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Strategic injustice, dynamic network formation, and social movements

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Abstract

What I call "strategic injustice" involves a set of formal and informal regulatory rules and conventions that often lead to grossly unfair outcomes for a class of individuals despite their resistance. My goal in this paper is to provide the necessary conditions for such injustices and for eliminating their instances from our social practices. To do so, I follow Peter Vanderschraaf's analysis of circumstances of justice and expand his account by embedding "asymmetric conflictual coordination games" that summarize fair division problems in a dynamic social network. I use the network effect on such coordination games to explain the emergence of stable exploitative behavior and conventions by a class of individuals even in the presence of restraining efforts by others. I conclude that such unfair conventions are resilient to uncoordinated individual actions and interventions. In fact, maintaining a rough equality itself turns into another coordination problem. Finally, I show that something similar to a social movement that restructures the network of social relations is necessary to solve such coordination problems.

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Notes

  1. The list of other scholars who also use the tools of game theory to advance this discussion includes but is not limited to David Gauthier (1986), Robert Sugden (2004), Ken Binmore (1994, 1998), and Brian Skyrms (1996, 2014).

  2. Games in this reformulation represent strategic interactions among multiple actors where for every player the results are dependent on other players’ decisions as well as on their own. Players are simply the individuals that participate in the interaction, and strategies are the options available to them. A key feature of these games is that for each combination of strategies individuals choose, their payoffs determine the benefits or utility they enjoy.

  3. This was originally introduced by Maynard Smith (1982).

  4. Vanderschraaf (2018) explains these conditions in details and analysis their adequacy in chapter 3.

  5. World in many agent-based models simply refer to the space in which agents exist.

  6. To see the original form of this model, see Wilensky (1997). NetLogo Divide the Cake model. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/DivideTheCake. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

  7. For a similar argument see, for example, Mills (2008) idea of a racialized society.

  8. I will provide all three models upon request.

  9. Myerson’s model was originally introduced as a reformulation of coalitional games. However, it does not require the common features of cooperative games.

  10. The possible partitions are {{1,2}, {3}} or {{1}, {2,3}} or {{1,2,3}}.

  11. Gordon-Bouvier (2020) introduce and discuss this idea in her book, Relational Vulnerability: Theory, Law and the Private Family.

  12. For an example of cases in which individuals’ social networks affect their ability to survive or even access to justice institutions see Shami (2021).

  13. None of the models that I have discussed so far in this paper distinguish “ties” or social interactions in terms of their strengths. But in network theory and its application to many real-world cases like finding jobs or dissemination of information the difference between contingent and infrequent interactions and robust relationships is a well-studied matter. For an example of a dynamic model of weak and strong ties in the context of labor marker see Zenou (2015). In fact, the models I provided can easily accommodate this distinction. But for the sake of simplicity, I did not elaborate this matter more. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this distinction and its importance in the literature.

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  1. The Ohio State University, Columbus, United States

    Sahar Heydari Fard

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Heydari Fard, S. Strategic injustice, dynamic network formation, and social movements. Synthese 200, 392 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03576-3

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