Received: 29 January 2021

DOI: 10.1111/phc3.12757

ARTICLE
- -Revised: 6 May 2021 Accepted: 18 May 2021

Structural injustice

Maeve McKeown

Faculty of Philosophy, University of

Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Abstract
The concept of “structural injustice” has a long intellectual
Correspondence
Maeve McKeown, Raised Faculty Building, lineage, but Iris Marion Young popularised the term in her
Sidgwick Ave, Cambridge, CB3 9 DA, UK. late work in the 2000s. Young’s theory tapped into the
Email: mm2143@[Link]
zeitgeist of the time, providing a credible way of thinking
about transnational and domestic injustices, illuminating
the importance of political, economic and social structures
in generating injustice, theorising the role of individuals in
perpetuating structural injustice, and the responsibility of
everyone to try to correct it. Young’s theory has inspired
secondary and novel research. In this paper, I outline the
main topics in this recent literature: what structural injus-
tice is, responsibility for structural injustice, acting on re-
sponsibility, avoiding responsibility, and historical injustice.
I conclude by noting how the influence of structural injus-
tice theory is spreading beyond the confines of political
theory. Any field that is concerned with structural in-
equalities, disadvantage, or oppression, can utilize struc-
tural injustice theory.

1 | INTRODUCTION

Structural injustice has become a familiar concept in contemporary political theory. Many problems are now
referred to as instances of structural injustice—notably homelessness and sweatshops, but also racism, sexism,
colonialism, climate change, and many other injustices that are embedded in social, political, and economic struc-
tures. The concept of structural injustice has a long intellectual lineage. The general idea that injustice can be built‐
in to structures is usually associated with Marxism, but perhaps its lineage can be traced even further. And it is a

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© 2021 The Authors. Philosophy Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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common concept in feminism, critical race theory, and liberation theology, amongst other schools of thought.
Liberal political philosophers are concerned with the relationship of justice to institutional structures; famously,
John Rawls (1971) argued that justice applies to the “basic structure” of society.
But the way many scholars use the term “structural injustice” in the early twenty‐first century refers to a
recent trend in the political theory literature. Iris Marion Young popularised the term “structural injustice” in a
series of articles in the 2000s and her posthumously published, final book Responsibility for Justice (Young, 2003,
2004, 2006a, 2006b, 2011). The dominant theory of justice of that era, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971),
focused on justice in ideal theory, institutions, and the domestic arena; by contrast, Young was interested in
structural injustice, how it implicates individuals, and the ways it crosses borders. Young’s theory tapped into the
zeitgeist of the time, providing a credible way of thinking about transnational and domestic injustices, illuminating
the importance of political, economic and social structures in generating injustice, theorising the role of individuals
in perpetuating structural injustice, and the responsibility of everyone to try to correct it.
Responsibility for Justice has spawned a lively secondary literature. Each chapter of the book has generated
comment and critique and has inspired secondary or novel research; but some aspects of the debate have
developed more than others—the aspect that has received the most attention is responsibility for structural
injustice. This paper provides a summary of the most recent literature on structural injustice, looking at the topics in
order that they appear in Young’s book: what structural injustice is, responsibility for structural injustice, acting on
responsibility, avoiding responsibility, and historical injustice. I conclude by noting how the influence of structural
injustice theory is spreading beyond the confines of political theory.

2 | STRUCTURAL INJUSTICE

The term “structural injustice” appeared in Young’s 1990 classic text Justice and the Politics of Difference
(Young, 1990, p. 254). In that book, Young famously developed an account of the “five faces of oppression,” namely
exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. She described oppression as ‘the
institutional constraint on self‐development’ and domination as ‘the institutional constraint on self‐determination’
(Young, 1990, p. 37). But in that text, Young did not develop the concept of structural injustice and its relationship
to oppression and domination.
In her late work, Young returned to this theme and devoted her final book Responsibility for Justice to it. Structural
injustice is a slippery concept, so Young (2011, pp. 43–44) uses the following example to try to explain it. Sandy is a
single mother of two, who works in a mall and is facing eviction because a developer bought the building she lives in
and wants to convert it into condominiums. Sandy finds few options for housing: the apartments close to work are too
expensive, she worries that the inner‐city neighbourhoods are dangerous for her kids, and the apartments further
away necessitate buying a car. She decides to buy a car, but then discovers she needs a three‐month deposit for an
apartment and can’t pay. She finds herself on the brink of homelessness, through no fault of her own, nor through any
obviously blameworthy or illegal actions of anyone else. This is not to say that no‐one has acted badly within these
structures. Discriminatory landlords, corrupt politicians and dodgy developers ought to be held accountable. But
holding these particular agents accountable for specific wrongdoings won’t tackle the wider social, economic and
political structures that create housing insecurity. Structural injustice, therefore, renders individuals (and certain
social groups) vulnerable to domination or oppression. In a widely‐cited passage, Young writes,

