develop our overall theory of structural injustice, distinguish it from
existing alternatives, demonstrate its relevance within different nation-
states and across national boundaries, and defend the justifiability of forms
of resistance, many chapters are also written so that they can be read on
their own. For example, a reader interested in what makes norms of justice
different from other moral norms can read chapter 3, or a reader interested
in debates about the foundations of human rights can read chapter 5. Both
1.1. Structural Injustice
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