Bitch|Lab commemorates the life of Iris Marion Young in a most fitting fashion, with a series of posts situating her within the discipline of philosophy, and by highlighting the aspects of Young's philosophy that B|L has found interesting and helpful in her own work and life.  

I first encountered Young's work last year, in a political science class on conceptions of justice and the challenge of 'difference'.  Young was one of the first critics of dominant conceptions of justice that we read. 

In 'Displacing the Distributive Paradigm', the first chapter of her book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young critiques the distributive paradigm of justice, the idea that justice in a society can and should be assessed by looking at how 'social goods' ('good' being used here less in the sense of 'a product' than attribute of 'a good life') are distributed among members of that society.  She argues that this understanding of justice 'tends to ignore the social structure and institutional context that often help determine distributive patterns'.  The goal of Young's critique, in her own words, was:

to displace talk of justice that regards persons as primarily possessors and consumers of goods to a wider context that also includes action, decisions about action, and provision of the means to exercise capacities.  The concept of social justice includes all aspects of institutional rules and relations insofar as they are subject to potential collective decision.  The concepts of domination and oppression, rather than the concept of distribution, should be the starting point for a conception of social justice.  (p. 16)

In my words, while Young recognizes that questions of how 'social goods' are distributed is important to a conception of justice, she thinks it is inadequate without considering the operations of power, and considering power as a relationship, not as something that is possessed by a person or institution independent of interactions with others.   Her focus on relationships and their complexities was, to me, a far more realistic depiction of the state of society than idealized theories that attempted to deal with members of society as individuals only, devoid of any context (and complicating factors) such as culture, race, class, sexuality - she paid attention to the relationships that instrumental in creating group and individual identities.  

Young's conception of social justice is deeply appealing to me, and worth quoting at length: 

This, then, is how I understand the connection between justice and the values that constitute the good life.  Justice is not identical with the concrete realization of these values in individual lives; justice, that is, is not identical with the good life as such.  Rather, social justice concerns the degree to which a society contains and supports the institutional conditions necessary for the realization of these values.  The values compreise in the good life can be reduced to two very general ones: (1) developing and exercising one's capacities and expressing one's experience, and (2) participating in determining one's action and the conditions of one's action.  These are universalist values, in the sense that they assume the equal moral worth of all persons, and thus justice requires their promotion for everyone.  To these general values correspond two social conditions that define injustice: oppression, the institutional constraint on self-development, and domination, the institutional constraint on self-determination.  (p. 37)

When I read this chapter, I was feeling utterly overwhelmed by the intellectual demands of uni.  It probably took me at least half of the first semester to feel like my brain was accustomed to not only the amount of reading I had to do, but the nature of it, and way in which I was meant to read - with an eye toward critiques and intellectual connections.  Individual articles or chapters from that period had to be outstanding to have stuck in my head after the semester was over.  Young's work stood out for her clarity of thought and for her concern with its practical applications.  So I noticed when it was announced that she was coming to uni to give a lecture. 

I cut half of a class I quite liked to go to the lecture, and it was worth it.  I couldn't find my notes so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but what sticks in my mind is her discussion of institutional oppression and how every member of society is implicated in the injustices that result from the way that society is structured, and that, therefore, as members of society we have a responsibility to figure out what we can and should do to address social injustice. (I wish I could find my notes.  I wouldn't have thrown them out.  It was such a good lecture.)  I doubt that many people in the audience, if any at all, would have been aware that at the time she was undergoing treatment for the cancer that caused her death.  She was a compelling, but not showy, speaker - in command of her material and at ease in front of the audience.  She was already on my list of 'scholars to read extensively when I have a bit more time', but that lecture kicked her up to a spot at the top.

I was saddened to read of Young's death, because her lecture indicated that her moral philosophy was headed in a very interesting direction, and I was looking forward to reading her work as that philosophy continued to develop.  I'm very sorry that that opportunity is no longer available, and I'm sorry that our society has lost a critic with a compelling moral vision who was committed to taking, and inspiring, action for social change.  

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