Reimagining Justice Beyond Blame: Defending Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model

Abstract

This paper defends Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model (SCM) as a superior framework for understanding responsibility for structural injustice and proposes a conceptual intervention into what I term the punishment dilemma. The dilemma is this: the liability model’s backward-looking focus on blame is conceptually mismatched to structural phenomena (since no identifiable perpetrator exists), yet impunity is morally intolerable. The liability model – built on identifiable wrongdoing, direct causation, and culpable intent – fails because structural harms are processual, systemic, and normalized. Young’s SCM performs a foundational shift from fault to social position: responsibility derives not from culpable action but from constitutive participation in interconnected social processes that produce unjust outcomes. I reconstruct the SCM’s philosophical architecture, showing how its five features and four parameters provide a coherent alternative. Drawing on Virginia Mantouvalou’s analysis of state-mediated vulnerability and Serena Parekh’s work on gender violence and refugee policy, I demonstrate that structural injustice generates a demand for accountability that retributive punishment cannot satisfy. I then develop transformative sanction: punitive or quasi-punitive measures justified not by backward-looking desert but by forward-looking structural disruption. Young’s four parameters – power, privilege, interest, and collective ability – provide criteria for operationalizing this framework. I address the indeterminacy critique (Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli) and the motivational challenge (Martha C. Nussbaum), showing that the SCM survives both. While further specification of procedural safeguards is needed, the SCM stands as a philosophically coherent and politically actionable framework for transforming structural injustice.