'Structural injustice, then, exists when social processes put large groups of persons 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 capacities available to them. Structural injustice is a kind of moral wrong
distinct from the wrongful action of an individual agent or the repressive policies of a state. Structural
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injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular
goals and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms.' (Young, 2011, p. 52)

Structural injustice is not limited to the domestic sphere, it can cross borders. Young’s example of global
structural injustice is sweatshop labour. Injustice in the global garment industry is now familiar: excessive working
hours, poverty wages, physical abuse, and dangerous working conditions. Young acknowledges that certain agents are
morally and legally responsible for these harms; factory owners and managers are legally responsible for human rights
violations, and states that encourage sweatshops are morally responsible. However, she also acknowledges that these
agents ‘operate under serious structural constraints’ (Young, 2011, p. 132). Employers claim that they cannot afford
to improve wages and working conditions because they are operating in a ‘highly competitive environment’ and it is a
good thing that they are providing jobs to people who need them (Young, 2011, p. 131). Poor states have to compete
with other poor states for investment and jobs, which is why they develop export‐processing zones and lax terms for
multi‐national corporations (Young, 2011, p. 132). Thus, multiple and diverse actors in different countries are enabled
and constrained by structural processes, resulting in the exploitation of sweatshop workers.
Drawing on sociologists and philosophers, Young (2011, pp. 52–64) identifies four features of “social‐structural
processes” that result in structural injustice:

1. The legal and social rules, and material world, in which people live are objectively constraining. Using Jean‐Paul
Sartre’s (1976) idea of the practico‐inert (the effects of past praxis that persist in the world), Young shows how
material infrastructure constrains contemporary options. Legal rules enable and constrain actors: laws can make
certain actions possible for certain actors but not others, for instance export‐processing zones enable multi‐
national corporations to create jobs in poor states, but also constrain workers’ rights. Social norms also
enable and constrain actors because people behave as though they are real; for instance, Sandy believes that her
children need to live in a ‘safe’ neighbourhood, meaning white and middle‐class, a widely‐shared belief which
pushes property prices up in certain areas and reduces them in others.
2. Society is made up of social positions. Sociologists think of society as a multi‐dimensional space (Blau, 1977) or a
field (Bourdieu, 1977) with individuals positioned in relation to each other. These positions condition and place
limits on our interactions. This macro view also helps identify structural inequalities that persist over time.
3. Structures are produced through the actions of individuals. Anthony Giddens (1979) refers to this as the ‘duality of
structure’—individuals draw on the rules and resources of a society when they act, and in doing so they
reproduce that structure. Young adds that they do this out of habit, drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of the
habitus—individuals internalize the behaviours associated with their social position.
4. Structural processes have unintended consequences—namely vulnerability to deprivation and oppression for the
least advantaged people in the structures.

