9.12.2025 Online
Structural Explanation, Levels of Analysis, and System Dynamics
Time: 9 December 2025
Venue: Online
The network Bioethics and Structural Injustice is delighted to host Sally Haslanger (MIT) for a public online lecture on “Structural Explanation, Levels of Analysis, and System Dynamics” on 9 December 2025, 19:00–20:30 CET. Bioethics is increasingly concerned with the influence of structural forms of injustice on health and their ethical implications, especially within public health ethics. However, it is often unclear what “structural” means and what kinds of “structures” are relevant for bioethical considerations. Sally Haslanger’s lecture will address this question and provide an account of structural explanation that can be used within bioethical debates.
“Societies are complex dynamic systems and, as a result, are self-organizing – without central authorities – due to their internal structure. Broad social systems are composed of co-integrated sub-systems, such as political and economic systems, but also transportation systems, health care systems, and education systems. To explain how such systems emerge, change, interact, and collapse, we should attend (a) to different levels of analysis (micro, meso, and macro) and (b) intersecting dynamics. In this talk, Sally Haslanger will consider care work as a case study where these different analytical factors matter for explanation.”
Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at MIT. She also teaches in MIT D-Lab, a hands-on program using participatory design to create inclusive, accessible, and sustainable solutions to global poverty challenges. Broadly speaking, her work links issues of social justice concerning gender, race, class (and other social categories) with contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language.
Please register here: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/8CJ9t6vDgW