The journal has long encouraged ethical engagement across methodologies and disciplinary barriers, publishing quality research that integrates the empirical and the purely philosophical, the theoretical with the practical, and the historical and the contemporary. This issue’s contents embody that mission in a variety of ways.

The centrepiece of this issue is a symposium on Alasia Nuti’s Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress. Nuti’s book represents a noteworthy development within scholarship on the ethics and politics of reparation. Much of that scholarship has viewed historical reparations for past injustice (such as that done to particular racial or ethnic groups or to women) in terms of what Iris Marion Young has criticized as a “liability model.” On this model, the central aim of reparations is to ‘settle’ the moral debts arising out of past injustice, compensating its victims with resources drawn from its perpetrators (or beneficiaries). The liability model represents reparations as responding in the present to the injustices of the past. This picture of reparations faces the difficult task of identifying the appropriate victims and perpetrators. Nuti’s principal novelty in Injustice and the Reproduction of History is to pivot away from the liability model while still insisting that the case for reparations has historical roots. Nuti proposes that reparations be responsive to structural injustice, i.e., to ongoing social facts that perpetuate unjust inequalities even when these facts cannot be attributable to specific individuals. For Nuti, reparations must hold powerful agents accountable for the “structural debt” they have incurred by reproducing injustice over time, including in the present and in the foreseeable future. Her rationale for reparations thus promises to incorporate past injustices while also being “forward-looking”. Nuti allies this rationale with a distinctive account of social groups, some of which are voluntary while others are involuntary. This “anti-essentialist” account of social groups is meant to identify social groups that are (plausibly) rightful beneficiaries of reparations without their members sharing a common biological, hereditary, etc., essence.

The symposiasts concede the theoretical innovations of Nuti’s position but contest various aspects of it. Daniel Butt argues, contra Nuti, that past injustices can give rise to backward-looking duties that we can in principle fully discharge, as in our duties to the dead. Nuti’s structural approach acknowledges the historical or causal origins of present injustices, but emphasizes the entanglement of past and present injustices. In contrast, Megan Blomfield defends a “causal” approach wherein present day inequalities are to be addressed by virtue of being caused by historical injustice. Jennifer Page raises concerns about how Nuti understands the relationship between blameworthy injustices and their structural effects, pressing for clarification as to whether those responsible for injustices are blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice or merely for the immediate wrongs of the kind central to the liability model. David Owen urges that Nuti’s structural account be augmented by a notion of solidarity wherein those most marginalized by injustice play an active role in the sphere of political choice. One manifestation of the structural injustice that concerns Nuti, according to Désirée Lim, is what she calls the U.S. “crimmigration system”, a system that uses border control to limit migrant labour in the U.S., thereby making them vulnerable to various forms of employer abuse. Lim proposes that this system is representative of how migrant labour practices and policies can reproduce structural injustice.

Two other articles in this issue intervene in existing debates in interpersonal ethics.

“Conditional apologies” — those characteristically expressed by locutions such as “I am sorry if” — are often viewed as suspect or second-rate apologies. Peter Baumann’s “Sorry if! On Conditional Apologies” attempts to rehabilitate such apologies. He offers an analysis according to which conditional apologies, despite lacking four features that define unconditional apologies, are genuine apologies with a role to play in our moral interactions insofar as they express the apologizer’s commitment to be a certain kind of person.

Deontological moral theories typically assert that moral agents are not morally permitted to violate individuals’ rights in order to yield better results from an impartial standpoint. Such theories represent rights violations as violations of agent-relative side constraints, constraints on violating rights that do not require that we prevent other agents from violating individuals’ rights. But are agents dutybound to violate rights in order prevent themselves from violating a greater number of rights later on? In “A Diachronic Consistency Argument for Minimizing One’s Own Rights Violations,” Nicolas Côté argues in the affirmative, proposing that this duty follows from widely acknowledged constraints regarding temporal neutrality in our choices.

Two other contributions explore challenges to ethical theories prominent in the ‘Western’ tradition.

Marissa Espinoza and Rico Vitz (“Cultural Embeddedness and the Mestiza Ethics of Care: a Neo-Humean Response to the Problem of Moral Inclusion”) contribute to the growing literature juxtaposing ‘Western’ moral theories with Latin American moral thought. They draw upon Mia Sosa-Provencio’s mestiza ethics of care to challenge Humean aspirations of grounding moral inclusion in sympathy and humanity. According to Espinoza and Vitz, the Humean project must be augmented by the concepts of sympathetic understanding and relational humility in order to engage with injustices grounded in “cultural embeddedness,” the role of race, heritage, language, etc., of those subject to particular injustices.

Gennady McCracken’s “Is Aristotelian Naturalism Safe From the Moral Outsider?” intervenes in recent discussions within Aristotelian naturalistic metaethics. Specifically, McCracken replies to a recent “membership objection” to Aristotelian naturalism. This objection claims that such naturalism allows for the possibility of a non-human rational “moral outsider” whose species-specific norms of rational license morally objectionable behaviour. McCracken attempts to leverage Alasdair MacIntyre’s naturalism to answer this objection.

Finally, Jaana Pariviainen’s “Kinetic Values, Mobility (In)equalities, and Ageing in Smart Urban Environments” investigates an area of social policy, namely, human mobility, that has received only very sporadic attention in the philosophical literature. Older individuals often confront limitations on their physical mobility. Given the wide acknowledgement of a right to mobility, how can such inequalities in mobility be theorised? Pariviainen appeals to four kinetic values — self-motion, being-moved, co-motion, and forced movement — in an attempt to understand the significance that such mobility limitations has for the dignity of older adults. This approach illuminates the relationship between mobility on the one hand and assistive technologies and urban infrastructure on the other.

As this issue illustrates, the journal continues to welcome research that transcends conventional understandings of the approaches by which ethical phenomena are best understood.