The majority of secondary literature in this area takes Young’s conception of structural injustice and applies it
to case studies, in order to illuminate the previously neglected structural aspects of a phenomenon. These range
from the macro: gender inequality (Parekh, 2011), colonialism (Lu, 2011, 2017), climate change (Godoy, 2017); to
more specific case studies, such as human egg freezing (Browne, 2018), labour migration in the EU (Nuti, 2019b),
the ‘workfare’ scheme in the UK (Mantouvalou, 2020), undocumented care workers (Meghani & Eckenwiler, 2009),
beauty standards (Widdows, 2021) and obesity (Schrempf, 2014). By in large, philosophers working on the appli-
cation of the concept of structural injustice to various real‐world phenomena take Young’s conception for granted.
One book which challenges Young’s conception of structural injustice is Ruth Faden and Madison Powers’s
Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights. They argue that Young is wrong to consider structural
injustice the outcome of ‘morally benign decisions of diverse agents,’ that instead it is a result of powerful actors
engaging in subordination, exploitation and exclusion (Powers & Faden, p. 3). Despite it bearing the title Structural
Injustice. Faden and Powers are bioethicists and their book has a specific aim and audience: introducing the idea of
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structural injustice to bioethicists and public health experts. Their main theoretical target is John Rawls, with Young
coming in a distant second (perhaps because Rawls is better known beyond political theory), and they do not
engage with any of the secondary literature on structural injustice that has arisen since Young’s work. They target
Rawls’s ideal theory of justice for a closed society, arguing that it is insufficiently globalised and structural (points
which Young’s theory already responded to). Their core argument is that to achieve structural justice, all individuals
globally should have their core well‐being needs met. The five core elements are health, knowledge and under-
standing, personal security, personal attachments, equal respect, and a self‐determining life. They argue that human
rights are grounded in these elements of well‐being and that states have a responsibility to secure human rights.
Therefore, it is less a book on structural injustice and more a book on structural justice, conceived of in terms of
well‐being and human rights, with states bearing primary responsibility to secure it. This is quite far removed from
structural injustice theory, which is more concerned with diagnosing injustice than specifying what justice looks like.
One alternative for theorising structural injustice is Sally Haslanger’s work (Haslanger, 2012, 2015, 2016).
Over the last 3 decades, Haslanger has developed her own theory of social construction in the fields of ontology,
epistemology and philosophy of language. She does not engage Young’s work on structural injustice directly, but
there are parallels. Haslanger and Young’s views overlap on the idea that structures are recursive, meaning they are
reproduced through individuals’ action. But Haslanger delves deeper into what a social structure actually is and
how it can be critiqued. Haslanger draws on William Sewell’s (1992) theory of social structure, which challenges
Giddens’ view that structures are ‘virtual,’ arguing that they also have a material component. Haslanger argues that
social practices are collective solutions to coordination problems with respect to specific resources, and they are
made up of two things: i) schemas, which are the shared mental states, including concepts, attitudes and disposi-
tions, that enable us to organise information and coordinate action; and ii) resources, which are all sorts of things
that have some value, so water, land, knowledge, etc. (whether or not something is a resource will depend on the
cultural frame). Social structures are sets of interdependent social practices. Haslanger’s innovation is to highlight
the role of ideology in perpetuating social structures. A set of interdependent cultural schemas constitutes a
cultural technē, which ‘provides us with the know‐how to be part of a social group’ (Haslanger, 2015, p. 23). A
cultural technē becomes ideological (in the pejorative sense) when it organises us in relations of domination, or mis‐
recognizes or mis‐conceives the value of resources. Once ideology is understood as an inapt cultural technē, then it
can be critiqued in two ways: epistemically—by pointing out the ways in which schemas are cognitively faulty; and
socio‐politically—pointing out how social practices distribute resources in an unjust way.
Other theorists have stuck more closely to Young’s approach but highlight its limitations. The emerging trend
seems to be towards conceiving of structural injustice in “pluralist” terms; although, this secondary literature is in
its infancy. For example, Alasia Nuti (2019a) argues that structural injustices should be classified differently
depending on their relationship to an unjust history. She does this by classifying different kinds of structural groups
and considering their relationship to a history of injustice. ‘Historical structural groups’ are groups like women or
lesbian and gay persons; groups that have historically been denied the vote, been excluded from paid work, or have
been systematically regarded as abnormal, deviant or repugnant. ‘Non‐historical structural groups’ are the kinds of
groups that correspond to Young’s conception of structural injustice; they emerge out of the present‐day accu-
mulation of nonblameworthy, legal actions, but combined cause injustice; this includes the homeless or Nuti’s
example of army veterans, a contemporary group who are marginalized and suffer from unemployment, home-
lessness, alcohol and drug addiction, and mental or physical health problems. Nuti (2019a, p. 66) argues ‘there are
(at least) two different kinds of structural injustices: one that stems from an unjust history… and one that does not.’ For
Nuti, this matters for diagnostic purposes and also to help determine how to address the injustice; remedies for
historical‐structural injustice, must be sensitive to the unjust history and avoid reproducing it.
In Maeve McKeown’s forthcoming book, With Power Comes Responsibility (forthcoming), she argues that there
are three different types of structural injustice and that the crucial element is power. ‘Pure structural injustice’ is
the kind of injustice Young was interested in; injustices where there is no identifiable perpetrator, and the injustice
is the sum of multiple agents’ nonblameworthy actions that can only be changed through collective action.
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‘Avoidable structural injustice’ is where there are powerful agents with the capacity to change unjust structures,
but they fail to do so. For example, rich states have the capacity to end homelessness, but they don’t. So where
Young understood homelessness as a structural injustice simpliciter, McKeown argues that it is avoidable. ‘Delib-
erate structural injustice’ is where agents are deliberately perpetuating unjust background conditions for their own
gain, and they have the power to change them. For example, in the sweatshops case, multi‐national corporations
(MNCs) deliberately lobby governments and threaten governments with the prospect of capital flight, in order to
maintain the poorest wages and working conditions for garment workers. McKeown concludes, therefore, that
when powerful agents deliberately perpetuate structural injustice or have the capacity to change unjust structures,
they bear moral, rather than political responsibility to do so, which leads to our next topic.
Before coming to responsibility, however, a more critical response to Young’s conception of structural injustice
comes from David Atenasio (2019). He argues that Young’s conception of structural injustice is not only under‐
developed, but fundamentally flawed because it conflates three different moral failures: i) a systematically unfair
structure (such as sweatshops); ii) a structure that inadequately distributes resources or opportunities (such as the
housing market); or iii) a structure that harms, or incentivizes harm to, a non‐consenting third party (such as
financial markets). If this is correct, then it is not necessary to create new theory of responsibility (as Young does
and which we will now look at); rather, existing individualist theories of moral responsibility already respond to
these injustices. In the case of i), there is wrongful exploitation and agents that can be blamed for that. In the case of
ii) there is distributional unfairness, which is the responsibility of states and citizens. In iii), these cases are either
the product of blameworthy behaviour or they result in ‘normatively neutral’ harm (e.g., a job going to one
candidate harms the other candidates, but this is not wrongful). On this view, Young’s theory of structural injustice
and responsibility for it is redundant.

