Emergent Disorders: Structure, Agency, and Injustice

Abstract

This dissertation develops an account of structural injustice that provides a unified set of answers to three distinct but interconnected questions. First, the ontological: what are social structures, and how do they produce unjust outcomes? Second, the normative: on what moral grounds are certain outcomes unjust and/or oppressive? Third, the political: what can and should agents do to address structural injustice? In the course of tackling these questions, I argue that a better conceptualization of the ontological and normative features of structural injustice is helpful and indeed necessary for understanding what agents can and should do about these political problems. The first half of the dissertation provides that conceptualization. On the ontological question, I identify and disentangle three meanings of social structure across social and political theory: patterns of behavior, conditions or forces on our agency, and relational positions. I then argue that the relationship between social structure and agency is fruitfully theorized in terms of emergent properties; building on that claim, I conceptualize structural injustice as emergent disorders: how our social activities sustain structural conditions that in turn constrain (and enable) what we do in ways that produce unintended and unforeseen bad outcomes. Next, I turn to the normative question and defend a distinction between two kinds of structural injustice that track distinct moral concerns: how social structures undermine freedom, and how social structures undermine equality. The second half of the dissertation explores the political implications of this conceptualization. I argue that finding actionable and effective remedies to structural injustices as emergent disorders requires middle-range sociological analyses that identify the most salient structural causes and mechanisms behind specific social outcomes, not the analysis of general social systems (which produces unactionable remedies) or particular social practices (which produces ineffective remedies). Finally, I develop a view of responsibility for structural injustice that accounts for its ontological and normative complexity. On this view, agents have remedial responsibility for structural injustice because of morally significant features of their social structural position, namely power, privilege, interest, and collective ability – not because they have contributed to the social activities that produce these outcomes.