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Systemic and Structural Injustice: Is There a Difference?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2022

Sally Haslanger
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Abstract

The terms ‘structural injustice’ and ‘systemic injustice’ are commonly used, but their meanings are elusive. In this paper, I sketch an ontology of social systems that embeds accounts of social structures, relations, and practices. On this view, structures may be intrinsically problematic, or they may be problematic only insofar as they interact with other structures in the system to produce injustice. Because social practices that constitute structures set the backdrop for agency and identity, socially fluent agents reproduce the systems, often unknowingly and unintentionally. The account aims to capture how agents both depend on and enact structures, and do so in ways that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, ‘land on the body’.

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Type
Research Article
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Philosophy , Volume 98 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 1 - 27
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of Philosophy

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Footnotes

This paper was presented at the Royal Institute of Philosophy's London Annual Lecture on 29 November 2021.

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