Justice and The Politics of Difference

“I do not regard any of the theoretical approaches which I take up as a totality that must be accepted or rejected in its entirety. Each provides useful tools for the analyses and arguments I wish to make.”

While Young uses critical theory and other schools of thought, such as communitarianism, to build her argument, she refuses to be pigeonholed into any of these approaches. She is making an argument that bridges contrasting schools of thought. This approach makes her argument more difficult to dismiss by simply referring to the weaknesses of a particular school of thought.

“Politics in this sense concerns all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking.”

Justice applies to all that is political, and Young defines politics in a broad sense. It is not at all limited to what the government does but rather includes economic, social, and cultural spheres. Whenever decisions are made that impact people’s actions and opportunities, whether that be in the workplace or the school, politics is taking place. This conception allows Young to expand the purview of justice beyond matters of distribution.

Individuals are not primarily receivers of goods or carriers of properties, but actors with meanings and purposes, who act with, against, or in relation to one another.”

Young seeks to expand the conception of justice beyond the traditional question of distribution to include decision-making, the division of labor, and culture. As a result, she highlights that people are agents. How decisions are made and by whom are as or more important than what those decisions are. In fact, she argues that understanding injustices in the distribution of goods requires broadening the conception of justice to include these procedural areas.

“Philosophers interested in nurturing this emancipatory imagination and extending it beyond questions of distribution should, I suggest, lay claim to the term justice rather than abandon it.”

Some Marxists and critical theorists have dismissed the very concept of justice as bourgeois or capitalist. Recognizing the power appeals to justice have in the popular imagination, Young refuses to surrender the concept and instead seeks to redefine it. In so doing, she wants to give theoretical voice to those in new social movements fighting against oppression and domination.

“New left social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, however, shifted the meaning of the concept of oppression. In its new usage, oppression designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society.”

Young details the several forms that oppression takes and notes its centrality to injustice. Social groups have organized movements for change against these forms of oppression. Importantly, Young argues that the oppression women and people of color experience is not always intentional but the product of unconscious behaviors and feelings, such as discomfort. Because the behaviors are unintentional, victims are often chastised for complaining about them and thus remain silent.

“The injustice of capitalist society consists in the fact that some people exercise their capacities under the control, according to the purposes, and for the benefit of other people.” 

When people are told what to do and have no input into that decision, they are oppressed. For Young, justice requires that people have a voice in decisions that impact their lives. That is why she maintains that the division of labor is central to the conception of justice.

“Cultural imperialism involves the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm.”

One of the five faces of oppression, culture imperialism defines difference from the young, able-bodied, professional, white male as deviant. The norms of this group are particular to it, as are the norms of other social groups. Yet other social groups are measured by this standard and found wanting or simply rendered invisible. All cultural products represent the dominant group’s perspective.

“The oppression of violence consists not only in direct victimization, but in the daily knowledge shared by all members of oppressed groups that they are liable to violation, solely on account of their group identity.” 

Another of the five faces of oppression, violence victimizes not only the injured person but all members of the social group. When police officers beat a Black person, all Black people experience that violence and know that it could happen to them. Likewise, women feel the terror associated with rape simply based on their identity. Young exposes the shared experiences of members of social groups and how those experiences differ from those of the dominant group(s).

“In its process of conflict resolution, interest-group pluralism makes no distinction between the assertion of selfish interests and normative claims to justice or right.”

Interest-group politics denies any notion of groups or publics that are not grounded in self-interest. In so doing, it trivializes the demands of social groups for justice and rights. Such a politics can only offer material rewards to social groups and therefore fails to provide an end to oppression. Young seeks to change this form of politics and its underlying distributive theory of justice.

“Increasingly the activities of everyday work and life come under rationalized bureaucratic control, subjecting people to the discipline of authorities and experts in many areas of life.”

Domination occurs when people cannot participate in determining their own actions. Bureaucracies often dominate workers, requiring them to do certain actions, and clients, who must accept the bureaucracies’ decisions. Such bureaucracies characterize not only government, but also corporations, hospitals, schools, and other institutions. They assume that reason dictates one solution to the neutral observer, which is a fallacy per Young.

“Challenges to institutional structure and demands for change in decision making structures have often been rechanneled into distributive solutions by the politics of welfare capitalist society.”

When movements have formed to seek democracy and changes to the very form of politics, those in the political system have offered material benefits only. In some cases, groups have been brought back into the system (or, in Young’s words, recontained) as a result. These insurgent groups are fighting for a new form of justice that confronts oppression and focuses on process. The system resists and neutralizes them.

“The ideal of impartiality expresses in fact an impossibility, a fiction. No one can adopt a point of view that is completely impersonal and dispassionate, completely separated from any particular context and commitments.”

According to Young, no one can shed their perspective and imagine a universal viewpoint dictated by reason. The claim that there is such a universal and impartial viewpoint hides the particularity of the dominant group’s perspective and defines out of existence the perspectives of other social groups.

