Iris Marion Young's last book proves a fitting capstone to her work on justice. In Responsibility for Justice, Young proposes a social-connection model of responsibility to show that everyone is responsible for changing unjust structures because their interdependent actions support such structures. Her analysis proves strong, insightful, and accessible.
Young does not look to develop a new theory of justice. Rather, she examines whether and how we ought to hold people responsible for structural injustice. She begins by examining the notion that individual persons are responsible for their own situation in life, even the needy. This doctrine of personal responsibility has swept over the United States and other liberal democracies in the last thirty years. The doctrine consists in the claim that because societies have eradicated the obstructions to economic prosperity and because the programs of the Great Society failed to lift people out of poverty, then poverty is a result of persons failing to take personal responsibility for their lives. Welfare programs have produced a class of people who feel entitled to handouts and refuse to work for their own good.
Young shows that this doctrine relies on several assumptions—a disjunctive fallacy (either structural failure or personal responsibility but not both), a belief that unjust social structures have disappeared from society, and an individualism that entails that people have no responsibility for the welfare for others. Young attacks both social-policy analysts, like Lawrence Mead and Charles Murray, and philosophers of luck-egalitarianism, especially Ronald Dworkin. Both fail to recognize that large elements of life result from structural injustice.
Structural injustice occurs “when social processes put large groups under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising [their] capacities” (52). These structures position people relative to others, result from human action, and include unintended consequences from those actions. Rather than eliminating freedom, these structures produce different options that constrain people's choices and the exercise of their capacities. Structures, rather than being parts of society, appear when society is viewed from a particular perspective, one often lost or ignored in theory and policy debate.
If injustice results from structures, then we need a theory of responsibility to account for structural injustice. Young turns to Arendt's notion of collective responsibility. Responsibility can fall on a collective by virtue of the fact that its members belong to the same nation. Reading Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in a creative way, Young plays Arendt against herself. Eichmann shows that people are responsible, not because they comprise a nation, but because their actions support unjust institutions and structures. Using Arendt's Danish example (the Danes refused to surrender Jews to the Nazis), Young also shows that collective action can be effective.
Young develops the alternative social-connection model of responsibility, which she contrasts with the liability model. The liability model “assigns responsibility to particular agents whose actions can be shown to be causally connected to the circumstances for which responsibility is sought” (97). Because of the complexity of social structures, however, the liability model does not help to assign responsibility for structural injustice. In contrast, the social connection model “says that individuals bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes” (105). The social-justice model does not look for direct causal chains. Rather than looking backwards to assign guilt and determine who owes reparations to whom, the social-connection model looks forward—it seeks to show which individuals are responsible for changing unjust structures because such structures arise through their interdependent actions. Finally, it requires politics—“public communicative engagement with others for the sake of organizing our relationships and coordinating our actions most justly” (112). Victims, because of their unique perspective on these structures, must take responsibility to explain those structural injustices and change them with others. Solidarity must be “forged and re-forged” (120).
The last three chapters of Young's book concern problem areas for the social-connection model of responsibility: international justice, avoidance of responsibility, and historically past injustices like slavery. The social-connection model of responsibility places responsibility for international justice on those who are connected through the various means of modern globalization and capitalism. One of the main impediments to accepting responsibility that Young attacks throughout the work is the reification of social structures.
Young's arguments expose the fault lines in discussions of responsibility for structural injustice. Her accessible critique of the doctrine of personal responsibility should be required reading in high schools and college classrooms. Her forward-looking-not-blame-finding philosophy models a fruitful approach to handling issues of structural injustice. Those in the Occupy movement would benefit from her analysis of the doctrine of personal responsibility and would develop a better vocabulary for engaging in the practical discussion of structural injustice. Young's analysis of the housing problem in the main part of the book lays out just how such conversations should go.
Young's discussion provides, perhaps, the best account possible in the liberal paradigm of structural injustice and the responsibility for it. Yet it relies on an individualism that it does not openly recognize and, further, blatantly avoids discussion of the common good, a discussion that could prove integral to overcoming structural injustice through politics. Young claims that the doctrine of personal responsibility fails to acknowledge that people may be responsible for the welfare of others. This claim seems to contradict her statement on p. 106: “structural injustice may be ongoing even when some of the participating actors have done nothing that existing practices of criminal, legal, or moral blame or fault-finding would identify as wrong. Those who participate by their actions in producing and reproducing structural injustices are usually minding their own business and acting within accepted norms and rules.” Minding one's own business is simply a synonym for being personally responsible. An account of the structural injustices in a society, however, must focus on the interconnectedness of human beings as, in Aristotle's words, political animals. Human beings must engage in politics.
No one familiar with Young's work (especially Justice and the Politics of Difference [Princeton University Press, 1990]) will be surprised at her rather procedural understanding of politics. In Justice Young denied the place of a concept of the common good in politics because it rests on a homogeneity that factually does not exist and that ought to be avoided. Her position, however, misconstrues the nature of Aristotelian politics and of the common good. Politics is, rather, the participatory engagement of all in determining the common good of all. Such an engagement is multivocal and heterogeneous. Seen from this perspective, however, structural injustice exemplifies a failure of politics and of the common good. Everyone, further, has a responsibility to correct these social injustices, and claims that one is “minding one's own business” constitute moral failure. Thus, while I find Young's book illuminating and well argued, I think its richness exposes the lacuna of modern liberal theories of justice.
