1 Injustice and Structural Wrong: Reply to Sankaran & Monaghan, and Collins David Estlund, Brown University October 21, 2025 Forthcoming in Ethics, April 2026 6,900 words Final edits to accepted version, pre-copyediting I welcome the chance to reply to two critical pieces about my recent article, “What’s Unjust About Structural Injustice?” 1 which presses a challenge for the view that social structures themselves can be wrong irrespective of wrong by any agents. I hope to show that the argument in that piece does not presuppose that only conduct by agents can be wrong, and also that neither piece provides a satisfactory answer to the challenge: what kind of wrongness is meant if it is not wrong committed by any agent? First it will be helpful to set the stage with a brief sketch of my article’s line of argument, emphasizing a few points that will come up. I grant for purposes of argument that social structures themselves can be bad in themselves much as natural disasters can be bad, and can be the ground of duties of avoidance, prevention, and remedy. The question is whether they can be wrong. If a certain view about structural injustice does not hold that it is wrong, I say nothing against it. But if, as in much of the central philosophical literature, structural injustice is said or meant to be a kind of wrong and not only something bad, then we might expect it to consist in wrongs committed by agents, along with important social structural implications. For example, in one of the paradigmatic examples of structural injustice, structural racism, culprits include the individuals who wrongfully helped produce the relevant social structure, or who should have done more to prevent it, mitigate it, or do away with it. We could certainly call the structural result a wrong of structural injustice—indeed, this seems often to be what is meant in non-academic political discourse—but there the problematic structure is the fault of some agents. That model would therefore fail to reach some cases that motivate the idea of purely structural wrong, namely, conditions that seem to many people to be wrongs of structural injustice in some way even if they don’t essentially involve or depend on any such wrongs by agents. Examples might be some kinds of hierarchy, or perhaps a regional disparity, or other structural condition that emerges from broad historical causes and continues for some time 1 “What’s Unjust about Structural Injustice?” Ethics 134 (2024) (3):333-359