Iris Marion Young was one of the most important, insightful, and innovative political theorists of her generation. Responsibility for Justice presents a nearly completed manuscript that Young had been revising just before her untimely death in 2006. It is her final contribution to political theory. Despite inevitable loose ends and rough edges, it is an excellent book; it is penetrating and provocative, and it contains many important contributions to discussions of structural injustice and political responsibility. The intellectual virtues for which Young was known are fully on display here. She shows impressive breadth in bridging Anglo-American and continental traditions of theorizing, with discussions ranging from Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. She also resists overreliance on theoretical abstraction, grounding her arguments in empirical analyses and policy discussions on such issues as poverty, international labor conditions, and reparations for slavery.
The main question of this book is how to conceptualize responsibility for specifically structural injustices, that is, harms wrought not by particular perpetrators against particular victims, but rather by large-scale and anonymous social processes to which many institutions and individuals contribute. Young's examples include vulnerability to homelessness and goods produced by sweatshop labor. Naming these wrongs injustices “entails the claim that something should be done to rectify [them]” (p. 95). We need an appropriate conception of responsibility, she argues, in order to determine what this something is and who should be doing it.
Young begins with an incisive discussion of the rhetoric of “personal responsibility” in such writers as Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead, which has ushered in a “seismic shift” (p. 3) in the way Americans think about poverty. This shift makes her argument partly a project of reclamation; she aims to rehabilitate structural models for understanding poverty and other injustices. To this end, she unpacks the idea of “social-structural processes” as the subject of justice and contributes to debates about Rawls's category of the “basic structure.” She agrees with critics like G. A. Cohen and Liam Murphy that Rawls's category is ambiguous and shifting and fails to account for individual responsibilities; however, she does not follow these critics in reinterpreting justice as wholly a matter of individual duties. According to Young, the problem with Rawls's view is not that he adopts a structural perspective but that he limits it to a subset of “basic” institutions. The problems Cohen and Murphy raise can be addressed, she argues, through a more comprehensive conception of the structural domain of justice.
The book's most important theoretical contribution is its new account of responsible agency. Young sets up her view with an exegesis of Arendt's contrasts between guilt and responsibility in Eichmann and Jerusalem (1963) and elsewhere. Her analysis makes an original contribution to studies of Arendt while advancing her conceptual argument. Young targets Arendt's claim that responsibility arises simply from belonging to a particular nation. She shows that Arendt's examples of responsibility in Eichmann rely on actions and connections to social processes; furthermore, this is more plausible than treating national membership as the basis of responsibility, which Young calls a “mystification” (p. 79). Using her revisions of Arendt's guilt/responsibility distinction as a springboard, Young lays out her own conception through a series of contrasts with a “standard” framework for responsibility derived from legal reasoning, which she calls the “liability model.” According to Young, the liability model looks for “particular agents whose actions can be shown to be causally connected to the circumstances for which responsibility is sought” (p. 97).
The author's alternative, the “social connection model,” conceives of responsibility not in terms of liability for specific actions but, rather, in terms of participation in and connection to large-scale social-structural processes. Unlike liability, responsibility for social connection emphasizes ongoing processes rather than completed actions and is, therefore, primarily forward looking. Furthermore, social connection generates shared responsibilities that each of us has as individuals but can discharge only through collective action. Young is careful to say, moreover, that the liability model is useful and appropriate in many contexts, and that she intends the social connection model as a supplement for better illuminating structural injustices. She also recommends the social connection model on pragmatic grounds, in that it avoids the ressentiment and defensiveness often involved in the rhetoric of blame. Here, she contributes to analyses of resentment and blame by William Connolly, Wendy Brown, and Bonnie Honig, and adapts Jacques Derrida's account of friendship to model an alternative rhetoric (pp. 113–22). Young illustrates the usefulness of this conception of responsibility by applications to antisweatshop movements and reparations for slavery.
This is a difficult book to criticize—Young intended to continue working on it and might have preempted many concerns. Still, as Martha Nussbaum notes in her foreword, “the best way to honor Iris's daring and provocative contribution is to wrestle with it” (p. xi). In that spirit, I offer a few of my own questions. First, in her concern to distance herself from the language of blame, Young argues that those who fail to take up their responsibilities should not be blamed. But she does not think that they should not be “criticized” (p. 144). This is an important distinction, but it is left largely unexplained. How do we criticize for past wrongs without blaming, and even if this is possible, how can we be sure it avoids the psychological and rhetorical weaknesses she attributes to blame? Given the importance of such criticism in rhetorical strategies for motivating social change, the distinction needs elaboration.
Second, I think Young's effort to identify justice, as a moral concept, with structure ought to be resisted. It is an implausible truncation of the concept of justice, and it seems to present problems for her own political goals. In her discussion of Rawls, Cohen, and Murphy, she writes that “[w]e ought to reserve the concept of justice and injustice for more systematic wrongs” (p. 71). This definition is offered in contrast to Cohen and Murphy's focus on individual duties of justice. We may note first that justice is a broad and multifaceted concept, encompassing proportionate retribution and honest interpersonal dealings, as well as nondiscriminatory structural patterns. But even limiting ourselves to the distributive aspects of justice, Young's focus on structure seems to drown out individual duties and virtues that might be mobilized to help correct structural injustices. In this respect, her structuralism is partly at cross-purposes with her appeal for responsibility; the conceptual disconnect between structure and individual would seem to make it difficult to motivate responsibility (why should I be responsible?). Given her desire to call individuals to take responsibility for structural problems, it is odd that she is not more sympathetic to Cohen and Murphy's efforts to bridge this gap.
Responsibility for Justice is a book for the trenches. Its concerns are at least as strategic as they are scholarly: Young proposes a framework for motivating action on some of our most serious and intractable problems, such as global poverty, labor injustice, and racial inequalities. We might also use this framework to address many more problems than she explicitly discusses, such as rapidly accelerating climate change. In this sense, the book is a final gift, and a worthy addition to her legacy.
