CONCEPT
The Social Connection Model of Responsibility
Young's forward-looking theory of political responsibility — the obligation to transform unjust structures falls on all who participate in them, differentiated by power, privilege, interest, and collective ability.
The social connection model is Young's answer to the question the liability model cannot address: how do we respond to harm that no individual caused? Her answer shifts responsibility from a backward-looking judgment of fault to a forward-looking obligation of political action. Because structural injustice is produced by collective institutional processes, it can only be transformed by collective institutional action. And because all participants in the structure are connected to the outcomes it produces, all participants bear some share of the responsibility to work for its transformation — not because they are guilty, but because they are embedded. The model refuses both the liability model's search for villains and the despair that follows when no villain can be found.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The model's most uncomfortable feature is that it distributes responsibility asymmetrically but universally. The AI company bears more responsibility than the individual consumer because it has more power over structural processes. The venture