Analysis Of Iris Young's Justice And The Politics Of Difference

In her 1990 book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Young draws attention to the fact that “contemporary philosophical theories of justice… tend to restrict the meaning of social justice to the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens among society’s members. Young believes that this is too narrow a conception of justice, and proposes that those interested in truly understanding justice need to look beyond the distributive paradigm. Her critique goes right at the heart of liberal political theory, and as such has been the subject of intense scholarly discussion. In this paper, I will examine her criticisms of the distributive paradigm in order to determine which of them can be reconciled with conventional liberalism and which require a radical reconception of the bases of liberal moral theory. Young divides her criticism of the distributive paradigm into two main points: (i) that “it tends to ignore, at the same time as it often presupposes, the institutional context that determines material distributions” and (ii) “when extended to

To Young, economic justice is not just about who has money because “economic domination derives at least as much from the corporate and legal structures and procedures that give some persons the power to make decisions about investment, production, marketing, employment, interest rates, and wages that affect millions of other people” (Young 23). In the distributive paradigm, as Young conceives of it, there is no mechanism for examining the justice of an arrangement that concentrates decision making power in the hands of a select few unless that power is used to create distributive injustices of some other