Cognitive Entanglement and Individual Responsibility for Structural Injustice

Recent years’ political debates have raised questions regarding how to understand individuals’ responsibilities for repairing unjust structures they may perpetuate, but do not directly cause. Though Iris Marion Young’s conceptualization of structural injustice has become widespread in political theory, disagreements persist due to divergent and narrow understandings of intentionality. Some deny that individuals intentionally reinforce unjust structures, while others attempt to trace causality sufficiently finely to attribute such responsibility. This paper offers a novel cognitive entanglement model to move forward these debates, drawing on insights from neo-pragmatism and enactivist philosophy of mind. This model demonstrates how, to the degree that individuals cognitively entangle themselves with unjust structures, offloading cognitive responsibilities to them and uncritically accepting their logics, we can attribute extended intentionality and, along with it, an attenuated form of moral responsibility to inform differential obligations in the context of collective action. This framework explains how individuals relate to unjust structures, while also clarifying methods for combatting structural injustice through cognitive disentanglement—regaining critical perspective and cognitive distance from unjust institutions. I illustrate this framework’s utility via the complex case of the United Kingdom’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the structural injustice it perpetuated. After considering relevant mitigating circumstances, this model can help move forward tendentious political debates, including over individual responsibilities to pay reparations.