Injustice and Structural Wrong: Reply to Sankaran & Monaghan, and Collins

This paper defends my challenge to the idea of purely structural wrong—the influential idea that social structures can be wrong independently of individual wrongdoing. Responding to criticisms from Kirun Sankaran & Jake Monaghan, and Stephanie Collins, I maintain my position against their charges of presupposing or concluding with the "deontic view" that only agents can commit wrongs. I then explain why I think Collins’s positive account of how there might be structurally targeted grievance attitudes such as resentment is not successful. She suggests that grievance attitudes can target social structures while their expression is properly directed at individual role-occupants. This proposal fails to explain how those attitudes that she, as is standard and sensible, takes to respond to “slights” by social structure, can be warranted when directed at structures that, as she agrees, lack agency and attitudes of their own.