3 | RESPONSIBILITY FOR STRUCTURAL INJUSTICE

The bulk of the secondary literature has been on responsibility. Young’s view is that there are two models of re-
sponsibility. The “liability model” is the traditional way of understanding legal and moral responsibility: in order to
bear responsibility for a harm, an agent must have directly caused the harm, with intent to cause harm and knowledge
of the likely consequences of their actions. She claims that this is inadequate for understanding responsibility for
structural injustice, because structural injustice is not directly caused by any one agent (it is cumulative), it is not
intended, and when many agents act within structures, they do not know what the consequences of their actions will
be. Her new model of responsibility—the “social connection model”—generates political responsibility, which is shared
by all agents connected to structural injustice, is nonblameworthy, forward‐looking and entails collective action.
There are several reasons why Young wants to move away from the liability model with regards to structural
injustice. The liability model is “isolating,” holding specific agents liable for particular wrongdoings (Young, 2011, p.
100–106). This is impractical in relation to structural injustice; specific actions by particular agents cannot be
isolated and identified as contributing in quantifiable ways to cumulative harms. It also has the effect of focusing
attention on these agents and their actions, absolving other participants in the processes from responsibility, and it
ignores the background structures that enable the harm.
This way of breaking down responsibility has been hotly debated, raising a number of objections. The first
objection focuses on the lack of blame in Young’s analysis. A number of theorists criticise the social connection
model for failing to attribute moral responsibility to any agent (Barry & Macdonald, 2016; Hahn, 2009; Neu-
häuser, 2014). This is the ‘non‐attributability objection’ (this terminology is borrowed from (Zheng, 2018)). Can no
agents be blamed for structural injustice? What about states and corporations? Are ordinary individuals really not
blameworthy for structural injustice? Are they let off the hook too easily?
Second, Martha Nussbaum identified the ‘free pass objection’ in her foreword to Responsibility for Justice.
Nussbaum (2011, p. xxi) argues that if we accept Young’s distinction between retrospective guilt and prospective
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political responsibility, ‘well, then, people get a free pass indefinitely, since no task ever goes onto the debit or guilt
side of their ledger, and the new task always lies ahead of them.’ This leads to a related objection, which is that
without any sort of accountability mechanism, individuals will not be motivated to act on their political responsibility.
Third, how is political responsibility generated (Aragon & Jaggar, 2018; McKeown, 2018b)? Young took the
distinction between moral and political responsibility from Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, citizens bore political re-
sponsibility to maintain the ‘world’ (the public‐political sphere in their country). But Young did not want to tie
political responsibility to citizenship; for Young, mere membership of a political community is not enough—political
responsibility implies doing or not doing something. Young, therefore, argues political responsibility is generated by
connection to structural injustice. But what does connection actually mean? Call this the ‘connection objection.’
Fourth, the most controversial aspect of Young’s “social connection model” of responsibility is that it includes
the victims of structural injustice. Young thinks that the victims of structural injustices, like sweatshop labour or
homelessness, share political responsibility to collectively organise to overcome it. However, not everyone agrees
that the victims should be included, since the point of alleviating structural injustice is to help, not further burden,
the victims (Gould, 2009)—the ‘victim‐blaming objection.’
Some of these objections are stronger than others. The non‐attributability objection is important. For example,
say climate change counts as a structural injustice, it seems implausible that every individual on earth shares the
same kind of responsibility for climate change as the hundred corporations that account for 71% of carbon
emissions (Riley, 2017). Or take sweatshop labour, can it really be the case that a consumer who buys clothes from
a high‐street shop (even someone buying more clothes than they actually need), shares the same responsibility for
sweatshop labour as Inditex, the parent company of Zara, which has been one of the top twenty richest garment
corporations in the world for twenty years and pioneered the practice of ‘fast fashion’? Christian Barry and Kate
MacDonald (2016) argue that consumers and corporations do bear the same kind of responsibility for sweatshop
labour, but contra‐Young, they argue that consumers and corporations share moral responsibility on the liability
model. They argue that the liability model can be expanded in ways that Young did not consider.
But other theorists have insisted that there is a valid and worthwhile distinction between the liability model
and social connection model, and they offer different ways of cashing that out. Robin Zheng (2019) responds to the
non‐attributability objection that it relies on a misunderstanding of the kind of responsibility Young is talking about.
Zheng argues that responsibility as attributability refers to the presence of certain metaphysical or psychological
conditions required for holding an agent blameworthy for particular actions. However, responsibility can have
another meaning—accountability. When considering responsibility as accountability, different considerations are in
play; in particular, whether or not an agent can be assigned the burdens of remediating a situation regardless of
whether they are morally blameworthy for it.
Others turn to the original inspiration for Young’s moral/political responsibility distinction–Hannah Arendt
(Arendt, 2003; Young, 2011, Chp 3). McKeown (forthcoming) argues that Arendt was right that there must be
two different kinds of responsibility depending on an agent’s relation to an injustice. Young argues that all
agents connected to structural injustice share political responsibility for it, but McKeown argues that whether
