While the relationship among freedom, responsibility, and (constrained) agency are central to both moral philosophy and Christian ethics, these questions have increasingly been taken up using structural analyses. In Christian social ethics, questions of complicity and responsibility can employ language of social sin and have largely focused on the issues of climate change and global markets.[i] In moral philosophy, theorists have recently focused on questions of responsibility as a social phenomenon wherein we hold each other responsible by displaying reactive attitudes such as blame and praise.[ii] Relatedly, legal theorists have developed intricate theories of complicity.[iii] In our deeply interconnected and globalized world, complex structural injustices have become increasingly urgent to address, yet these social ills present difficulties for theorizing about individual responsibility.
A significant contribution to a structural analysis of these issues comes from Iris Marion Young’s 2011 Responsibility for Justice, where she develops a theory of structural injustice and its relationship to blame. Young argues that a structural injustice is a harm neither reducible to interpersonal injustice nor attributable to a specific unjust law or policy. While some laws might contribute to the structural processes that cause these injustices, “none can be singled out as the major cause.”[iv] The sources of structural injustices are multiple, large scale, and long term. As such, liability models of responsibility, which rely on backward-looking blame, are ill suited to analyze structural injustices. Young proposes a forward-looking political responsibility for structural injustices and collective political action for its redress. Moral philosophers have built on and refined Young’s theory, seeking greater clarity on responsibility amid structural injustices.[v]
According to Young, structural injustices are not attributable to individual actors, institutions, or policies. Rather, when individuals act to bring about an intended state of affairs, they reproduce the “structural properties, the positional relations of rules and resources, on which they draw for these actions.”[vi] Furthermore, we experience social structures as materially constraining because the “accumulated effects of past actions and decisions have left their mark on the physical world, opening some possibilities for present and future action and foreclosing others.”[vii] This sort of structural analysis, I believe, is central to understanding the relationship between freedom and responsibility, given its account of constrained agency.
In this paper, I turn to philosopher Sally Haslanger to further develop this analysis, namely her understanding of social practice and social systems. To begin, I draw primarily from “Agency under Structural Constraints in Social Systems” and a lecture she delivered in 2024 at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Conference on Structural Injustice. Here she critiques associationalist models which rely on collective intentionality and suggests that a social systems analysis can reveal how structural injustices emerge and persist through the interactions of individuals, culture, and material conditions.[viii] She argues that systems analysis illuminates how coordination emerges through social practices. In “What is a Social Practice?” Haslanger argues that social practices “are constitutive of social agency, enable coordination around things of value, and are a site for social intervention.”[ix] Social practices do not require collective intentionality, but they can contribute to structural injustice. Importantly, I argue that Haslanger’s understanding of a social practice as a site for social intervention, is a useful supplement to Young’s theory of political responsibility. While Young begins to sketch her understanding of a forward-looking political responsibility, her theory would be strengthened by a more robust vision of what constitutes political responsibility. As such, considering social practices as sites for intervention could be a fruitful way to think about addressing structural injustice as a form of political responsibility.
Some of the most pressing forms of structural injustice include, economic inequality, the climate crisis, gender-based violence, and housing and school segregation. Importantly, these social ills function to constrain our agency, further reifying them. However, Young’s theory helps us see that just because structural injustices constrain our agency does not mean we lack responsibility. Rather, a forward-looking political responsibility is better suited than liability models for understanding and addressing these ills. Haslanger’s understandings of social practices, I believe, can helpfully contribute to a richer understanding of what this political responsibility ought to look like.
[i] See for example Albino Barrera’s Market Complicity and Christian Ethics, the edited volume Distant Markets, Distant Harms: Economic Complicity and Christian Ethics, and Julie Hanlon Rubio’s essay “Moral Cooperation with Evil and Social Ethics,” which considers the case of individual consumers in the United States and the social evil of sweatshop labor.
[ii]This development began with Peter Strawson’s intervention in “Freedom and Resentment” which moved the field from metaphysical questions about whether and to what extent agents control their actions. For more contemporary developments regarding blame, see Blame: Its Nature and Norms (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013).
[iii] Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); Francine Banner, Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems (Oakland: University of California press, 2024).
[iv] Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47.
[v] Maeve McKeown, With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024); Jude Browne and Maeve McKeown, eds., What Is Structural Injustice?, Oxford Scholarship Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
[vi] Young, Responsibility for Justice, 60.
[vii] Young, Responsibility for Justice, 53.
[viii] Sally Haslanger, “Agency under Structural Constraints in Social Systems,” in What Is Structural Injustice?, ed. Jude Browne and Maeve McKeown (Oxford University Press, 2024).
[ix] Sally Haslanger, “What Is a Social Practice?,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 82 (July 2018): 231.
This paper explores the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and agency within the context of structural injustices, drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young and Sally Haslanger. Young's theory of structural injustice highlights the complex, long-term nature of harms that cannot be attributed to individual actors or specific policies but instead result from systemic forces. She critiques backward-looking liability models and advocates for a forward-looking political responsibility, emphasizing collective action to address these injustices. Haslanger’s analysis of social practices as sites for social intervention offers a valuable supplement to Young's theory by expanding our understanding of political responsibility. Social practices, which shape and are shaped by social systems, enable coordination and can be sites for addressing structural injustices. By integrating Haslanger’s perspective, this paper proposes a more robust vision of political responsibility, emphasizing collective intervention to confront structural injustices like economic inequality, climate change, gender-based violence, and segregation.