Iris Marion Young

Central to Young's philosophy is the contention that concepts of justice were not limited to individual desert. Instead, the recognition of social groups was essential to redressing structural inequalities. Because the social rules, laws, and institutional routines constraining certain people constrain them as a group, and because our awareness of injustice almost universally compares classes of people rather than individuals directly, our evaluations of inequality and injustice must recognize the salience of social groups as constituent of a complete theory of justice.[3]

Young's recognition of social groups impelled her to argue for a post-liberal "politics of difference," in which equal treatment of individuals does not override the redress of group-based oppression. Young contrasted her approach with contemporary liberal political philosophers like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, who she claims conflate the moral equivalence of people with procedural rules that treat all people equally.

Among Young's most widely disseminated ideas is her model of the "five faces of oppression", first published in Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), in which she presented a relational approach to the question of justice, based upon a group theory of oppression.[4] Synthesizing feminist, queer, poststructuralist, and post-colonial critiques of classical Marxism, Young argued at least five distinct types of oppression could not be collapsed into more fundamental causes, and furthermore could not be reduced to dimensions of distributive justice.[5] Her "five faces" are:

• Exploitation
• Marginalization
• Powerlessness
• Cultural domination
• Violence

One of Young's most well-known essays is "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality," first published in Human Studies (1980). In it she explores differences in feminine and masculine movement in the context of a gendered and embodied phenomenological perspective[2] based on ideas from Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She discusses how girls are socialized and conditioned to restrict their body movement and think of their bodies as fragile, which then has repercussions for their confidence in accomplishing tasks and goals later in life. The essay also serves as a critique and extension of Simone de Beauvoir's ideas of 'immanence' and 'transcendence'.

One of Young's contributions, of particular importance to moral and political philosophy, global ethics and global justice are the concepts of structural injustice and its associated approach to responsibility: the social connection model. In an idea developed at length in Responsibility for Justice,[6] a collection of Young's work published after her death as well as in several other writings,[7][8] Young argues that structural (social) injustice "exists when social processes put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as these processes enable others to dominate or have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising their capacities".[9] Because most of us are implicated at some level in contributing to structural injustice, this also gives rise to what Young calls a social connection model of responsibility.[2] In this model, we are to ask ourselves how agents and institutions are to think of themselves in relation to structural injustice. This is starkly contrasted with a 'liability for harm' model of responsibility, which is more focused on finding guilt, blame or fault for a particular harm. According to Young, the main reason why the liability model fails to address structural injustice is that structures are produced and reproduced by a large number of people acting within accepted norms, rules and practices, and so harm cannot always be traced back to the actions or motivations of particular individuals. The social connection model, in contrast, is forward-looking suggesting that all those who contribute through their actions to structural processes that result in injustice[8] have a (political) responsibility to remedy that injustice. In this, she departs from and contrasts her approach to other political philosophers such as John Rawls and David Miller and the focus on distributive and statist approaches to justice, and draws much inspiration from Hannah Arendt's work.

Young applied her model of responsibility to a wide range of real-world scenarios, but perhaps most to global labour justice.[10] For example, in connection to the unjust conditions of sweatshop labour,[11] and the political responsibility of consumers in high income countries to remedy it. The social connection model has five main features. It is (1) Not isolating (unlike the liability model which seeks to define specific liable actors), it (2) judges the background conditions that other models would find normal or acceptable, it is (3) forward-looking not backward-looking, it is a model of (4) shared responsibilities, and it can only be (5) discharged through collective action (e.g. through community engagement rather than personal action).

• Young, Iris Marion; Allen, Jeffner (1989). The thinking muse: feminism and modern French philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253205025.
• Young, Iris (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691023151.
• Young, Iris (1997). Intersecting voices: dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691012001.
• Young, Iris Marion; DiQuinzio, Patrice (1997). Feminist ethics and social policy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780585025438.
• Young, Iris Marion; Jaggar, Alison (2000). A companion to feminist philosophy. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. ISBN 9780631227649.
• Young, Iris (2000). Inclusion and democracy. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198297550.
• Young, Iris (2002) [1990]. Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Books on Demand. ISBN 9780608050478.
• Young, Iris Marion; Macedo, Stephen (2003). Child, family, and state. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 9780814756829. (Conference proceedings)
• Young, Iris (2007). Global challenges: war, self determination and responsibility for justice. Cambridge Malden, Massachusetts: Polity. ISBN 9780745638355.
• Young, Iris Marion; Shanley, Mary Lyndon; O'Neill, Daniel (2008). Illusion of consent engaging with Carole Pateman. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 9780271035918.
• Young, Iris (2011). Responsibility for justice. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199970957.
• Young, Iris Marion; Levy, Jacob T. (2011). Colonialism and its legacies. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. ISBN 9780739142943.

• Young, Iris Marion (1995), "Gender as seriality: thinking about women as a social collective", in Brenner, Johanna; Laslett, Barbara; Arat, Yeşim (eds.), Rethinking the political: women, resistance, and the state, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 99–124, ISBN 9780226073996.
• Young, Iris Marion (2001), "Pushing for inclusion: Justice and the politics of difference", in Terchek, Ronald J.; Conte, Thomas C. (eds.), Theories of democracy: a reader, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 268–278, ISBN 9780847697250.
• Young, Iris Marion (2005), "Five faces of oppression", in Cudd, Ann E.; Andreasen, Robin O. (eds.), Feminist theory: a philosophical anthology, Oxford, UK Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 91–104, ISBN 9781405116619.
• Young, Iris Marion (2005), "The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current security state", in Friedman, Marilyn (ed.), Women and citizenship, Studies in Feminist Philosophy, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 15–34, ISBN 9780195175356.
• Young, Iris Marion (2006), "The complexities of coalition", in Burns, Lynda (ed.), Feminist alliances, Amsterdam New York: Rodopi, pp. 11–18, ISBN 9789042017283.

• Young, Iris Marion (1980). "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality". Human Studies 3 (2): 137–156. JSTOR 20008753.
• Young, Iris Marion (1985). "Humanism, gynocentrism and feminist politics". Women's Studies International Forum. 8 (3): 173–183. doi:10.1016/0277-5395(85)90040-8.
• Young, Iris Marion (January 1989). "Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship". Ethics. 99 (2): 250–274. doi:10.1086/293065. JSTOR 2381434. S2CID 54215809.
• Young, Iris Marion (Spring 1994). "Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. University of Chicago Press. 19 (3): 713–738.
• Young, Iris Marion (1997). "On the politization of the social in recent western political theory". Filozofski vestnik. 18 (2): 153–176. OCLC 438842134.
• Archibugi, Daniele and Young, Iris Marion (2002) "Envisioning a Global Rule of Law", Eurozine, 14 June 2002.

Her writings have been translated into several languages, including German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Swedish and Croatian, and she lectured widely in North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa.