Political Philosophy

Structural Injustice

What makes a social structure unjust?

Positions

  1. Capability Deprivation

    A social structure is unjust when it leaves people below a threshold level of the central human capabilities, whatever resources it distributes to them.

  2. Injustice as Domination

    A social structure is unjust when it leaves some people subject to others' capacity for arbitrary interference, whether or not that capacity is ever used.

  3. Injustice as Exploitation

    A social structure is unjust when its ordinary workings transfer the fruits of one group's labour to another, however voluntary each transaction within it appears.

    Held by Marxism

Engaged by schools of thought

  • Critical Theory

    Frankfurt School critique treats domination not just as legal inequality but as ideology and administered culture that reproduce unfreedom; its guiding interest is emancipation — the abolition of social injustice and of 'all forms of domination'.

  • Feminist Philosophy

    Feminist philosophy analyses patriarchy as a structure that distributes advantage and burden by gender across institutions rather than through individual wrongs, so gender injustice is treated as structural; the tradition carries several accounts of what makes the structure unjust rather than one named position.

Methods used to investigate this question

  • Ideology Critique

    Ideology critique examines how socially produced beliefs and representations misdescribe, legitimate, or reproduce relations of domination.

    Open in Methods

  • Immanent Critique

    Immanent critique reconstructs the standards a society or a position must appeal to in order to justify itself, and shows that the object cannot satisfy those standards while remaining what it is.

    Open in Methods

Discussion

Not every injustice is a matter of how a fixed stock of goods is divided. Some accounts locate injustice in relationships and structures — domination, exploitation, and the arrangements that decide who holds power over whom — which can persist even under a nominally fair distribution.

The answers name three distinct structural wrongs: subjection to another's arbitrary power, the appropriation of what others produce, and a failure to secure what people need in order to live a life they have reason to value. They are not rivals, since one arrangement can commit all three at once, and a pluralist view such as Young's counts each as its own way for a structure to be unjust. What they share is reframing the political question from "who gets what" to how the arrangement itself stands towards the people living under it.

References

  • Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (2011), ch. 2 'Structure as the Subject of Justice', which holds that structural injustice exists when social processes place large groups under systematic threat of domination or of deprivation of the means to develop their capacities
  • Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), ch. 1, on the limits of treating justice as the distribution of a fixed stock of goods
  • Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), ch. 2 'Five Faces of Oppression', which counts exploitation among several distinct forms of structural oppression rather than treating any one as the whole of it