Abstract

Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in widespread injustice through our everyday actions, which I call ‘structural wrongs’. To do justice to these facts, I argue that we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. While summative criticism functions to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark, formative criticism aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way. I show that the negative sanctions associated with summative responses are only justifiably imposed under certain conditions when persons exercise their agency wrongly — conditions that do not always hold for structural wrongs. Yet even in such cases we can still use formative responses, which are warranted whenever agents fall short of moral ideals. Expanding our repertoire of moral criticism to include both summative and formative responses enables us to better appreciate both the powers and limitations of our agency, and the complexity of moral life.

中文翻译：

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道德批评和结构性不公正

摘要

道德能动性是有限的、不完善的，并且在结构上受到限制。这在我们通过日常行为不知不觉地参与到广泛的不公正中的许多方式中是显而易见的，我称之为“结构性错误”。为了公正对待这些事实，我认为我们应该区分总结性和形成性道德批评。虽然总结性批评的功能是最终评估代理相对于某个基准的表现，但形成性批评的目的只是为了以持续的方式提高表现。我表明，只有在人们错误地行使他们的代理权时，在某些条件下才合理地施加与总结性反应相关的负面制裁——这些条件并不总是适用于结构性错误。然而，即使在这种情况下，我们仍然可以使用形成性回应，当代理人达不到道德理想时，这是有保证的。将我们的道德批评范围扩大到包括总结性和形成性反应，使我们能够更好地理解我们机构的力量和局限性，以及道德生活的复杂性。