CONCEPT
Structural Injustice
Young's name for harm produced by the accumulated rule-following behavior of many decent people operating within institutional arrangements — authorless, blameless, and real.
Structural injustice, in Young's precise usage, exists when social processes place large groups under systematic threat of domination or deprivation while enabling others to dominate or develop capacities. The critical word is processes — not decisions, not conspiracies, not individual cruelty, but the interlocking actions of millions operating within institutional rules no single person authored. The Chicago advertising agency that laid off its illustration department contained no villain: the creative director admired his team, the clients followed budgets, the illustrators followed career paths. Yet twelve people lost their livelihoods. Structural injustice names this gap between the absence of a wrongdoer and the presence of a wrong, and insists that the gap itself is the object of justice.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept cuts against the dominant liability model of responsibility, which requires an identifiable perpetrator, a causal chain, and a breach of duty. Young developed structural injustice precisely because the liability model systematically fails in cases like early industrialization, globalization, and now AI — cases where the harm