Eco-Emancipation by Sharon R. Krause;

Author:Sharon R. Krause;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Reconstructing Responsibility

Recent work on responsibility for structural injustice has begun to reimagine responsibility, challenging the dominance of the liability view. As Chad Lavin notes, the liability view rose to predominance in the mid-twentieth century as European and Anglo-American theorists were grappling with events such as the Holocaust and the massacre at Mai Lai.15 Their focus was on establishing grounds for assigning blame in the context of particular events caused by clearly identifiable agents. What Lavin calls “impersonal conditions of deprivation” were not the primary concern.16 In the intervening period, issues of structural injustice have come to the fore in political theory as ostensibly democratic societies have been forced to confront their own persistent inequalities and the impersonal dynamics of injustice that help drive them. The upshot, Lavin says, is that contemporary discourse is marked by a significant “shortcoming,” namely, “the incommensurability” between current “political urgencies” and our “dominant conceptions of responsibility.”17 In the decade and a half since Lavin’s book was published, a surge of new work has emerged that is intended to address this shortcoming, rethinking responsibility in the context of injustices that are sustained through large-scale, impersonal social systems, rather than by a clearly identifiable, “competent agent’s willed causality.”18

The most influential of the new approaches to responsibility is Iris Marion Young’s “social connection model.”19 The model addresses problems of structural injustice in which unfairness is perpetuated systemically through large-scale economic, political, and social forces instead of through intentional acts of domination by discrete agents. Young uses the global apparel industry as an example, where products are often made by impoverished people in developing countries working under exploitative conditions, while the products are consumed by relatively privileged people in wealthy societies. The consumers do not mean to be unjust, often know little about the labor conditions that produce the goods they purchase, and do not control the system. Yet their purchases help to sustain the system, and in Young’s view “all those who contribute by their actions to structural processes with some unjust outcomes share responsibility for the injustice.”20 Our responsibility tracks the force of our effects, as Young sees it, and those whose contributing effects carry more weight in bringing about the harm will have more responsibility for it. For example, wealthy people who spend large sums of money on clothing made by sweatshop workers in the developing world play a more significant part in sustaining the exploitation of those workers than do people who buy little. Those wealthy consumers may also be better positioned to purchase from fair trade enterprises, and to use their privilege and resources to press for changes in the industry more broadly.21

This view of responsibility focuses less on blaming people for what they have done in the past than on changing their actions for the future.22 Moreover, although responsibility here applies to individual persons, it calls for coordinated, intersubjective action. Responsibility for justice “is a responsibility I personally bear,” as Young puts it, “but I do not bear it alone” because this responsibility

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