Systematic Injustice and the Scale of Wrong-doing

Abstract

Chapter 4 begins the defense of Unfreedom for All by laying out its theory of the nature of systematic injustice and of the harm it does its victims. The theory maintains that systematic injustice can be either the political subjugation described by the received view or structural injustice. Structural injustice is an institutional arrangement in which one group is unjustly privileged and another unjustly harmed by centering or marginalizing of the group’s political voice, exploitation of the victims that benefits the privileged, systematic violence done the victims but not the privileged, and society’s having dominant norms that unjustly favor the privileged and harm the victims. The chapter then offers an account of how systematic injustices compare to other injustices in what it calls “the scale of wrong-doing” and then argues that the harm oppression does its victims is that it sets back one of their fundamental welfare interests.