► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

To Promote an Injustice Which Was no Part of Their Intention

Prominent strands of the literature on structural injustice in the past two decades, largely building on work by Iris Marion Young, emphasize the potentially unplanned character this kind of injustice, its development out of complex social processes and the possibly innocent actions of many decentralized actors. (The blamelessness of the individual actors has been the subject of lively debate, which is set aside for purposes of this discussion.) It is striking how much the structural injustice literature therefore sometimes sounds like an analysis of what other literatures would describe as invisible hand phenomena and emergent or spontaneous orders. There has, however, been little direct engagement from either direction: neither theorists of structural injustice drawing on what has already been learned about emergent phenomena, nor analysts of invisible hands and spontaneous orders grappling with the challenging implication of Young’s work that injustice might itself be an emergent phenomenon, irreducible to violations of the rules of just conduct. Intellectual gains from trade have perhaps not been realized because of the different ideological orientations at work: those thinking about structural injustice from a market-critical perspective might be predisposed to doubt the construct of the “invisible hand” of the market altogether, while those beginning from a market-sympathetic position might hear “structural injustice” as nothing but the kind of “social justice” claim Hayek dismissed decades ago.

I aim to begin to bridge that gap, and to suggest the gains from trade that might be possible. Adam Smith taught that we are, in many cases, led to promote an end which is no part of our intention. That end may be an unjust one, and indeed Smith’s corpus includes arguments to that effect. Explanations of emergent phenomena and diagnoses of unjust structures have the potential to be complementary, to the benefit of both.

I argue that structural injustice as understood by Young and her followers is market-like, but is not merely market injustice; it is not simply a reversal of the normative signs on a traditional invisible hand account of exchange relations. I suggest, first, that some standard and unavoidable features of market processes, including even comparative advantage itself, are part of the social processes through which unjust social structures can emerge; second, that this is not equivalent to or reliant on any general claim about the supposed injustice of markets as such; and third, that many of the processes through which injustice might emerge are not market processes, even if they have an invisible-hand shape. The interaction of many persons’ individual actions may generate emergent social norms, or political and legal outcomes, not only economic ones, and all of these may raise questions of injustice.

► This event is in-person. Join at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200).

Jacob Levy

Political Science
McGill University

Mon, Oct 7, 2024
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin