Justice and the Politics of Difference

Iris Young (1990)

• Instead of focusing on distribution, a conception of J should begin with the concepts of domination and op-
pression (3)
• Brings to light issues of decision making, DoL, and culture that are often ignored; the importance of social
group differences in structuring social relations and oppression -> social J requires explicitly acknowledg-
ing and attending to those group differences in order to undermine oppression
• Adopts critical theory approach generally due to shortcomings of political philosophy - CT rejects as illusory
the effort to construct a universal normative system insulated from a particular society; normative reflection
must begin from historically specific circumstances - the call to ‘be just’ is always situated in social and po-
litical practices that precede the philosopher

Summary:

• Chapter 1 - distinguishes between an approach to social J that gives primacy to having and one that give
primacy to doing. Distributive paradigm tends to focus on material goods and social positions and in doing
so, obscures other issues of institutional organisation that it assumes as a given. Distributive J extents to
the politics - all aspects of institutional organisation insofar as they are potentially subject to collective deci-
sion. DisJ should be limited to material goods; oppression and domination primary terms for conceptualis-
ing inJ (8)
• Chapter 2 - Oppression happens to social groups but philosophy and social theory lack a viable concept of
the social group. Argues that groups exist prior to individuals because individuals get their identity from
group affinities (9)
• Chapter 4 - impartiality (as denial of difference) contributes to social group oppression and argues for a
politics the recognises rather than represses difference. Impartiality serves 2 ideological functions: (1) feed
cultural imperialism by allowing the particular experience and perspective of privileged groups to parade as
universal and (2) legitimates authoritarian hierarchy. Also works at level of civic public which CT is also
guilty of - civic public is not universal and unified. But idea that it is excludes from citizenship persons iden-
tified with body and feeling
• Chapter 5 - implications of modern society’s denigration of the body
• Chapter 6 - argues for principles and practices that identify liberation with social equality that affirms group
difference and fosters inclusion and participation in all aspects of public life
• Principle of = treatment originally assures as guarantee for fair inclusive treatment - this also suppresses
difference. Politics of difference sometimes implies overriding a principle of equal treatment with principle
that group differences should be acknowledged in public policy in order to reduce actual/potential oppres-
sion. Argues that differential treatment doesn’t stigmatise these groups so long as we don’t see difference
as being oppositional

Chapter 2 - Five Faces of Oppression

• Enabling conception of J - J should refer to distribution as well a to the institutional conditions necessary for
the development and exercise of individual capacities and collective communication and cooperation. InJ in
this conception refers to two forms of disabling constrains: oppression and domination (39)
• Oppression is incommensurate with the language of liberal individualism
• Cannot define a single set of criteria for oppressed groups but in general, they all suffer some inhibition of
their ability to ‘develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts and feelings’ (40)

• Oppression refers to the everyday practices of liberal society; structural - ‘causes are embedded in un-
questioned norms, habits and symbols’; reproduced in economic, political and cultural institutions (41)
• Oppression -> privilege (42)

• Social group. ‘…is a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms,
practices or way of life. Members of a group have a specific affinity with one another because of their simi-
lar experience or way of life…Groups are an expression of social relations; a group only exists in relation to
at least one other group’ (43)
• A group isn’t defined by a set of shared attributes (e.g. an aggregate) but by a sense of identity (44)
• Groups are real as social relations not as substances (so avoiding reification) (44)
• Traditional - social ontology is methodologically individualist or atomist - self is autonomous, unified, free
etc (45). Oppression is identified with group identification - so to get rid of oppression means eliminating
groups - people should be treated as individuals. (46)
• Young - groups are an inevitable and desirable aspect of modern social processes. Social justice requires
promotion and respect for group differences without oppression (47)
• Group differentiation isn’t itself oppressive

