This paper proposes a novel view in the historical injustice debate: Radical Reparations. Following a recent defense of reparations, Radical Reparations appeals to the Beneficiary Pays Principle to justify the assignment and distribution of reparative obligations for historical injustice among present-day agents. However, drawing on some considerations from the structural injustice literature, it argues that the relevant kind of benefits that demand redress are what I call structural benefits: the benefits of occupying powerful and privileged positions within contemporary social structures, (...) structures that are the legacies of major historical injustices like slavery and colonialism. Radical Reparations thus assigns present-day structural beneficiaries reparative obligations to support and enact various structural reforms to the social structures that produce unjust outcomes for historically marginalized groups today. This view avoids some of the problems with existing approaches to historical injustice in the philosophical literature and is better aligned with the reparations programs of recent social movements for racial and global justice. (shrink)

Structural injustice broadly refers to objectionable outcomes produced by generally accepted social structures for members of particular social groups. But theorists of structural injustice have said relatively little about why certain outcomes are objectionable, and many theorists suggestively connect structural injustice to a worry about oppression without explaining their precise normative concerns. I provide a normative analysis of structural injustice that addresses this gap and clarifies its connection to oppression. On this view, there are two kinds of structural injustice, each (...) grounded in a distinct moral concern. One is a freedom-based concern for how social structures harmfully constrain members of a social group, depriving them of the means to develop and exercise their capacities. The other is an equality-based concern for how social structures subordinate a social group to others in hierarchies of power, standing, and esteem. By disentangling these concerns, this account shows that our social structures contain multiple kinds of injustice that do not necessarily travel together; some social groups experience unfreedom without being subordinated to others, and indeed their unfreedom is intertwined with their dominant position over subordinated groups. Furthermore, against prevailing philosophical accounts, this analysis shows that there are good reasons to understand oppression primarily as an issue of inequality rather than an issue of unfreedom. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a novel account of entrapment. This account suggests that the wrongness of pursuing punishment in cases of entrapment consists of two distinct components, one concerning the culpability of the entrapped defendant and the other concerning the legitimacy of the entrapping state to prosecute crimes that it has effectively created. Distinguishing these two components of entrapment, I explain, helps to clarify the moral issues at stake and to resolve some confusions and debates in existing legal analyses (...) of entrapment. (shrink)

This paper identifies a theoretically neglected reason why cultural appropriation can be wrong and examines how this wrong is connected to a broader concern about cultural colonialism. Cultural appropriation is wrong if it perpetuates the lack of social recognition of certain groups, namely those that were colonized or otherwise oppressed, as cultural contributors despite their participatory role in the development of valuable cultural objects. This pernicious effect occurs through the phenomenon of detachment: as cultural objects developed among these groups gain (...) broader social uptake, these objects are appropriated in ways that obscure, denigrate, or crowd out the participatory role of the oppressed groups responsible for their development. This analysis sheds light on several other important theoretical issues, including why cultural appropriation is more contentious in certain social contexts, whether and how the issue of authenticity bears on the wrong of cultural appropriation, and what forms of cultural engagement avoid wrongful appropriation. (shrink)