As part of the CRÉ’s Midis de l’éthique lecture series, our visiting researcher Elena Popa (University of Seville, Spain) will present her work entitled “When Injustice Makes No Difference: Causality in Relational Health Justice,” co-authored with Jay Zameska.

The presentation will be delivered in English, but the discussion that follows may take place in either French or English.

To join the event via Zoom, click here (Meeting ID: 892 5294 0670; Passcode: 9Me2EW).

Abstract

Relational theories of health justice often hold that a health inequality is more unjust, and should receive greater priority, when it is caused by an unjust social relation. We argue that this claim cannot be applied without specifying what “caused by” means. Using a case of causal preemption, we show that a simple counterfactual account can treat otherwise identical health inequalities differently merely because one case contains a backup cause. We suggest that this is implausible since the same injustice and same inequality are present in both cases. We further analyze the case of causation by omission. Certain accounts of causation as production are unable to incorporate omissions as causal relata, thus not capturing as causal the connections between lack of access to resources or services and health outcomes. We argue that this shows that relational theories of health justice must clarify their causal assumptions, since different accounts of causation can change which inequalities count as unjust and how they should be prioritized.