Responsibility for justice

Abstract

According to Young, guilt is an inappropriate way to account for structural injustice because structural injustices may arise out of multitudinous individual and collective acts that are not in themselves unjust. Young argues instead that our social connection to the victims and the perpetrators of slavery (for example, some living Americans may have material disadvantages or benefits that are traceable back to slavery) demands that we seek both to redress the resulting social disadvantage and to 'do justice' to the history of slavery and of its continuing effects on society. By contrast, in Young's social connection model, responsibility is borne by each person to different degrees depending on their social connection (which consists, to some extent, in personal actions) to some wrong that is not perpetrated by a collective agent but by many agents acting without coordination.