Stephanie Collins, "Forward-looking Responsibility for Structural Injustice"

"Forward-looking Responsibility for Structural Injustice"

Stephanie Collins (Monash)
March 30, 2026, 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Leacock 927

A structural injustice occurs when political, legal, or economic processes produce unjust outcomes, which cannot be reduced to identifiable wrongs perpetrated by isolatable agents. This paper offers a new answer to a vexed question: who bears forward-looking responsibility for alleviating structural injustice, and why? The paper argues that ‘relations of interdependence’ are the source (i.e., normative grounds or justification) of forward-looking responsibility. These relations combine to determine the extent (level of cost required) for each responsibility-bearing agent, allowing us to differentiate between the responsibilities of powerful collective agents versus ordinary individuals. Finally, these interdependence relations also inform the content of forward-looking responsibility (that is, the actions or practices required): our respective forward-looking responsibilities call on each agent to perform ‘contextual care’: the meeting needs of in the local context, in a way that promotes the meeting of needs in the larger contexts in which our local contexts are embedded.

The talk is co-sponsored with GRIPP.