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. 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. 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'.

Methods used to investigate this question

  • Genealogy

    Genealogy reconstructs how values, concepts, identities, or practices emerged through contingent struggles, institutions, and relations of power.

    Open in Methods

  • Historical-Materialist Critique

    Historical-materialist critique explains ideas, institutions, and social conflicts through historically changing material production and class relations.

    Open in Methods

  • 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.

Answers differ over what the defect in a structure actually consists in: subjection to another's arbitrary power, the appropriation of what others produce, or a failure to secure what people need in order to live a life they have reason to value. 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