The ethics of the international monetary system (IMS) can be framed either as a case of background injustice or of structural injustice. Both ideas suggest that due to the background conditions, the interaction of agents, in a context of no rules, can lead to domination and unfairness. Moreover, both ideas emphasise the need to create regulation, or a structure, that prevents domination and unfairness. This article asks how (if at all) do monetary regimes, or each of the three scenarios that stem from the Mundell-Fleming trilemma, raise domination and unfairness. This article identifies domination and unfairness in both regimes with open capital markets: the one with floating exchange rates and the one with fixed exchange rates. Moreover, it offers a principle of non-domination, according to which institutions of the IMS ought to guarantee effective sovereignty of participant states or offer an equal distribution of this value when securing full effective sovereignty for all is not possible. For the last regime, of closed capital markets, this article identifies unfairness but no domination. By identifying domination and unfairness in each regime, this article proposes policies and regulation, or a structure, to prevent and mitigate these issues.

The transition toward addressing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses serious justice challenges. The just transition framework—originally developed within the U.S. labor movement to safeguard workers’ interests during shifts toward sustainable economies—has been proposed as a valuable framework for guiding the AMR transition. In the AMR context, similar conflicts of interests arise—such as those between farmers’ interest in maintaining routine antimicrobial use and the public interest in preserving their long-term effectiveness. This brief proposes enhancing the just transition framework by incorporating elements of Transitional Justice. Transitional justice has emerged as a practice aimed at addressing past political tragedies and building a more equitable future. While traditionally applied in post-conflict settings—such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa—transitional justice offers valuable tools for navigating conflicts rooted in past injustices and long-term uncertainty. One circumstance that makes transitional justice necessary in the context of AMR is the conflict between opposing views on the role the past should play in planning the transition. In this brief, we highlight key research gaps that the sciences, social sciences, and humanities should prioritize in order to better identify the conflicts and trade-offs that an AMR transition informed by a transitional justice framework must address.

After World War II, many countries, including Nigeria, embraced Keynesian “welfarist” policies to stimulate economic growth and enhance the well-being of their citizens. However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a global economic crisis prompted a shift towards neoliberalism, leading to the commodification of social institutions and the implementation of policies such as privatization, trade liberalization and deregulation in Nigeria. This shift had a significant impact on Nigeria’s socio-legal economy, particularly in terms of property rights in company ownership. The article raises concerns about the structural injustice and growing inequality resulting from these neoliberal policies. It advocates for a legal framework that addresses these issues and proposes reconceptualizing private property rights in company ownership in Nigeria. This proposed framework aims to counter the dominance and power of property-owning elites and mitigate the structural injustice induced by neoliberal policies in Nigeria.

Standard conceptions of discrimination cannot account for all that is morally wrong about discrimination, as they cannot explain how individual acts of discrimination wrong not only their direct target but also all members of the targeted social group. In response to this lacuna, I develop a comprehensive account according to which discrimination consists of two interdependent wrongs: to discriminate against B, A must, first, treat B worse than C in a way that is grave enough to make this differential treatment morally wrong; and second, A must do so in a way that is disrespectful to B and to the social group B is perceived to belong to.

The past five years have seen a dramatic increase in scholars working to supplement or challenge accounts of structural injustice. Almost without exception, scholars in this area assume that the move from personal responsibility to political or public responsibility will represent a net gain in justice, at least in modern liberal regimes. In this essay, I challenge this assumption and introduce the concept of “structural hobbling” as a parallel cause of injustice, but one whose origins derive from neutral state activities rather than from intentional bad faith or diffuse private action (as in structural injustice). Using health-care regulations as a lens, I offer two narratives of individuals navigating health-care regulations that demonstrate how seemingly neutral regulatory decisions create regressive hobbling effects. Structural hobbling challenges structural-injustice theorists to take more seriously the complex and often subtle ways in which apparently benevolent state activity can create downstream injustice, while adding complexity to existing narratives around public responsibility and what it demands.

This essay defends a new account of wrongful benefiting based on the principle of fair play. In particular, I argue that certain structurally-conferred group-based benefits or privileges can ground obligations on the part of innocent beneficiaries to relinquish specific gains for purposes of redistribution regardless of whether their receipt is sourced in wrongdoing or involves the imposition of harm upon relevant others. I call this approach to fair play reasoning externalist insofar as it turns on a novel conception of free-riding that eschews necessary appeal to beneficiaries’ mental states or volition. After presenting an empirical example to help illustrate the sort of benefiting at issue and distinguishing my account from arguments rooted in the notion of structural injustice, I defend it via what I call the extension argument, respond to two salient objections, and close by suggesting its potential political utility in the American context specifically.

