The first meeting of the Ethics Table brown bag lunch will take place next Wednesday, Sept. 10, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Cleveland Room in Thwing Center.
The topic will be being a democratic citizen in the aftermath of Ferguson.
Coffee and light dessert will be served. Bring your own lunch and drink.
A few concepts may help us discuss this topic:
Structural injustice: one claim made by those who link the Brown killing to historical racism is that the killing brings into the fore the structural injustice of the U.S., and this concept is typically overlooked by those who want to make the issue a simple matter of an individual officer and the legality of what he did. A good primer on structural injustice can be found here.
Political responsibility and structural injustice: The late Iris Marion Young wrote a posthumous book called “Responsibility for Justice” in which she asks what a citizen ought to do in structural injustice. Her answer was to create a concept of political responsibility that is different than responsibility as liability. I choose to call her view responsibility as civic transformation. You can read a short statement of her view here.