WORK
Responsibility for Justice
Young's posthumously published 2011 masterwork developing the social connection model — the book that extended structural analysis from distribution to responsibility itself.
Responsibility for Justice is the book Young was refining in the years before her death from esophageal cancer in 2006. Published posthumously by Oxford University Press in 2011 with an introduction by Martha Nussbaum, it represents the culminating statement of her political philosophy. The book takes up the question her earlier work on structural injustice raised but did not fully answer: given that unjust structures are produced by collective processes rather than individual wrongdoing, how should responsibility be theorized? Her answer — the social connection model — has become increasingly central to debates about globalization, climate change, and now the AI transition.
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The book opens with the case of sweatshop labor in the global garment industry, the situation that first convinced Young that standard responsibility frameworks were inadequate. Consumers buy cheap clothes. Retailers contract with manufacturers. Manufacturers subcontract to local factories. Factories employ workers under conditions that would be illegal in the consuming countries. No actor in the chain violated a contract, broke