This dissertation presents structural competency as a response to three interrelated problems. First, ethics education is at a crisis of relevance, with widespread complaints among educators that students do not regard ethics as important. Second, ethics does not take oppression to be theoretically significant, and only rarely addresses major movements like Black Lives Matter or #MeToo as isolated case studies. Third, a reactionary conservative campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives is gaining momentum, especially at academic institutions. As a theoretical and pedagogical model, structural competency holds that addressing structural oppression is necessary for responsible professional practice. As such, it should be treated as a required competency in professional training. While mirroring cultural competency in many ways, the shift from culture to structures as the focus of the competency makes it much more effective in discussing systemic oppression. Structural competency solves the first problem of relevance by remedying the deficiency of ignoring oppression in the second. In centering structural oppression as a necessary topic for professional ethics, structural competency takes up moral problems that many experience as pressing questions of right and wrong but have long been excluded from ethics. Simultaneously, structural competency provides a strategic response for the attacks on DEI by repositioning attention to oppression as a necessary component of professional preparation. Chapter One surveys ethics education literature to make the case that professional ethics education is both facing a crisis of relevance and failing to address structural oppression. Chapter Two identifies necessary features for a working understanding of structural oppression as intersectionality, starting from lived experiences, the centrality of race and colonialism, structures as adaptive and dynamic, and a complex understanding of agency. The importance of these features is illustrated positively in women of color feminist accounts of structural oppression from Patricia Hill Collins and Elena Ruíz and negatively in accounts that fall into the trappings of white feminism from Nancy Hartsock, Iris Marion Young, and Miranda Fricker. On the way to articulating a view of structurally sensitive professional responsibility, Chapter Three examines the subject of moral responsibility, searching for an account that can explain responsibilities in relation to structural oppression. A relational understanding of responsibility is needed because successfully accounting for structural oppression requires acknowledging relationships as a legitimate source of moral requirements. Major accounts of moral responsibility, including rights and duties, blameworthiness, liability, and Young’s social connection model, ultimately discount relationships as a source of moral requirements. Instead, they rely on the Kantian premise that the self-legislating subject is the only legitimate source of moral requirements, because imposition of requirements from an external source violates individual autonomy. Chapter Four presents the structural competency model as it is situated in the health care ethics literature before developing a generalized adaptation that can be applied to a variety of fields. Chapter Five offers guidelines for incorporating structural competency into ethics courses and professional degree programs and analyzes how structural competency can function to sidestep many of the current attacks on DEI. Ultimately, this project approaches ethics education from the starting point of regarding structural oppression as theoretically significant and offers resources for making the changes that this approach demands.
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