LSE Philosophy Fellow Nikhil Venkatesh has published his new paper “Inefficacy, Pre-emption and Structural Injustice” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

Many pressing problems are of the following kind: some collection of actions of multiple people will produce some morally significant outcome (good or bad), but each individual action in the collection seems to make no difference to the outcome. These problems pose theoretical problems (especially for act-consequentialism), and practical problems for agents trying to figure out what they ought to do. Much recent literature on such problems has focused on whether it is possible for each action in such a collection to make such a tiny impact on the world that it makes no expected difference to the outcomes with which we’re concerned.

Link to the paper.