“A ‘moral point of view’ arises not from a lonely self-legislating reason, but from the concrete encounter with others, who demand that their needs, desires, and perspectives be recognized.”

Young denies the idea that reason can dictate one answer to a moral problem. There is no such thing as a universal standard devoid of context. Given that reason cannot dictate moral choice, the only way to arrive at moral and policy decisions is via a democracy that includes all perspectives.

“It is simply not possible for flesh-and-blood decisionmakers, whether in government or not, to adopt the standpoint of transcendental reason when they make decisions, divorcing themselves from the group affiliations and commitments that constitute their identities and give them a perspective on social life.”

Young explains that bureaucracies are not neutral, even though they claim to be. Those in power bring their biases with them. For example, a white, middle-class judge or arbiter is likely to misunderstand the behavior of those from different backgrounds. However, society assumes the particular experiences of the dominant class to be universal, making the exposure of their particularity and bias all the more difficult.

“In the developing sciences of natural history, phrenology, physiognomy, ethnography, and medicine, the gaze of the scientific observer was applied to bodies, weighing, measuring, and classifying them according to a normative hierarchy.”

Young explains that as the ostensibly objective Western scientific method developed, the scientific observer—the subject—was in fact white, male, wealthy, and Christian. Others were objectified, with their physical health, moral soundness, and mental balance deemed wanting. While such overt racism and sexism is no longer prevalent, the presumption of the young, white, middle-class man as the norm remains in the US psyche.

“If contemporary oppression is enacted through a body aesthetic, through nervousness and avoidance motivated by threats to the basic security system, and through images and stereotypes that simultaneously feed such behavior, legitimate it, and allay the fears it expresses, then normative reflection on justice should include attention to such phenomena.”

Contemporary racism and sexism are often unintentional and expressed through gestures and avoidance, but victims are nonetheless oppressed by them. As a result, Young maintains that political theorists must address these psychological and physical aspects of injustice. A discussion of justice cannot limit itself to abstract reason and intentional behavior.

“The assimilationist ideal assumes that equal social status for all persons requires treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and standards. A politics of difference argues, on the other hand, that equality as the participation and inclusion of all groups sometimes requires different treatment for oppressed or disadvantaged groups.”

The assimilationist ideal assumes a universal standard but in fact embodies the perspective of the dominant group. It disadvantages social groups in the name of procedural fairness or neutrality. Because there are differences among social groups, justice requires differential treatment at times. Young cites maternity leave and the rights of American Indians as examples.

“If the unified public does not transcend group differences and often allows the perspective and interests of privileged groups to dominate, then a democratic public can counteract this bias only by acknowledging and giving voice to the group differences within it.”

Young distinguishes her theory from those of communitarians, who seek to find a common good upon which all agree. There is no such thing, according to Young: Such claims to a common perspective mask the reality of the privileged group’s dominance. As a result, Young calls for the formal representation of oppressed or disadvantaged social groups in politics, which she defines broadly.

“Even if strong affirmative action programs existed in most institutions, however, they would have only a minor effect in altering the basic structure of group privilege and oppression in the United States.”

Affirmative action has use as a policy in offsetting unconscious biases. However, it legitimates a hierarchical division of labor—one that includes very few desirable positions—and the notion of merit as a means to distribute those positions. Most people will not have access to professional positions and will be doomed to follow orders. Young not only exposes merit as a mythical concept but seeks to change radically the organization of the workplace.

“Specialized knowledge, which experts should present and disseminate, is indispensable for decisionmaking, but experts cannot claim the authority to make the decisions on grounds of their expertise.” 

Young is a supporter of expertise, science, and the pursuit of knowledge. Experts help to identify facts and alternatives, but they cannot make decisions for others. For example, people rely upon scientists to explain the risks of climate change and economists to identify the costs and benefits of policies, but ultimately the people, not the experts, must decide which values they want to pursue.

“But recognizing the value and specificity of such face-to-face relations is different from privileging them and positing them as a model for the institutional relations of a whole society.”

Young acknowledges that a good society should nurture relations among small groups, such as friendships. However, face-to-face interaction via small, decentralized communities is not a good model for politics. It is not practical and ignores the urban character of much of modern life.

“Politics must be conceived as a relationship of strangers who do not understand one another in a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and distance.”

Young argues that individuals are not fully present to themselves and therefore do not know even themselves wholly, let alone others. Her politics of difference embraces this otherness and calls upon people to express their perspectives to one another. She maintains that urban life provides the imagination with unrealized possibilities of the good life.

“In the city persons and groups interact within spaces and institutions they all experience themselves as belonging to, but without those interactions dissolving into unity or commonness.”

City life allows for both belonging and difference. Young wants to avoid the creation of a false standard of universality, whether it be in the form of reason or community. She applauds city life for four virtues: One invites people to encounter the novel or different and lose their own identities, and another allows for social differentiation without exclusion.