To what extent should we focus on implicit bias in order to eradicate persistent social injustice?Structural prioritizers argue that we should focus less on individual minds than on unjust social structures, while equal prioritizers think that both are equally important. This article introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend the equal priority view. The transactive memory framework helps us see how structure can emerge from individual interactions as an irreducibly social product. If this is right, then debiasing interventions are structural interventions. One upshot is that the utility of the individual versus structural distinction is not apparent for the purposes of intervention. 1.Recent work in this literature, such as Machery et al. (2010), Madva (2016 and Davidson and Kelly (2018), has sought to undermine the utility of this distinction by highlighting the explanatory power of psychologistic explanations. Call this position equal prioritism. In this vein, this paper introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend a t3 focus on individual minds, but without relinquishing the importance of structures in shaping those minds. According to the transactive memory framework, a collective memory product can emerge from the interactions between individuals. This framework helps us see structure and individuals as two components of a dynamical system, guiding us to diagnose more effective sites of intervention. Individual minds are not merely shaped by structures, but actively shape structures. The implication is that implicit bias interventions are not merely necessary for social justice, but equally important as structural interventions.It is important to note that this strategy departs from the state-based conception of the individualist-structuralist debate. The debate is currently founded on a conceptual distinction between minds and structures. On this conception, the question is: Are minds or structures the main ongoing cause of the inequality in question? As Davidson and Kelly ( 2018) have argued, this conceptual distinction is not a clean ontological one, because some informal "soft structures", such as norms, are internalized. My account is motivated by this ontological overlap to shift the debate toward thinking about the processes that create and sustain minds and structure. In other words, the focus is on the causal connection between the two rather than the causal weight of each element, considered in isolation, in producing injustice. By reframing the individualist-structuralist debate to emphasize the dynamic processes by which structures and biased minds mutually sustain themselves, we can see that our policy options do not take the form of either-structural-or-individualistic choices. Individualistic interventions can have structural effects, and vice versa. I proceed as follows. In Section 2, I situate structural prioritism and equal prioritism within the conceptual landscape of the individualism-structuralism debate. I highlight the connecti...

Social problems such as racism, sexism, and inequality are often cited as structural rather than individual in nature. What does it mean to invoke a social structural explanation, and how do such explanations relate to individualistic ones? This article explores recent philosophical debates concerning the nature and usages of social structural explanation. I distinguish between two central kinds of social structural explanation: those that are autonomous from psychology, and those that are not. This distinction will help clarify the explanatory power that each type of SSE has, points of convergence with methodological traditions such as critical theory and rational choice theory, and the difficulties that each type of SSE faces.

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It is commonly accepted that what we ought to do collectively does not imply anything about what each of us ought to do individually. According to this line of reasoning, if cooperating will make no difference to an outcome, then you are not morally required to do it. And if cooperating will be personally costly to you as well, this is an even stronger reason to not do it. However, this reasoning results in a self-defeating, yet entirely predictable outcome. If everyone is rational, they will not cooperate, resulting in an aggregate outcome that is devastating for everyone. This dismal analysis explains why climate change and other collective action problems are so difficult to ameliorate. The goal of this paper is to provide a different, exploratory framework for thinking about individual reasons for action in collective action problems. I argue that the concept of commitment gives us a new perspective on collective action problems. Once we take the structure of commitment into account, this activates requirements of diachronic rationality that give individuals instrumental reasons to cooperate in collective action problems.

Social connections between different types of people are necessary for individuals to fairly access resources and opportunities. Yet we tend to associate homophilously, with people who are more similar to us than different. Our associational choices therefore make it difficult for some groups to access a fair share of resources and opportunities; associational choices are thus a prima facie candidate for policy intervention. But as it commonly understood, freedom of association is negative: it enacts a normative bulwark against interventions on our associational choices, as it guarantees the presumptive right to exclude and a right against interference from the state on our associational choices. Thus there is a tension between freedom of association and the demands of justice -this is the problem of sorting. This paper argues that the commonly accepted negative conception of freedom of association is insufficient, and offers an ecological conception of freedom of association as a way to resolve the problem of sorting. On the ecological conception, certain social conditions are necessary for associational freedom.Freedom of association and justice can be jointly realized to an extent further than previously thought.