or not an agent bears moral or political responsibility for structural injustice depends on how much power they
have within structures. Valentin Beck (2020) argues both that Young’s interpretation of Arendt was wrong and
that the moral/political responsibility distinction based on blame is independently untenable. In order to cap-
ture Young’s insight that conventional theories of responsibility do not capture responsibility for unjust
background structures, Beck argues that instead of insisting on two models of responsibility, there are two
forms of responsibility: interactional and structural responsibility, that should be used simultaneously (see also
Zheng, 2019, pp. 112–113 and McKeown, 2015, Chp 3 for discussion of interactional vs. structural
responsibility).
The ‘free pass’ objection highlights a problem of temporal orientation in the social connection model of re-
sponsibility. Is it plausible for responsibility to only be forward‐looking? One way to respond, is to argue that it is
possible to say that individuals are not blameworthy for the reproduction of structural injustice, but they are
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blameworthy for failing to act on their political responsibility. It remains true that individuals are not guilty for
structural injustice, but they can now be blamed for failing to act on their political responsibility. This means that
the failure to act on their political responsibility goes on the guilt side of their ledger. Indeed, Catherine Lu (2017,
p. 259) adopts this position. Andrea Sangiovanni addresses responsibility for structural injustice itself suggesting
that individuals are causally responsible for structural injustice, but because their contribution is ‘unintended, tiny,
within the normally accepted rules and patterns of action, and not traceable, individuals are neither culpable nor
liable for their wrongdoing’ (Sangiovanni, 2018, p. 468). Instead, they are excused moral responsibility, but they
bear backward‐looking remedial duties to address structural injustice based on wrongdoing. However, both so-
lutions conflict with Young’s (2011, p. 104) insistence that ‘What we should seek is not a variation on a weaker
form of liability, but rather a different conception of responsibility altogether.’ Zheng responds that the free pass
objection is misguided because there is no sense in which an individual can ever ‘wipe the slate clean’ with regards
to structural injustice because we are all implicated in so many structural injustices, thus score‐keeping is
misguided (Zheng, 2019, p. 120).
The ‘connection objection’ has been answered in at least two different ways. Corwin Aragon and Alison
Jaggar suggest that the concept of connection should be replaced with ‘complicity.’ This concept is more
specific than connection; it provides a moral rationale for responsibility; and it grounds responsibility in
backward‐looking action, providing a solid moral grounding for responsibility. The problem here is that Young
considered and ruled out complicity as the relevant form of connection (Young, 2011, pp. 101–103). However,
she was referring specifically to Christopher Kutz’s (2000) account of complicity, which requires intent, and
since structural injustice on Young’s definition does not involve intent, this is ruled out. Perhaps a different
account of complicity could do the work, and Aragon and Jaggar suggest a concept of ‘structural complicity,’
which does not rely on intent. But the problem in using complicity as the grounding for political responsibility
is, as Aragon and Jaggar, point out, it is ‘a normative concept with a negative moral valence’ (Aragon &
Jaggar, 2018, p. 447). This taps into an under‐explored and unresolved issue in Young’s theory—the rela-
tionship between moral and political responsibility. Is political responsibility a species of moral responsibility,
or is it something else entirely? Arendt argues the latter, but there is textual evidence in Young’s book for
either interpretation. McKeown surveys four different ways of defining connection in the social connection
model: existential, dependent, and causal connection, and reproduction of structures through action. She ar-
gues that the latter is the form of connection that generates political responsibility. For example, when I
purchase a T‐shirt in a high‐street shop, I am not causing sweatshop labour (it already exists), but I am
reproducing it (McKeown, 2018b, p. 497).
Finally, Young (2011, p. 146) includes the victims in political responsibility because ‘It is they who know
the most about the harms they suffer, and thus it is up to them, though not them alone, to broadcast their
situation and call it injustice.’ Otherwise, well‐meaning outsiders might cause harm or implement ineffective
reforms. But there is more at stake than epistemic reasons (victims have the most knowledge and insight into
their condition), what matters is recognising that they are agents too. Tarama Jugov and Lea Ypi (2019) posit
a solution, suggesting that the degree of the oppressed’s responsibility depends on their level of knowledge,
or epistemic insight, into their predicament. Lewis Gordon (2007) puts Young in conversation with Frantz
Fanon, noting that both thinkers affirm the agency, and not just the victimhood, of the oppressed. But
Gordon notes that from a Fanonian perspective, Young’s theory strikes as a bit naïve. Fanon highlighted that
oppression dehumanizes. But Young’s theory of responsibility has the effect of collapsing the moral and the
political, encouraging privileged individuals to recognise their moral responsibility towards the oppressed.
Fanon would argue that the point of oppression is that the oppressed no longer count as human, therefore,
politics (potentially violent struggle) comes first. Failing to recognise that the political struggle for recognition
precedes ethics, means that Young’s theory could ‘have the conservative consequence of preserving the
conditions that need to be changed’ (Gordon, 2007, p. 7). This objection also highlights the lack of clarity
over whether political responsibility is, in fact, a form of moral responsibility. If political responsibility is a
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form of moral responsibility, then assigning political responsibility to victims could entail blaming them; if it
isn’t, then it would not.

