Hochan "Sonny" Kim

This paper identifies a theoretically neglected reason why cultural appropriation can be wrong and examines how this wrong is connected to a broader concern about cultural colonialism. Cultural appropriation is wrong if it perpetuates the lack of social recognition of certain groups, namely those that were colonized or otherwise oppressed, as cultural contributors despite their participatory role in the development of valuable cultural objects. This pernicious effect occurs through the phenomenon of detachment: as cultural objects developed among these groups gain broader social uptake, these objects are appropriated in ways that obscure, denigrate, or crowd out the participatory role of the oppressed groups responsible for their development. This analysis sheds light on several other important theoretical issues, including why cultural appropriation is more contentious in certain social contexts, whether and how the issue of authenticity bears on the wrong of cultural appropriation, and what forms of cultural engagement avoid wrongful appropriation.

This chapter argues that unfreedom and inequality amount to distinct concerns about social structures and explains why this distinction matters for theorizing structural injustice and oppression. On this account, structural injustice comes in two varieties. One is freedom-based, drawing on the capabilities approach: how social structures harmfully constrain members of a social group, depriving them of the means to develop and exercise central capabilities. The other is equality-based, drawing on relational egalitarianism: how social structures subordinate a social group to others in hierarchies of power, standing, and esteem. Disentangling these concerns reveals that social structures produce multiple kinds of injustice that do not necessarily travel together. Some groups experience unfreedom without being subordinated to others; indeed, their unfreedom is intertwined with their dominant position over others. Beyond enriching the concept of structural injustice, this analysis uncovers theoretical and political reasons to conceptualize oppression in terms of inequality rather than unfreedom.

This paper proposes a novel view in the historical injustice debate: Radical Reparations. Following a recent defense of reparations, Radical Reparations appeals to the Beneficiary Pays Principle to justify the assignment and distribution of reparative obligations for historical injustice among present-day agents. However, drawing on some considerations from the structural injustice literature, it argues that the relevant kind of benefits that demand redress are what I call structural benefits: the benefits of occupying powerful and privileged positions within contemporary social structures, structures that are the legacies of major historical injustices like slavery and colonialism. Radical Reparations thus assigns present-day structural beneficiaries reparative obligations to support and enact various structural reforms to the social structures that produce unjust outcomes for historically marginalized groups today. This view avoids some of the problems with existing approaches to historical injustice in the philosophical literature and is better aligned with the reparations programs of recent social movements for racial and global justice.

In this paper, I offer a novel account of entrapment. This account suggests that the wrongness of pursuing punishment in cases of entrapment consists of two distinct components, one concerning the culpability of the entrapped defendant and the other concerning the legitimacy of the entrapping state to prosecute crimes that it has effectively created. Distinguishing these two components of entrapment, I explain, helps to clarify the moral issues at stake and to resolve some confusions and debates in existing legal analyses of entrapment.