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.
Notes
The full text of Brown’s apology is at https://blog.jgc.org/2011/07/complete-text-of-gordon-browns-apology.html
BBC News, 24/12/2013: “Royal pardon for codebreaker Alan Turing”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315.
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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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10180-w