Responsibility for structural injustice

• Main Author: Farid Abdel-Nour
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2018-01-01
• Series: Ethics & Global Politics
• Subjects: Structural injustice; Iris Marion Young; responsibility; causal responsibility; outcome responsibility; remedial responsibility; Bernard Williams; liability model; social-connection model; David Miller
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/16544951.2018.1512831
• ISSN: 1654-4951; 1654-6369

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.