Project 5.1

This PhD project examines how societies should address structural injustice without damaging the social relations required for collective action. Building on theories of structural injustice and moral responsibility, it investigates who ought to bear forward-looking responsibilities for unjust social structures and how accountability for meeting such responsibilities can be exercised without generating backlash or fragmentation. Empirical work plays a supporting role, using experimental studies to test how different responsibility assignments affect cooperation under conditions of inequality. The project develops a justice-centred framework that contributes to SOCION’s research on social cohesion.

This project investigates how societies can address structural injustice without undermining social cohesion, integrating philosophical theories of responsibility with sociological and economic analyses of social structure. Structural injustice theorists, such as Iris Marion Young and Sally Haslanger, argue that injustices arise not from identifiable wrongdoing but from systems of norms, rules and resource distributions that systematically expose certain groups to domination and deprivation. These structural injustices shape social relationships, trust and solidarity, often fracturing social cohesion. At the same time, recognizing structural injustice can also foster cross-group solidarity and collective action.

The project aims to develop an interdisciplinary framework for 1) identifying who bears forward-looking responsibilities for addressing structural injustices, 2) determining how to hold individuals accountable in ways that do not erode social cohesion and 3) empirically examining how different responsibility assignments affect cooperation within unequal social networks. Through primarily normative analyses, which are supplemented by experimental methods, the project will produce a conceptual and empirical foundation for designing responsibility practices that help repair injustice without breaking social bonds.

Philosophy

The project combines normative ethics and political philosophy with targeted empirical work to investigate responsibility and accountability in contexts of structural injustice.

The core component is a philosophical analysis of forward-looking responsibility and accountability under conditions of unequal power and privilege. Drawing on theories of structural injustice developed by Iris Marion Young, Sally Haslanger and David Estlund, the project reconstructs and evaluates competing accounts of who ought to bear responsibility for unjust social structures and on what grounds. Particular attention is given to how considerations of power, privilege and collective capacity figure in justifying responsibility assignments and to the moral tension between holding agents accountable and sustaining social cohesion. These arguments are then applied to paradigmatic cases of structural injustice, such as housing and migration, to examine how different responsibility attributions and accountability practices may either support cooperation across groups or contribute to backlash and fragmentation.

Sociology

The empirical component is designed to support and refine this normative framework. We will translate the normative analysis into an empirically testable framework. Key elements of the philosophical analysis are translated into a small programme of network-structured economic games that reflect inequalities in power and opportunity and vary in how responsibility and accountability are presented. By comparing more cohesive and more fragmented social settings, the experiments examine when responsibility practices encourage cooperation and when they risk alienation or resistance. The purpose of this work is to provide evidence that informs the normative analysis and clarifies the social conditions under which justice-oriented responsibility practices are most likely to foster social cohesion. If the PhD candidate has suitable expertise, the normative framework will be formalized into a computational network model to stimulate broader structural dynamics. However, the experimental programme is fully implementable without this step, ensuring feasibility regardless of the PhD candidate’s specific background.