Women's and Gender Studies Program
Date of this Version
2018
Citation
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2018) 21: 869–885. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9892-8.
Abstract
What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the Role-Ideal Model is that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles as parents, colleagues, employers, citizens, etc., because roles are the site where structure meets agency. In short, the Role-Ideal Model (1) explains how individual action contributes to structural change, (2) justifies demands for action from each particular agent, (3) specifies what kinds of acts should be undertaken, (4) moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and (5) provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice.
Included in
Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Human Ecology Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social Influence and Political Communication Commons, Social Psychology and Interaction Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Comments
Copyright 2018, the author. Open access material. CC-BY 4.0.