Responsibility for Justice
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.
In the AI Story
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 a law, or intended the worker's suffering. Yet the suffering is real and the structure is unjust. Young uses the case to develop her distinction between the social connection model and the liability model.
The book's central chapters develop the four parameters — power, privilege, interest, collective ability — that differentiate political responsibility across actors in a structural process. Young was emphatic that these parameters do not assign differential blame but differential capacity and obligation. The multinational retailer has more responsibility than the individual consumer because it has more power to shape the structural conditions. The consumer still has responsibility, but her responsibility takes the form of political participation in efforts to transform the structure, not guilt about her individual purchases.
The book closes with an extended engagement with Arendt's distinction between guilt and responsibility and a defense of the claim that political responsibility for structural injustice is shared, forward-looking, and non-dischargeable. The chapters on the specific responsibilities of the structurally harmed — the insistence that victims of structural injustice bear political responsibility for transforming the structures that harm them — are the book's most controversial and, in the AI context, its most urgent.
Origin
The book emerged from two decades of Young's engagement with globalization, particularly her work with labor organizations and international NGOs on sweatshop campaigns. The manuscripts were substantially complete at her death and were prepared for publication by Nussbaum and colleagues. The book has proven extraordinarily durable: sales and citations have increased rather than decreased since publication, and the framework has been applied to an expanding range of structural phenomena Young did not live to see — including the AI transition.
Key Ideas
Liability model vs. social connection model. The book's load-bearing distinction, and the framework for every subsequent application.
Four parameters of differentiated responsibility. Power, privilege, interest, collective ability — the operational structure of the theory.
Forward-looking responsibility. The obligation is to structural transformation, not backward-looking blame.
Non-dischargeable. As long as the structure persists, the responsibility persists — a genuinely uncomfortable implication.
The victims' responsibility. The structurally harmed bear political responsibility too — the book's hardest and most contested claim.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford, 2011), with Martha Nussbaum's foreword
- Catherine Lu, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge, 2017)
- Robin Zheng, "What Is My Role in Changing the System?" Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (2018)
- Maeve McKeown, With Power Comes Responsibility (Bloomsbury, 2024)