4 | ACTING ON POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY

Young (2011, Chp 5) provides some guidance for acting on political responsibility through a discussion of
sweatshop labour. She provides four ‘parameters of reasoning’ for thinking about how to take up political re-
sponsibility: power, privilege (equated with benefit), interest and collective ability. This discussion has given rise
to the most prominent critique of Young’s theory—the ‘action‐guiding objection.’ A number of theorists argue
that the social connection model of responsibility is fundamentally flawed because it fails to tell individuals what
exactly they should do about structural injustice (Barry & Macdonald, 2016; Hahn, 2009; Zheng, 2018). The
claim is that a theory of responsibility must be action‐guiding, and since the social connection model is vague in
this regard, it fails. As Neuhäuser (2014, p. 242) puts it, the biggest problem with Young’s theory of re-
sponsibility is it doesn’t specify ‘who has to do what.’ Each of these theorists tries to resolve this problem and
does so in different ways.
However, the action‐guiding objection strikes as particularly weak, despite its prominence in the literature.
Without going into too much detail, Young deliberately intended the concept of political responsibility to be
discretionary and open‐ended for a number of valid reasons. She deliberately distinguishes between a responsibility
and a duty; a duty requires an agent to do a specific act in a specific way, but responsibility is discretionary and is up
to the agent to determine the best course of action (Feinberg, 1966; Goodin, 1986; Hart, 2008); the focus is on the
outcome (Goodin, 1986, p. 51). Second, Young does this because it is up to an individual to assess their own position
in relation to a particular structural injustice—in terms of how much power, privilege, interest in or collective ability
—in order to figure out how to be most effective in tackling it (Young, 2011, pp. 142–151). Third, responsibility
grants authorization to be responsive to change but duty does not (Richardson, 1999). Fourth, Young argues that
acting on political responsibility necessarily requires collective action (Young, 2011, pp. 111–113). It cannot be
determined exactly what collective action requires because it will have to respond to circumstance and to the
democratic deliberation of all the people involved. Fifth, political responsibility requires listening to the victims and
prioritising their needs (see Beausoleil, 2019).
Perhaps most importantly, what this criticism neglects is that Young incorporated theories of responsibility
from the continental tradition. Anglo‐American analytic philosophy is set in its legalistic ways when it comes to
responsibility, with its focus on methodological individualism, agency and action. Young sought theories of re-
sponsibility that look to structure, agency within constraints, unknowability of consequences, and collective re-
sponsibility. She drew on Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and
Larry May in conceptualizing political responsibility. In the continental tradition, bearing responsibility doesn’t
necessarily require causation of harm, nor specific guidance for action. Responsibility can arise by virtue of exis-
tence within a political community or merely by virtue of existence itself (McKeown, 2018b). Young’s project fits in
with the general framework of the “ethic of responsibility,” which does not set out rules for action, but rather uses
exemplars or frameworks for guidance (May, 1996, pp. 88–89). Failure to engage with this aspect of Young’s theory
of responsibility neglects the nuance and originality of Young’s approach.
Nevertheless, it is true that there is much more to be said about what taking up political responsibility could
look like in practice. This topic is beginning to generate a secondary literature. In Just Responsibility, political sci-
entist Brooke Ackerly (2018) studies the grant applications of women’s rights organizations from 26 countries to
draw on real‐world experiences of structural injustice and activism against it. Based on her findings, she offers
suggestions for politically responsible consumerism, philanthropy, advocacy and activism. Even though Powers and
Faden (2019) place the primary responsibility on states to achieve structural justice in terms of fulfilling human
rights, they recognise that states are failing to do this. So in the final chapter of their book, they look at strategies of
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resistance for individuals and non‐state actors, including using the media, boycotts, divestment campaigns, and
direct action. Cynthia Kaufman (2020) offers strategies for holding powerful agents to account through looking at
case studies, including the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, the Greek economic crisis, the climate crisis,
and police brutality in the US.
Robin Zheng (2018) advances a related but different theory of responsibility that is designed to respond to the
non‐attributability and non‐action guiding problems in Young’s social connection model of responsibility—the “role‐
ideal model” of responsibility. On this model, an individual occupies multiple social roles (profession, relationship,
carer, citizen, family member, etc.). Each role has a set of expectations about what the person will do in that role
and normative beliefs about how they should act and be. On the role‐ideal model of responsibility, the individual
should push the boundaries of each of their social roles to promote alleviation of structural injustice. This has a
built‐in accountability mechanism (as opposed to an attributability mechanism)—if the individual doesn’t do these
things, there will be sanctions. It also provides more guidance on what individuals can and should do. But
McKeown (2018a) argues that Zheng’s role‐ideal model of responsibility strays too far into the arena of privatized
virtue ethics to operate as a likely opponent to Young’s political responsibility.

