Responsibility for Justice by Iris Marion Young

Author:Iris Marion Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

FOUR

A Social Connection Model

We are now in a position to answer this book’s guiding question: how shall agents, both individual and organizational, think about our responsibility in relation to structural injustice? The question harbors some puzzles and dilemmas. On the one hand, as I have argued, the very judgment that there is injustice implies some kind of responsibility. To judge a circumstance unjust implies that we understand it at least partly as humanly caused, and entails the claim that something should be done to rectify it. On the other hand, when the injustice is structural, there is no clear culprit to blame and therefore no agent clearly liable for rectification.

As I have explicated the idea in chapter 2, structural injustice is produced and reproduced by thousands or millions of persons usually acting within institutional rules and according to practices that most people regard as morally acceptable. A lack of availability of decent affordable housing for large numbers of people, for example, occurs as a normal aspect of most housing markets. The dynamics of these markets is affected by investment incentives, developers’ imaginations, expertise, and financial capacity, cultural assumptions concerning housing preferences, and local planning policies, among other factors. Within these structural processes some people often do illegal or immoral things. Some may refuse to rent to blacks or perceived Muslims. Others may bribe city officials in order to obtain a zoning variance. While such illegal or immoral acts certainly contribute to structural outcomes, the people who engage in such acts are not the only perpetrators of the injustice. There are too many other people also involved.

Practices of assigning responsibility in law and everyday moral life first try to locate “who dunnit”; for a person to be held responsible for a harm, we must be able to say that he or she caused it. Causal responsibility is not sufficient for finding an agent blameworthy or at fault, but it is usually necessary. There are important exceptions to this generalization. We find persons whose actions order or enable agents who directly cause harms, such as Eichmann’s actions of organizing trains, blameworthy, and sometimes even more blameworthy than the persons who directly cause the harms. This class of exceptions only proves the rule: within standard frameworks of moral and legal responsibility, it is necessary to connect a person’s deeds linearly to the harm for which we seek to assign responsibility.

The problem with structural injustice is that we cannot trace this kind of connection. It is not difficult to identify persons who contribute to structural processes. On the whole, however, it is not possible to identify how the actions of one particular individual, or even one particular collective agent, such as a firm, has directly produced harm to other specific individuals. When housing consumers want big front lawns, for example, and developers cater to this desire, satisfying these desires arguably helps inflate housing prices in a region. It would be incorrect to say, however, that the actions of investors in a subdivision with big

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