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3.4 Structural Injustice

One of Young's contribution, of particular importance to moral and political philosophy, global ethics and global justice are the concepts of structural injustice and its associated approach to responsibility: the social connection model. In an idea developed at length in Responsibility for Justice, a collection of Young's work published after her death as well as in several other writings. Young argues that structural (social) injustice 'exists when social processes put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as these processes enable others to dominate or have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising their capacities’. Because most of us are implicated at some level in contributing to structural injustice, this also gives rise to what Young calls a social connection model of responsibility.In this model, we are to ask ourselves how agents and institutions are to think of themselves in relation to structural injustice. This is starkly contrasted with a 'liability for harm' model of responsibility, which is more focused on finding guilt, blame or fault for a particular harm. According to Young, the main reason why the liability model fails to address structural injustice is that structures are produced and reproduced by a large number of people acting within accepted norms, rules and practices, and so harm cannot always be traced back to the actions or motivations of particular individuals. The social connection model, in contrast, is forward-looking suggesting that all those who contribute through their actions to structural processes that result in injustice have a (political) responsibility to remedy that injustice. In this, she departs from and contrasts her approach to other political philosophers such as John Rawls and David Miller and the focus on distributive and statist approaches to justice, and draws much inspiration from Hannah Arendt's work.

Young applies her model of responsibility to a wide range of real-world scenarios, but perhaps most interestingly in the global justice context, to global labour justice. For example, in connection to the unjust conditions of sweatshop labour, and the political responsibility of consumers in high income countries to remedy it. The social connection model has five main features. It is (1) Not isolating (unlike the liability model which seeks to define specific liable actors), it (2) judges the background conditions that other models would find normal or acceptable, it is (3) forward-looking not backward-looking, it is a model of (4) shared responsibilities, and it can only be (5) discharged through collective action (e.g through community engagement rather than personal action).