5 | AVOIDING RESPONSIBILITY

Young (2011, Chp 6) claims that individuals avoid their responsibility for at least four reasons: they reify structural
injustice, meaning they treat it as natural and unchangeable; they deny their connection to structural injustice; they
focus on their immediate demands, such as responsibilities to family, friends and colleagues; or they claim it’s not
their job.
While Young recognises this problem, Jade Schiff argues that Young hasn’t considered the problem of
responsiveness to political responsibility in sufficient depth. Through an engagement with Arendt’s views on
thoughtlessness, Sartre on bad faith, and Bourdieu on misrecognition, Schiff argues that responsiveness depends
upon the stories we tell ourselves. Stories can either reinforce or challenge our existing narratives or views.
Schiff (2016, p. 185) suggests that ‘a politics of responsiveness could take the form of a critical and public exam-
ination and exchange of narratives.’
Mara Marin also addresses the problem of why individuals avoid their responsibility for structural injustice and
draws on the ethics of care to deal with this. She identifies the problem of ‘the circle of powerlessness and denial’
(Marin, 2017, p. 2). Even if structural injustice is made visible and therefore open to rational examination, people feel
powerless to engage in the necessary transformations of ingrained attitudes, laws, policies and modes of action in the
world. Because they feel powerless, they deny individual responsibility. The problem is circular because if an indi-
vidual feels they cannot effectively change structural injustice, they deny the obligation to do so, which then pre-
vents imagining ways of tackling it, increasing the sense of powerlessness. Marin argues that the way out is to explain
how individuals are able to change structural injustice and therefore have an obligation to do so. She does this using
the concept of commitment. In committed relationships, to friends and spouses etc., the commitment is made not
given, it develops over time, the demands of the relationship shift over time (in ways that cannot be predicted at the
outset), and the demands are obligatory. In the same way, individuals are committed to social structures. They may
not have chosen to enter the relationship to unjust social structures, but they are bound to them by their repro-
duction of the structures over time. This generates an obligation to try to change them. Powerlessness can be
overcome by recognising social relations as a form of commitment, thereby facilitating solidary action.
Clarissa Hayward highlights another gap in Young’s thinking on responsibility avoidance. Hayward argues that
individuals only do the right thing when they know that there is a need to do the right thing (unless they are in the
habit of doing the right thing because an appropriate incentive structure is in place). When it comes to structural
injustice, most people don’t know there is a need to change it and are not in the habit of correcting it, rather they
are in the habit of reproducing it. But there is a further problem—it is in the interests of people who benefit from
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structural injustice not to learn about it. Drawing on Charles Mills’s insights in “White Ignorance” (Mills, 2007),
Hayward argues that the privileged benefit from not informing themselves about structural injustice because they
can continue to believe in themselves as good people, thereby making their lives more comfortable. Such a belief is
hard to shake. One way to shift perspectives on structural injustices is “disruptive politics” like mass protests and
direct action. Hayward cites the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests after the police murder of Michael Brown in
Ferguson. While protest alone doesn’t necessarily change people’s minds, what it does do is ‘make it all but
impossible for the privileged to not hear the voices of, to not know the political claims of, the oppressed’ (Hay-
ward, 2017, p. 406).
In his pioneering work in social epistemology, The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina affirms support for
Young’s social connection model of responsibility (Medina, 2013, pp. 159–161). But he is concerned with how
agents can develop the self‐awareness of their role in perpetuating structural injustice. Medina argues that a ‘meta‐
blindness’ is created by a lack of ‘epistemic friction’ in relation to structural injustices that escape the dominant
society’s attention. Medina offers a ‘friendly amendment’ to Young, which is that political responsibility should
entail ‘chained action’ rather than collective action. This means that individuals who have gained ‘meta‐lucidity’—an
insight into structural injustice and what to do about it—can and should act, even if other individuals are not acting.
Their actions have a performative function and can ‘open up new possibilities of action’ (Medina, 2013, p. 228),
setting off a chain reaction and fostering ‘resistant imaginations.’

