Neves presents ‘Reciprocity and Structural Injustice’

25-27 June, 2025. Catarina Neves presents her paper ‘Reciprocity and Structural Injustice at the The Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy, an organized by the Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society (CEPS) at the University of Minho in Braga. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

It is difficult to find anyone who has never heard about the ‘golden rule’ of reciprocity. You might have heard it from your parents, when you were told to ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’. The golden rule finds its way into our day to day, and in the realm of distributive justice, it is translated as a principle of economic reciprocity, which determines that to receive the fruits of social cooperation, able bodied people need to contribute productively. The principle has been justified by appealing to conceptions of justice as mutual advantage (Gauthier, 1986), justice as fairness (Rawls, 2001), appeals to
mutual respect (White, 2003; Lister, 2011) or because relations of equality require it (Hartley, 2014). But the aims reciprocity seems to fulfill in these accounts seem to fall short of what has been done in the name of reciprocity, including the infamous poor laws or more recently the demands of workfare that stigmatize but often also dominate the poor (Elveld, 2020, 2021). Hence, several claims have argued in favour of relaxing the principle of reciprocity in distributive justice. And while I am sympathetic to these concerns, I believe disregarding reciprocity falls short of understanding where the problem with these policies lies.

I wish to show that existing accounts of the principle of economic reciprocity fail to capture the role of the social context in shaping our reciprocal interactions, and that doing so is of consequence to the discussion. When we fail to consider individuals as socially situated, we are prevented from seeing how commitments of a reciprocal nature reproduce structural injustice. This is because, for the least advantaged members of society, obligations of reciprocity, and the institutions that enforce them, produce two wrongs: they reduce individuals’ capacity to reciprocate and they compromise individuals’ self-realization. I aim to show that these two wrongs promote structural injustice, where the latter is conceptualized as a network of social relations of reciprocity. This will hopefully be helpful in both diagnosing what is wrong, but also what we can do to do remediate it. This reading of reciprocity as a norm that promotes structural injustice makes two different contributions to the literature. The first, is a methodological claim. While sociological and anthropological work on reciprocity have largely taken its relationality into account, political philosophy has yet to consider it seriously. I thus follow the work of
people like Iris Marion Young, who highlighted the importance of seeing individuals as socially situated. The second, is a contribution to the still largely underdeveloped question of how structural injustice works (McKeown, 2021). Reciprocity offers a paradigmatic case of how norms can contribute to structurally unjust outcomes, thus illuminating the need to think carefully at social policies, and which values they are reproducing.