Responsibility for structural injustice

ABSTRACT

Following Iris Marion Young, Catherine Lu allocates responsibility for transforming unjust global structures to the agents who participate in perpetuating and reproducing those structures. She also adopts Young’s qualitative distinction between the ‘liability’ and ‘social connection’ models of responsibility, reserving the first for interactional injustice where identifiable victims and perpetrators are involved, and the second for structural injustice where unjust outcomes emerge without any identifiable wrongdoers. This article’s argument is that Young’s and Lu’s specific allocation of the burden for transforming unjust global structures makes sense only if we reject the notion of a qualitative distinction between two models of responsibility and acknowledge instead that there is continuity in the conceptual tools available for thinking about responsibility for both interactional and structural injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural injustice
• Iris Marion Young
• responsibility
• causal responsibility
• outcome responsibility
• remedial responsibility
• Bernard Williams
• liability model
• social-connection model
• David Miller

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Since those who are victimized by structural injustice usually participate in reproducing and perpetuating it, the diffusion of responsibility to all those involved can potentially burden victims of an unjust structure with shouldering their share for transforming it. This however does not mean that Lu blames victims. Far from it. (Lu 2017, 75) She merely argues that victims too must share the burden to ameliorate or eliminate the structural injustice that they participate in perpetuating and reproducing, and from which they suffer. (166).

² This is the first idea of responsibility I discuss later and that is captured most clearly by Bernard Williams.

³ For a sense of the complexities involved, see an example used by H.L.A. Hart quoted by David Miller (2007, 82).

⁴ The first broad idea of responsibility I have in mind here is broad enough to encompass the notions of outcome responsibility and causal responsibility that are distinguished by Miller, but that he nonetheless has difficulty distinguishing. My interest is in the contrast between that idea and the idea underlying what Miller calls remedial responsibility.

⁵ Both Honoré and Raz develop this concept for the purpose of deploying it in legal contexts. Miller develops it for the purpose of deploying it in moral debate beyond legal contexts. But, its underlying idea transcends both contexts.

⁶ Here, I am using the notion of involvement in the causal process broadly, to encompass Raz’s bringing about, causing, preserving, or allowing to continue.

⁷ Williams’ theory of responsibility is developed in Shame and Necessity (Williams 1993) but is prefigured in Moral Luck (Williams 1981, 28–29) which contains that example. For a brief account of Williams’ articulation of this broad idea of responsibility, see Abdel-Nour (2016, 265–266).

⁸ Whereas it is possible for questions of strict liability to arise in this type of situation, they are premised on prior assumptions about who will be held liable if something goes wrong, or on public authority’s purely pragmatic need to identify someone to respond. (Williams 1993, 57, 64) In other words, strict liability is not based on the normative weight that Williams brings into view when he focuses on the driver’s experience of agent-regret.

⁹ In this vein, Jade Larissa Schiff emphasizes the centrality of ‘experiencing’ responsibility. Although she does not mention Williams’ work, they are both focused on capturing the same general intuition (Schiff 2015, 1–49).

¹⁰ When discussing the failure of the participants in an unjust structure to do their part to transform it, Lu is willing to blame them for such a failure (Lu 2017, 258–259), whereas Young is only willing to criticize them (Young 2011, 143–144). I discuss this later. Note that in both cases, the criticism or blame is not for participating in the unjust structure but for failing to do one’s part to transform it once one becomes aware of one’s participation.

¹¹ Miller lists six potential justifications. We might identify those who have capacity to do what it takes, those who benefit from the injustice, those who are outcome responsible, those who are causally responsible, those who are morally responsible, or those who have special communal ties to the ones who suffer the injustice (Miller 2007, 101–104).

¹² In terms of the six justifications proposed by Miller, this would entail selecting those who are causally responsible and those who are outcome responsible.

¹³ That is an answer that Daniel Butt offers and Lu rejects (Lu 2017, 150).

¹⁴ This is the answer that Lu evokes briefly but does not adopt, when she discusses Rawls’ duty of assistance (Lu 2017, 235).

¹⁵ Blame and liability are not unavoidable considerations that somehow taint the entire conceptual toolkit. In an interactional context, we might ask about whether an agent’s involvement in the causal process of a bad state of affairs reaches the minimal threshold that would render her blameworthy. If it does not, that does not mean that she is now no different from a spectator of that state of affairs. She is still an agent in its causal process and that makes her and other similarly situated agents potentially appropriate targets for the allocation of the burdens of remedy and correction. This can be the case even if there is no judgement of blameworthiness or liability.