Critics of medical aid in dying (MAID) often argue that it is impermissible because background social conditions are insufficiently good for some persons who would utilize it. I provide a critical evaluation of this view. I suggest that receiving MAID is a sort of “hard choice,” in that death is prima facie bad for the individual and only promotes that person’s interests in special circumstances. Those raising this objection to MAID are, I argue, concerned primarily about the effects of injustice on hard choices. I show, however, that MAID and other hard choices are not always invalidated by injustice and that what matters is whether the injustice can be remediated given certain constraints. Injustice invalidates a hard choice when it can, reasonably, be remedied in a way that makes a person’s life go better. I consider the implications of this view for law and policy regarding MAID.

The intrusive state has long viewed women as fetal containers. The Dobbs decision goes further, essentially causing women to vanish when fetuses are abstracted from their relationships to pregnant persons. The ways in which women are first controlled and then made invisible are clearly connected with the move from obedience to omission that has historically affected black Americans. When personal decisionmaking and participation in democracy are regarded as threats, those threatened restrict decisional freedom and political power, deepening structural injustices relating to sex, race, and poverty. Fear of Dobbs has health effects on conditions unrelated to pregnancy and connects with erasures of human value that are not health-related. We reaffirm solidarity as a countering influence. Taking account of the richly relational context in which issues like abortion and political representation arise should lead to better, more meaningful policies, making so many people impossible to unsee.

It is becoming more common that the decision-makers in private and public institutions are predictive algorithmic systems, not humans. This article argues that relying on algorithmic systems is procedurally unjust in contexts involving background conditions of structural injustice. Under such nonideal conditions, algorithmic systems, if left to their own devices, cannot meet a necessary condition of procedural justice, because they fail to provide a sufficiently nuanced model of which cases count as relevantly similar. Resolving this problem requires deliberative capacities uniquely available to human agents. After exploring the limitations of existing formal algorithmic fairness strategies, the article argues that procedural justice requires that human agents relying wholly or in part on algorithmic systems proceed with caution: by avoiding doxastic negligence about algorithmic outputs, by exercising deliberative capacities when making similarity judgments, and by suspending belief and gathering additional information in light of higher-order uncertainty.

Stories and representations of suffering are frequently central to attempts to arouse our emotions and initiate political action. Yet, the evocation of emotion and, in particular, empathy, remains politically ambivalent. It does not necessarily lead to the acknowledgement of political responsibility or to actions to address the historically-constituted roots of contemporary structural injustices. Moving beyond the legal, moral, and institutional boundaries of political responsibility, this article argues for greater recognition of its affective dimensions. In particular, it differentiates between a sentimental politics and testimonial empathy to better understand the affective dynamics of political responsibility. While the former finds close company with pity and a lack of acknowledged political responsibility, the latter offers an ethical–political orientation towards radical reflexivity and social transformation, situating experiences of injustice within wider networks of power, privilege, and agency. Drawing on the work of feminist, cultural, and social theorists, the article offers a critical conceptualisation of testimonial empathy and its limits. The article illustrates the insights offered by re-thinking political responsibility in terms of testimonial empathy through a close reading of a historical account of structural injustice – slavery in the United States – as written in Harriet A. Jacobs’ 1861 slave narrative.

The responsibility of the food and beverage industry for noncommunicable diseases is a controversial topic. Public health scholars identify the food and beverage industry as one of the main contributors to the rise of these diseases. We argue that aside from moral duties like not doing harm and respecting consumer autonomy, the food industry also has a responsibility for addressing the structural injustices involved in food-related health problems. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, this article first shows how food-related public health problems can be understood as structural injustices. Second, it makes clear how the industry is sustaining these health injustices, and that due to this connection, corporate actors share responsibility for addressing food-related health problems. Finally, three criteria (capacity, benefit, and vulnerability) are discussed as grounds for attributing responsibility, allowing for further specification on what taking responsibility for food-related health problems can entail in corporate practice.

Temporary labor migration (TLM) constitutes a significant trend of migration movements within the European Union, especially after the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargements. However, compared to other forms of TLM, intra-EU TLM has received scant attention from normative theorists. By drawing on Iris Marion Young's conception of structural injustice, this article analyzes the injustice of TLM within the EU. It argues that purely rights-based approaches are deficient and that a structural injustice approach is needed. The latter sheds light on the formal and informal processes that place EU temporary migrants in a condition of vulnerability and reveals the multiple individual and collective agents participating in such processes. Moreover, such an approach offers important insights into the agency of migrants by showing how they themselves reinforce structural processes that put not only (i) individual temporary migrants but also (ii) similarly positioned migrants and (iii) other members of the sending and receiving countries in a vulnerable position. A structural injustice approach does not deny that intra-EU temporary labor migrants should enjoy the rights and entitlements that they currently have in the host country as European citizens. Nor does it dispute that reducing the vulnerability of temporary migrants may require “special rights” accommodating the specific nature of their life plans. Instead, though such rights may be necessary, a structural injustice approach demonstrates how they are insufficient to tackle the injustice of intra-EU TLM and other forms of temporary labor migration more broadly.