Maeve McKeown’s ambitious book, With Power Comes Responsibility, is inspired by Iris Marion Young’s work on responsibility for structural injustice. It engages Young’s work critically and builds on it to better account for power relations. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, McKeown fleshes out her account of structural injustice with a focus on power, and in the second, she focuses on the appropriate conceptions of responsibility that apply once we adopt her account.
The basic intuition animating work on structural injustice, including Young’s, is that ordinary people’s everyday actions can embroil them in social-structural processes that produce unjust outcomes, even if those actions violate no apparent legal or moral norms. Indeed, “it seems impossible to participate in everyday life without somehow contributing to structural injustice” (1), McKeown notes. For Young, this means that responsibility for structural injustice cannot be understood on the traditional liability model that involves blame and punishment but needs to be theorized through the social connection model. By this, Young foregrounds our entanglement with these unjust social processes and proffers that such connections ought to produce a forward-looking orientation to ameliorating these injustices. McKeown takes Young’s approach as the starting point of her work and builds on it by differentiating between the roles played by ordinary people, on the one hand, and certain collective agents—most notably, multi-national corporations and states—on the other. This difference, she argues, requires reconceptualizing both structural injustice and the responsibility for it.
The book’s most important theoretical innovation is McKeown’s redefinition of structural injustice. She breaks it down into three types: “pure,” “avoidable,” and “deliberate.” Young’s theory only covers pure structural injustice. That is “when the injustice is unintended, unforeseeable and there are no agents with the capacity to remedy” it (45). McKeown points out, however, that most cases of structural injustice, including Young’s iconic case of housing deprivation, do not fit in this category. She argues persuasively that the most significant cases of structural injustice are avoidable and deliberate, and she dedicates a significant part of her book to working through carefully selected examples. She argues in some detail that the global garment industry with its reliance on sweatshop labor, far from being a case of pure structural injustice, is one where there is a “deliberate maintenance of the injustice in order to continue extracting profits” (88). In turn, McKeown illustrates avoidable structural injustice through the example of global poverty. Much can be done to alleviate global poverty, including debt relief to countries of the Global South (100), she points out, yet such actions are not taken by the agents who have it in their power to do so.
McKeown argues that finding examples of pure structural injustice is difficult because there usually are powerful agents who can avoid or mitigate injustices but choose not to do so or deliberately maintain the status quo. Still, she offers climate change as a possible contender because even though certain agents have caused, and continue to cause, more global warming than others, only a complete systemic overhaul of the global capitalist economy can remedy it. For that reason alone, she “tentatively suggest[s]” that the climate catastrophe could be approached as a case of pure structural injustice (104, 112).
Once we accept that much of the structural injustice we experience, however, is either avoidable or deliberate, then it becomes much easier and politically urgent to conceptualize who (or what) is responsible. Here, McKeown argues that, most of the time, there are identifiable collective agents, including corporations and states, that bear moral responsibility for structural injustice. These collective agents, in other words, can be rightly blamed for failing to mitigate these structural wrongs. This is a significant departure from Young’s work and is the main normative upshot of McKeown’s reconceptualization of structural injustice to account for differentiated power relations between agents. With this move, she places her work squarely in the theoretical camp that conceives of certain collectives, including corporations and states, as fit to bear moral responsibility. She furthermore argues that this responsibility is borne over time and across generations.
When it comes to ordinary individuals’ responsibility for the structural injustices to which they are linked, McKeown takes her cue from Young. She explains in the second part of the book that ordinary individuals are not morally responsible for the unjust outcomes of the structures in which they participate. She argues at length that blaming ordinary individuals for participating in unjust structures cannot be justified on deontological, consequentialist, or complicity grounds (115–143). In other words, they cannot be rightly blamed for participating in the unjust housing and garment markets, for example, or in any other unjust structures. This does not mean, however, that such everyday actors are “off the hook.” Rather, following Young again, McKeown argues that they bear political responsibility to organize themselves and work collectively towards remedying the structural injustice in question.
Here, McKeown makes another important theoretical contribution in that she builds on Young’s understanding of ordinary individuals’ political responsibility and gives it a richer theoretical grounding. She argues that the intuition underlying Young’s political responsibility is best understood as a political virtue. In developing this notion, she deviates from the thrust of much of the literature on virtue ethics, which encourages introspection and focus on the agent’s character. Instead, she draws on Hannah Arendt’s work to center the political in political virtue. On McKeown’s account, the political responsibility of ordinary individuals for structural injustice is to “cultivate the capacity for political solidarity” (171–172) and to “build solidaristic relations with others in order to engage in collective action” (174). This requires doing some important work, including “unlearning received biases and prejudices, … developing the capacity to listen to others, and to acknowledge and accept their different and competing concerns… and developing the stamina for continuing to engage” in political activism (176). Political responsibility, as McKeown understands it, “is the responsibility an individual has to do this work” (176).
On McKeown’s account, ordinary individuals discharge their political responsibility by engaging in collective action, including participating in social movements that challenge the corporate agents that either fail to avoid or deliberately perpetuate structural injustice. Yet there are many structural injustices in the world and individuals will invariably be faced with the need to select where to direct their attention, which movements and activist groups to join or support. Some of the criteria McKeown proposes for making this selection include considering whether an individual benefits from a structural injustice, whether they are already part of an organized group that collectively has the capacity to ameliorate it, whether they have an interest in it, and whether they occupy an “adjacent location” to that injustice (231). Throughout, however, McKeown remains adamant that none of those criteria warrant blaming ordinary individuals for the wrongs that they are entangled with but do not intend and which they cannot single-handedly ameliorate. If they fail to discharge their political responsibility, she recommends the “compassionate approach” of “steering each other in the right direction” (180). In contrast, she consistently reserves moral responsibility and blame for structural injustice for corporate and state actors.
McKeown’s book is an important addition to the literature on structural injustice and political responsibility. It makes significant theoretical contributions that are anchored in well-developed empirical examples. Despite deviating from some aspects of Young’s work, it remains in keeping with her approach to help “bridge the gap between what [is] happening on the ground and what is going on in the Ivory Tower” (11).
