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What Structural Injustice Theory Leaves Out

For Symposium on Alasia Nuti, Injustice and the Reproduction of History

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Abstract

Alasia Nuti’s recent book Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress puts forward a compelling vision of contemporary duties to redress past wrongdoing, grounded in the idea of “historical-structural-injustice”, constituted by the “structural reproduction of an unjust history over time and through changes”. Such an approach promises to transcend the familiar scholarly divide between “backward-looking” and “forward-looking” models, and allow for a reparative approach that focuses specifically on those past wrongs that impact the present, while retaining a significant focus on the historical. While Nuti’s work is perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of structural injustice to date, this paper argues that an exclusive concentration on historical-structural-injustices neglects some aspects and some acts of wrongdoing that call out for present-day redress. What is needed, therefore, is a pluralist theory that can accept the pressing force in the present of historical-structural-injustices, whilst also making room for past-regarding duties that either do not fit, or are not best conceptualized in terms of, this approach, without being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of historic injustice.

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Notes

  1. The full text of Brown’s apology is at https://blog.jgc.org/2011/07/complete-text-of-gordon-browns-apology.html

  2. BBC News, 24/12/2013: “Royal pardon for codebreaker Alan Turing”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315.

  3. BBC News, 20/10/2016: “‘Alan Turing law’: Thousands of gay men to be pardoned”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

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Butt, D. What Structural Injustice Theory Leaves Out. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 1161–1175 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10180-w

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