Faces of Oppression

• Exploitation: oppression occurs through a steady process of the transfer of the results of the labour of one
social group to benefit another (49)
• Marginalisation. Whole category of people is expelled from unseal participation in socio life (potential suf-
ferers of severe material deprivation and even extermination) (53)
• Liberalism has traditionally asserted the right of all rational autonomous agents to equal citizenship.
But welfare state - because the excluded depend on bureaucratic institutions for support/services
they are subject to patronising, demeaning treatment by the politics and people associated with wel-
fare bureaucracies (54) ‘Dependency…implies, as it has in all liberal societies, a sufficient warrant to
suspend basic rights to privacy, respect and individual choice’. Dependency doesn’t need to be op-
pressive
• Powerlessness. Lack the authority, status and sense of self that professionals tend to have (57)
• Cultural imperialism. ‘To experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meaning
of a society render the articular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereo-
type one’s group and mark it out as the Other’ (59). Dominant group’s cultural expressions receive wide
dissemination so they become unremarkable, universal and true. These groups are defined from the out-
side and placed within a dominant network of meanings. So the dominant culture’s stereotyped and inferi-
orised images of the group must be internalised by group members to an extent e.g. Du Bois double con-
sciousness
• Violence. Oppression lies not so much in the actual victimisation 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 (62)

Chapter 4 - The Ideal of Impartiality and the Civic Public

• Ideal of impartiality in moral theory expresses a logic of identity that seeks to reduce differences to unity.
Particularities are abstracted from showing impartiality to be an impossible ideal because the particularities
of context and affiliation cannot and should not be removed from moral reasoning. Impartiality also corre-
sponds to civic realm in terms of denying/repressing difference (97)
• ‘logic of identity’ denies/represses difference by conceptualising entities in terms of substance rather than
process/relation. In doing so, it turns the merely different into the absolutely other (98-99)
• Impartiality is taken as the hallmark of reason in modern ethics

• The myth of the neutral state serves an ideological function insofar as it helps account for the distributive
paradigm of J. Assumption that distributive J is implicitly/explicitly ‘dispensed’ by an authority and that this
authority is impartial. So impartiality legitimates bureaucratic authority (115)
• Argues that we need real participatory structures in which actual people, with their differences, assert their
perspectives of social issues within institutions that encourage the representation of their distinct voices
(116)
• Citizenship by no means exhausts people’s social identities but it takes moral priority over all other social
actives in strong democracy (which regrets any division in the public which ideally expresses a common
will and common judgement of all the citizenry) (117)
• Communicative ethics - can be understood as the idea that normative claims are the outcome of the ex-
pression of needs, feelings and desires which individuals claim to have met and recognised by others un-
der conditions where all have an equal voice in the expression of their needs and ideas (118)
• When we engage in particularities then we can really achieve something that looks like the common good
• Young defines the private not as what the public excludes (e.g. Arendt) but the aspect of an individual’s life
and activity that any person has a right to exclude others from (119). Former conception of the public has
resulted in the exclusion of persons and aspects of persons from public life (120)

Chapter 6 - Social Movements and the Politics of Difference

…
Emancipation through the politics of difference

• Implicit in emancipatory movements asserting a positive sense of group difference is a different ideal of lib-
eration - can call this ‘democratic cultural pluralism’. Here, the good society doesn’t eliminate/transcend dif-
ference but ‘rather there is equality among socially and culturally differentiated groups who mutually re-
spect one another and affirm one another in their differences’ (163)
• Insisting equality and liberation but ignoring difference has three consequences:
• Blindness to difference disadvantages groups whose experience, culture an socialised capacities differ
form those of privileged groups. Assimilation brings formerly excluded groups into the fold so rules and
standards have already been set and moreover, don’t recognise these rules as being privileged
• Ideal of universal humanity without social group differences allows privileged groups to ignore their own
group specificity and so perpetuates cultural imperialism (165)
• Denigration of groups that deviate from this ‘neutral’ standard often produces an internalised devaluation
by members of those groups themselves e.g. feminists avoiding crying
• So politics that asserts the positivity of group difference is liberating and empowering - reclaiming identity.
Also promotes notion of group solidarity against individualism of liberal humans (166)

Reclaiming the making of difference

• Good/bad opposition is always implied in the marking of difference - about devaluation and the naming of
inferiority (170)
• This essentialising also prevents groups from affirming their specificity in their own terms

Respecting difference in policy

• Assumes that a goal of social justice is social equality. Equality refers ‘primarily to the full percolation and
inclusion of everyone in a society’s major institutions, and the socially supported substantive opportunity for
all to develop and exercise their capacities and realise their choices’ (173)