6 | HISTORICAL INJUSTICE

In the final chapter of Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses historical injustice. This chapter was not finished,
but the direction of travel was clear. Young uses the example of slavery in the US and argues that reparations for
slavery are unjustified. Analysing the past is important, according to Young, because it explains how present‐day
structural injustice came about and so provides suggestions for how to address it. But the focus should be on
contemporary structural injustice and ameliorating it for the sake of a better future.
This argument has generated arguments both in support and opposition. Catherine Lu (2017) supports Young’s
argument that historical injustice cannot and should not be repaired. Lu argues that it is not possible to trace the
liability of agents like states over time and it is not possible to identify victim‐groups over time. Historical losses
should lie where they fall. Acknowledging historical injustice is valuable, but present‐day structural injustice takes
priority.
Alasia Nuti (2019a) is more sceptical. She argues that Young and Lu are wrong to reject reparations for his-
torical injustice, mainly because they employ a faulty understanding of history. Drawing on the historian Reinhardt
Kosselleck, Nuti argues that there are two ways of reading history: there are historical ‘events’ that are bounded in
time and historical ‘structures’ that persist over time. Nuti claims that some historical structures persist in the
present; these are ‘historical‐structural injustices.’ For example, the injustice faced by African‐Americans today: this
injustice has changed over time as socio‐economic and political circumstances have changed, evolving from slavery
into Jim Crow and segregation, and persisting today not in legal disenfranchisement and subordination, but in banal
forms (such as stereotypes) and more radical forms (such as police killings and mass incarceration). Nuti argues that
the US government has accumulated a ‘structural debt’ towards African‐Americans for its persistent imposition of
unjust laws and failure to tackle this underlying historical social structure. Nuti argues against Lu that states can be
held liable over time and that victim groups can be identified; as mentioned above, there are ‘historical‐structural
groups’ like African‐Americans: members of this group are the ‘structural descendants’ of the enslaved and know
that if they had been alive at the time of slavery that they would be in the same social position as the enslaved.
McKeown (2021) agrees with Nuti that structural injustice approaches should take reparations for historical
injustice seriously, that states can be held liable over time and historical‐structural groups can be identified. But she
disagrees that the only historical injustice that can be repaired is historical injustice that continues into the present.
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Some historical ‘events’ warrant repair too. For instance, exclusively repairing the injustice experienced by African‐
Americans today denies what was unique about historical forms of that injustice, such as chattel slavery. Historical
events must be acknowledged and repaired too, if that is what victim groups want; failure to recognise their request
is a failure to take these groups seriously. Furthermore, it allows perpetrators of graves crimes in the past, like
European states, to evade their reparative obligations.

7 | CONCLUSION

The structural injustice literature has taken Young’s posthumously published Responsibility for Justice as its touch-
stone and theorists have responded to each aspect of Young’s theory: what structural injustice is, responsibility for
it, acting on responsibility, avoiding responsibility, and responsibility for historical injustice. The most‐explored
aspect is responsibility. The least‐explored aspect is what structural injustice is, but the literature is moving in
that direction. Another relatively under‐explored element is the role of continental philosophy in structural injustice
theory. Next steps will involve further development in these areas, from which new insights will emerge.
The value of the structural injustice literature has been to provide a more accurate assessment of real‐world
injustice than previous justice theory, which was generally idealised and abstract, or overly concerned with per-
sonal responsibility and luck. It represents a return to structural thinking in terms of actually existing structures and
forms of inequality and oppression. It grapples with the urgent problem of how to conceptualise and respond to the
weight of responsibility placed on each individual in our interconnected, interdependent and fundamentally unjust
world.
Perhaps one of the greatest indicators of the growing importance of structural injustice theory, is its reach
beyond political theory. Structural injustice theory is being used in bioethics and public health (Chung, 2012, 2021;
Ganguli‐Mitra, 2013, 2017; Powers & Faden, 2019). Articles published in education (Unterhalter, 2008), social work
(Clifford, 2013), law (Mantouvalou, 2020), and transitional justice (Balint, Evans, & McMillan, 2014) have all used
the structural injustice approach. Any field that is concerned with structural inequalities, disadvantage or
oppression, can utilize structural injustice theory. As the approach develops, it will likely reach even further. In
particular, there is the potential for a large literature on the COVID‐19 pandemic and structural injustice, given its
disproportionate effects on structurally disadvantaged groups, including Black and Minority ethnic (BAME) com-
munities, the working class, the elderly, the disabled, and women (in terms of careers, unemployment, and domestic
violence).

A C K N O W LE DG E ME N T S
Many thanks to Jude Browne and Ryoa Chung for helpful written comments.

C O NF L IC T O F IN T ER E S T
There is no conflict of interest.

O R C ID
Maeve McKeown [Link]

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A U TH O R BI O GR A PH Y

Maeve McKeown is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She is currently finishing her first
monograph With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice (Bloomsbury Academic,
forthcoming). Her research interests include structural injustice, reparations and feminism.

How to cite this article: McKeown, M. (2021). Structural injustice. Philosophy Compass, e12757. [Link]
org/10.1111/phc3.12757