“Social relations in social justice: interactional or structural?”

Social justice has something important to do with ‘social relations’. This is the upshot of much recent work, both in political philosophy/theory (including explicitly as relational egalitarianism), and in wider applications. But what is a ‘social relation’ in the sense that is of interest to normative political thought? And what is the nature of our evaluative and prescriptive concern with social relations? I argue that we can identify two different tendencies within relational thinking about justice and equality. One of these (‘interactional’) concerns itself primarily with the quality of and principles embodied by social and political interpersonal interactions. The other (‘structural’) concerns itself with evaluation of more macroscopic and durable relations between social groups or positions. These two tendencies will sometimes pull normative judgement in divergent directions. I illustrate this by re-examining the debate among egalitarians over private fee-paying schools, where an excessively ‘interactional’ conception of relations leads to misguided defences of a policy that egalitarians have far stronger reasons to oppose.