Two forms of responsibility: Reassessing Young on structural injustice

ABSTRACT

In this article, I critically reassess Iris Marion Young's late works, which centre on the distinction between liability and social connection responsibility. I concur with Young's diagnosis that structural injustices call for a new conception of responsibility, but I reject several core assumptions that underpin her distinction between two models and argue for a different way of conceptualising responsibility to address structural injustices. I show that Young's categorical separation of guilt and responsibility is not supported by the writings of Hannah Arendt, which Young draws on, and that it is also untenable on independent systematic grounds. Furthermore, I argue that several of Young's other criteria fail to clearly demarcate two distinct phenomena. I therefore propose to transcend Young's distinction between two models in favour of a related, but conceptually different distinction between two forms of responsibility: interactional and structural. Embracing this terminology facilitates the conceptualisation of the general features of responsibility that are shared by both forms, including their retrospective and prospective time-direction and their applicability to individual, joint and group agency. The distinction between interactional and structural responsibility also yields a more compelling general account of the role of background structures, and of blame within ascriptions of political responsibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Iris Marion Young
• Hannah Arendt
• Karl Jaspers
• group agency
• climate justice and climate ethics
• guilt and responsibility

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their written comments and Annabelle Lever for exemplary editorial guidance. I presented earlier versions of this paper at the conference on “Localizing and globalizing justice” at McGill University, Montreal, in September 2017, and at the workshop on “Justice in trade” at the Humboldt University of Berlin in January 2018. I am grateful to the commentators at these two events, Ryoa Chung and Luise Müller, and to the conference audiences. I would also like to thank Stefan Gosepath, Catherine Lu, David Frank and Gabriel Wollner for helpful oral feedback, and Bob Goodin, Martin Renz and Johanna Eckert for helpful written comments. A special thanks to Elise Hedemann for in-depth discussions of the text in various stages as well as for impeccable native language editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the vivid first-hand reception, see e.g., the contributions in the anthologies edited by Ferguson and Nagel (2009), Johnson and Michaelis (2013), and Niesen (2013).

2. See e.g., Lu (2011, 2017), Eckersley (2016), Hayward (2017), and Aragon and Jaggar (2018).

3. See Barry and Macdonald (2016, pp. 111–112). See also McKeown (2018, pp. 484–502), who distinguishes four different senses of ´connection´ that are all evoked by Young without being fully specified or argued for. Aragon and Jaggar (2018, pp. 448–450) argue that the criterion of social connection should be more precisely understood as ´structural complicity´.

4. Remarkably, Young’s first article on the topic, ´From Guilt to Solidarity´ (Young, 2003), already contains this emphasis in its title.

5. See also Young (2004, pp. 375–377).

6. Young refers to Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt, 1963/1964a), as well as to two shorter texts (Arendt, 1945/1994, 1968/2003c). It should be noted that Young apparently did not know (or at least does not cite) Arendt’s most extensive and richest contribution on the topic, ´Personal responsibility under dictatorship´ (Arendt, 1964/2003a), which synthesizes major themes of her view. This text is based on the manuscript of a lecture which Arendt gave in different locations in the years of 1964 and 1965, and which was published in English in full-length for the first time only in 2003. At the time, only a much shorter version of the presentation had appeared in print (see Arendt, 1964b), which Young does not cite, either. Nor does Young refer to Arendt’s posthumously published lecture ´Some questions of moral philosophy´ (Arendt 1965/2003b), which offers further specifications on the relation of political responsibility and guilt.

7. In this respect, Arendt’s treatment bears a striking resemblance to Jaspers’s view. Jaspers used the concept of ´political guilt´ in the narrow sense of an exclusively political ´liability´. For him, ´political guilt´, to which he also referred as ´political responsibility´, is a genuinely collective category and can be juridically enforced. It derives solely from membership in a political community, in opposition to individual moral and criminal guilt, which both derive from personal conduct. See Jaspers (1946/1948, pp. 25–40).

8. Compare again Jaspers, who wrote that, when it comes to individual moral guilt, ´Germans are divided by the greatest differences´ (1946/1948, p. 57). Jaspers gave a detailed account of attitudes and actions that were widespread during the Nazi Era, which, according to him, ´incurred´ (ibid., p. 58) individual moral guilt, depending on the particular motives and circumstances. Among the morally blameworthy behaviours, he listed: ´living in disguise´, such as when those Germans who did not share the Nazi ideology nevertheless performed the Hitler salute in public in order to ´camouflage´ their real convictions and to thereby shield themselves from retribution (ibid.); ´false conscience´ (ibid.), ´self-deception´ (ibid., p. 61) and ´inner assimilation´ (ibid.), ´passivity´ in the face of avoidable wrongs (ibid., p. 63), ´outward compliance´ and ´running with the pack´ (ibid., p. 64).

9. In particular, see Arendt (1958/1998, ch. III)

10. For an interpretation of Arendt’s work according to which ´both private and public life´ have ´a moral basis´, see Jacobitti (1991, p. 281).

