Explaining Injustice: Causation through a Remedial Lens

Abstract

When devising a plan of remedial action to address an ongoing injustice, it is desirable to possess an understanding of the key contributing factors and mechanisms that produce and sustain it. This is the domain of etiology of injustice. Etiology of injustice involves practices of causal selection that give explanatory priority to the operative causation of the injustice at issue. Operative causation refers to those processes and conditions that might be changed for the injustice to cease and to be sufficiently prevented in the future. This article uses causal selection criteria to theorize the ways in which a remedial orientation toward the explanandum of injustice determines the parameters of explanatory relevance.