Kalendarz - Interdyscyplinarne Centrum Etyki (INCET)
BIOUNCERTAINTY - ERC Starting Grant no. 805498
listopada 2025
20251127
27 listopada 2025 – Giulio Fornaroli – Privilege, Structural Wrongs, and Interpersonal Duties
Data:
27.11.2025
Czas rozpoczęcia:
17:30
Miejsce:
Grodzka 52
Organizator:
Interdyscyplinarne Centrum Etyki
Witryna internetowa wydarzenia:
https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/31600058216603?p=YW5lZfy03SykevKvNc
Interdyscyplinarne Centrum Etyki UJ (INCET) zaprasza na kolejne otwarte seminarium badawcze! Referat "Privilege, Structural Wrongs, and Interpersonal Duties" wygłosi Giulio Fornaroli. Spotkanie odbędzie się 27 listopada o godzinie 17:30 w sali 25 przy ul. Grodzkiej 52 oraz za pośrednictwem platformy MS Teams.
Abstrakt
Although public discourse often assumes that privilege imposes moral demands on the privileged, philosophical work has not offered a systematic examination of this assumption. In this paper, I begin by developing a three-part account of privilege as involving access to goods or opportunities that enable secure functioning in key domains of life, a distribution skewed in favor of some individuals, and a lack of justification for that distribution. On this basis, I ask whether privilege constitutes an interpersonal wrong that could ground corrective duties. I argue that, for privilege in general, this inference does not hold. Benefiting innocently from unfairness does not amount to wronging specific others and therefore does not generate the historical accountability required for directed corrective obligations or for the fittingness of blame, resentment, or guilt. Treating privilege solely as a distributive injustice also fails to generate specific interpersonal duties in contexts where no institution assigns entitlements or obligations.
I then turn to a narrower class of cases: extreme economic privilege. Here, I claim that retaining or wasting excess wealth, rather than deploying it for social benefit, expresses disregard for those who lack sufficient resources and for those who meet their needs only through demanding trade-offs. This constitutes a genuine interpersonal wrong. Yet even here, the corresponding corrective duties are difficult to specify. Moreover, the argument cannot be extended to non-economic forms of privilege. Focusing on epistemic privilege specifically, I show that beneficiaries of privilege are at least sometimes morally entitled to retain their benefit.
I conclude that privilege rarely gives rise to interpersonal obligations. Instead, a normative response to privilege is probably to be found in institutional obligations alone.