11. For this general point, see in particular Arendt, 1945/1994, 1963/1964a and 1965/2003b, p. 94. For a comprehensive treatment of three different kinds of ´thoughtlessness´, as conceptualised by Arendt, see Schiff (2012).

12. Compare Williams (2015), who argues that this assessment by Young ´misses the mark´ (p. 52).

13. Young instead seeks to show that Eichmann implicitly supports an idea of forward-looking political responsibility. See Young (2011, ch. III).

14. Young (2011) rightly points out that Arendt ´would not have been very sympathetic to´ (p. 75) her overall project, which focusses on responsibility for justice. Even though the idea of justice is largely absent in Arendt’s political theory, she tied her notion of responsibility for the world to the constant need for political reform, citing Hamlet (´The time is out of joint: O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right!´) (Arendt, 1964/2003a, pp. 27–28); see also Arendt 1961, pp. 192–193), and Williams (2015, pp. 43–44).

15. See e.g., Young (2011): ´This responsibility falls on members of a society by virtue of the fact that they are aware moral agents who ought not to be indifferent to the fate of others and the danger that states and other organised institutions often pose to some people.´ (p. 92; my emphasis). A bit further below, she writes: ´We are in a condition of having such political responsibility, and the fact of having it implies an imperative to take political responsibility.´ (ibid., Young’s emphasis).

16. Related conceptual distinctions can be found in the literature. Without referring to Young's work, I have distinguished between ´interactional responsibilities´ and ´institutional responsibilites to promote justice´ (Beck, 2010, p. 2). In a later text, I have briefly discussed Young's work and used the German equivalents to the English terms´interpersonal´ and ´structural responsibility´ (Beck, 2016, ch. IV). See Lu (2011; 2017), for the distinction of ´interactional´ as opposed to ´structural injustice´ in the context of colonial injustices, and correspondingly, of ´interactional´ as opposed to ´structural reconciliation´. In my view, either ´interactional´ or ´interpersonal´ can mark the distinction from structural responsibility. However, ´interactional responsibility´ is more neutral than ´interpersonal responsibility´ with respect to whether responsible agents should be attributed ontological personhood. That said, either term can accommodate the concept of group agency. Young herself comes close to using these concepts when she writes that ´a theory of responsibility for justice properly distinguishes between two levels of social relations: an interactive level and a structural level´ (Young, 2011, p. 163), but she does not develop these terms.

17. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for asking me to clarify this point.

18. See in particular Young (2011, ch. II).

19. For example, next to the topic of political liability discussed above in reference to Arendt and Jaspers, both role-related responsibilities of political representatives as well as the obligation to obey the law, standardly discussed as ´political obligation´, can also be categorised as political responsibilities. For a discussion of the latter, see Scheffler (2018). Each of these variants of political responsibility is different from, although related to, structural responsibility.

20. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this question, which allowed me to further clarify the relation of the two forms.

21. See Young (2004, p. 368), where she states that the social connection model is meant to ´supplement´ the liability model. See also Young (2006a, p. 125).

22. Young for example, writes: ´Practices of blaming look for ‘‘whodunit”. As in mystery novels, when we find who did it, we absolve other people, who by implication didn’t do it.´ (2006b, p. 41). In another passage, Young writes that ‘if corporate executives [..] believe that anti-sweatshop activists are blaming them for the conditions under which the shoes are produced, they rightly become indignant’ (2003, p. 42). Apart from falsely presuming that social connection responsibility cannot involve blaming its subjects, this passage also implies that agents can be either held liable for concrete harms or ascribed a responsibility to change the structures in question, while in fact they often bear both forms of responsibility simultaneously. This is also true for companies and their representatives, since doing their part to enable positive structural change, e.g., by ceasing their practice of sabotaging socially progressive legislation, does not permit them to cause concrete harms more directly.

23. See Nussbaum (2009, p. 143), see also Barry and Ferracioli (2013, p. 252). However, Young clarifies in other passages that ascribing liability to some agents does not absolve others, either from liability or from social connection responsibility (see Young, 2004, p. 377; 2006a, p. 120).

24. See Kutz (2000, ch. V, VII) for a normative analysis of conspirator responsibility.

25. Young’s conceptualisation of structure (see Young, 2011, ch. II), which refers to the interplay of formal institutions and informal rules and practices, remains instructive when it comes to applied questions of locating potential objects of the responsibility to address injustices in different contexts.

26. It should be noted that important contributions in the field of social ontology, such as that of List and Pettit (2011), appeared only after the time of Young’s writing.

27. For an overview of contemporary accounts that justify individual responsibilities to adopt a greener lifestyle and/or to take political responsibility in the face of climate change, see Fragnière (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship).

Notes on contributors

Valentin Beck

Valentin Beck is a lecturer in Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and currently a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Eine Theorie der globalen Verantwortung (Suhrkamp) and Co-Editor of Dimensions of Poverty (Springer). His articles on consumer boycotts, fair trade, global justice theory and global responsibility have appeared in journals and anthologies, including: Journal of Applied Philosophy; Moral Philosophy and Politics; Global Justice: Theory, Practice, Rhetoric; and Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie.