Responsibility for structural injustice: A third thought

Some of the most invidious injustices are seemingly the results of impersonal workings of rigged social structures. Who bears responsibility for the injustices perpetrated through them? Iris Marion Young – the pre-eminent theorist of responsibility for structural injustice – argues that we should be responsible mostly in forward-looking ways for remedying structural injustice, rather than liable in a backward-looking way for creating it. In so doing she distinguishes between individualized responsibility for past structural injustice and collective responsibility for preventing future structural injustice. We reject both those arguments but embrace and extend Young’s third line of analysis, which was much less fully developed in her work. We agree that people should take a stand against structural injustice, even if it is likely to prove futile. That is in fact a position that is widely endorsed in social practice.