The concept of structural injustice, introduced into contemporary political theory by Iris Marion Young in the early 2000s, has gained prominence in the ensuing decades, generating vigorous theoretical inquiry. One set of questions relates to how to define structural injustice and what work it does in our moral and political vocabulary. What are social structures, and how do they do anything? Is the concept of structural injustice analytically useful for accounting for a distinct kind of injustice or for a distinct level of moral, social, or political analysis? Another set of questions revolves around how to conceptualize responsibility for structural injustice. Does the concept generate different ways to theorize responsibility for injustice? Who is responsible for any given structural injustice, how are their responsibilities grounded, and what are they responsible for? A third set of questions asks what can be done about structural injustice? How can we stop, eliminate, or mitigate structural injustices? Can we hope for a world without structural injustices?
Answering the last set of questions motivates Robert Goodin’s highly readable and erudite, if sobering, book, Perpetuating Advantage. Eschewing the theoretical “quagmires” (p. xi) of defining structural injustice and responsibility for it, Goodin’s book refreshingly focuses on the task of developing a conceptual map of the structural mechanisms that operate to perpetuate advantage and disadvantage, with a view “to enable us better to interrupt them” (p. 20). Goodin takes Iris Marion Young’s conception of structural injustice seriously as consisting of objectionable outcomes produced by social structural processes in which many, perhaps most of us, participate. To counter skeptics of the concept, Goodin makes the welcome claim that a valid account of structural injustice does not require negating human agency—as if injustice can only be structural when no human agency is involved, or as if injustice would never be structural as soon as human agents are involved. Instead of dichotomizing structure and agent, he suggests we should focus on the interaction between agency and structure and of agency “working through” structures (p. 8).
There are various ways in which Goodin’s book is a unique contribution to the literature while also offering a fuller and more robust account of Young’s initial arguments on structural injustice, which were left underdeveloped due to her early death, and have been somewhat sidelined in the structural injustice literature that has developed. Goodin’s primary focus is not on powerful agents or nefarious agencies. Indeed, to focus on the “dastardly deeds of the rich and powerful” (p. 9) would be to miss the main task of a concept of structural injustice, which is to account for how large-scale social structural processes can produce unjust outcomes, even without malicious agents. Sidestepping the abstract, normative debates about what constitutes injustice, Goodin notes that whatever injustice is, it involves unfair advantage and disadvantage, and structural injustice can thus be conceptualized as “unfair advantage and disadvantage perpetuated through social structures” (p. xi).
The central task of Goodin’s book is to account for how structural mechanisms help the comparatively advantaged to retain, expand, replicate, and recreate their advantages over time. These mechanisms include not only social position in hierarchies but also positionality in social networks, language, coding categories, interpretive schema, norms and expectations, reputation, and coordination. Goodin’s analysis is a sobering reminder that while social cooperation may be necessary and desirable to solve collective problems and to attain personal goals, the structural mechanisms by which we try to make cooperation more efficient, reliable, profitable, or effective for meeting such challenges tend to perpetuate advantage and disadvantage, including in the objectionable forms that constitute structural injustice.
One advantage of Goodin’s approach is to make the function of structural analysis more diagnostic and less moralistic. For example, rather than attribute disparate patterns of youth employment entirely to employers being motivated by racist attitudes, Goodin’s approach highlights how racial inequalities can have non-nefarious sources, such as the way that racial self-sorting of young people’s networks disadvantages black youth in the labor market. “To some possibly large extent, the disadvantage that blacks experience in finding good, well-paying jobs may also be a function of the sheer size of their network,” he notes (p. 63). Another structural mechanism that can perpetuate advantage is language. While necessary for communication, the choice of language for governance, business, and education matters to different linguistic groups, and the disadvantages of not being an effective communicator in the dominant language of one’s society are typically significant, affecting a person’s educational, occupational, health, and wealth outcomes. The external drivers that lead these and other structural mechanisms to heighten advantage stem from scale effects in production, consumption, and valuation. In addition, internal constraints such as scarcity of time, attention, and information drive agents to rely on these mechanisms, further embedding them as sources of perpetuated advantage and disadvantage.
Full of rich, empirically detailed examples and cases from diverse geographic locations and cultural contexts, past and present, the main part of the book elaborates on these overlooked structures that work in seemingly “innocent” ways to reproduce advantage. These chapters demonstrate vividly that the diagnostic task of accounting for how structural mechanisms perpetuate advantages (or disadvantages) requires robust and context-specific social scientific research.
There is something beguiling about this approach to thinking about structural injustice. On the one hand, there is nothing morally wrong with aspirations to build efficient and reliable structures of communication, networking, norms, and coordination to secure and maintain advantages from social cooperation. On the other hand, Goodin’s focus on the perpetuation of advantage does provoke questions of moral desert and responsibility. By revealing how those in comparatively advantaged social positions stand to benefit from the perpetuation of their advantages through structural mechanisms, his analysis raises the question of their moral entitlements and responsibility. At a minimum, those who are comparatively advantaged have a responsibility to be informed, and not to be morally deaf and dissociated, as Judith Shklar might say, or “wilfully ignorant” of morally significant features of their situation (pp. 19–20). This is true even if they cannot do anything individually to effect structural reform.
The final chapter of the book addresses the question of what can be done to disrupt structural injustice. Goodin agrees with Young that collective action is necessary and that different sorts of action will be called for, depending on the logic of the relevant social mechanisms. Assuming the serious challenge of motivating collective action can be successfully met, how and where should collective action be directed? Goodin first confronts strategies that are direct head-on attacks against a structural mechanism—either to destroy the mechanism itself, to make it redundant, or to render it ineffectual. He concludes that such strategies are either unavailable or unreliable in terms of ending the perpetuation of advantage, or could only work at an unreasonably high social cost. Destroying structural mechanisms from which we all benefit (though unequally) would be dystopian—much like the egalitarian society in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” where a Handicapper General is officially in charge of equalizing every source of social advantage by devising ways to handicap those who are smarter, more beautiful, able to jump higher, and so on, thereby inhibiting them from developing their capabilities, improving society, or expressing political dissent.
The strategies that Goodin finds more potentially constructive are what he terms “work-arounds,” where the structural mechanisms are not destroyed or eliminated, but their effects are transformed or mitigated in some way. These strategies include redistribution by siphoning benefits produced by the mechanism and distributing them to those disadvantaged; regulation in ways that mitigate the production of unjust advantage; and a pluralization of advantage-producing mechanisms, so that people are not necessarily locked into any particular pattern of distribution of advantage and disadvantage.
Goodin’s book ends pessimistically. He was motivated to construct a descriptive conceptual map of how social structural mechanisms operate to perpetuate advantage, including unjust advantage, in the hope that it would help to plot clearer routes to overcoming structural injustice. His conclusion, however, is that “we can now see why structural injustice is so very hard to overcome” (p. 197). The moral insight of Goodin’s book is worth acknowledging: as long as our lives and prospects are socially structured, we should be vigilant about structural injustice. Goodin’s book helps to clarify the nature of the Sisyphean task, in a time when doing all that we can to disrupt injustice in all its forms seems more pressing than ever.
