Iris Marion Young was a brilliant feminist political theorist. I had the pleasure of reading a couple of her essays in graduate school, and they were formative. Today, I came across a lecture she gave in 2003 on “Political Responsibility and Structure Justice” (pdf link). In this post, I summarize the essay with a few key quotes, but it’s fairly short so I recommend just reading the whole thing.
Young opens with a vignette that introduces the complicated and confused concept of “structure” through an incredibly clear example of a working mother searching for, and failing to find affordable housing. Who is responsible for this injustice? How do we think about responsibility and justice in the context of structural harms?
Following this vignette about the housing market, Young offers a tight exposition of some of the major theoretical approaches to thinking about what structure means. This exposition alone is worth the price of admission, and would be a useful inclusion in a theory class, or maybe even an intro sociology or intro to social problems. She summarizes:
structures refer to the relation of social positions that condition the opportunities and life prospects of the persons located in those positions. This positioning occurs because of the way that actions and interactions reinforce the rules and resources avail- able for other actions and interactions involving people in other structural positions. The unintended consequences of the confluence of many actions often produce and reinforce opportunities and constraints, and these often make their mark on the physical conditions of future actions, as well as on the habits and expectations of actors. This mutually reinforcing process means that the positional relations and the way they condition individual lives are difficult to change. (Young 2003: 6)
This definition then lets her cleanly define structural injustice:
Structural injustices are harms that come to people as a result of structural processes in which many people participate. (Young 2003: 7)
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