Keywords

Introduction

Much of the injustice suffered by members of certain social groups can be described as structural – it is produced neither by proximate individual wrong-doing nor by unfair state policies. Instead, it occurs when the normal operation of social structures systematically disadvantages people including unfairly limiting their opportunities for jobs, education, and political office (Young 2011). Liberal theories of justice have difficulty theorizing and combating structural injustice because it tends to occur in social domains seen as beyond the scope of the state’s authority. This chapter examines the problem of structural injustice as it pertains to John Rawls’s theory of justice, focusing on the efficacy of his principle of fair equality of opportunity to combat it (Rawls 1995, 1999a, 2001). Its main thesis is that Rawls’s theory can directly or indirectly preclude or undermine several types of structural injustice, often by means of the principle of fair equality of opportunity. It can directly preclude structural class injustice, injustice in the division of labor, and, perhaps, injustice in the internal organization of private corporations. It cannot, however, address injustice in the internal organization churches, as that would conflict with Rawls’s commitment to freedom of conscience. Moreover, it can, on one interpretation, rely on the principle of fair equality of opportunity to oppose unjust social norms.

The chapter begins with an explanation of structures and structural injustice. Next is an argument that Rawls’s theory can be reasonably interpreted as a theory of structural class justice. After that is an overview of Young’s argument that, despite Rawls’s focus on structures, he cannot adequately theorize certain types of structural injustice (Young 2006). This is followed by several objections to Young’s critique, which pivots on what is arguably a mistaken interpretation of Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity. It turns out that Young is nevertheless correct that Rawls cannot address unjust structural processes that stratify people by branding some as inferior or deviant. This is not, however, due to shortcomings in Rawls’s principle of equal opportunity, as she avers. Next, is an outline of Lori Watson and Christie Hartley’s interpretation of Rawls, which claims that his commitment to equal citizenship requires him to endorse an expansive notion of equality of opportunity and wide array of state policies to ensure it (Watson and Hartley 2018). Last is an argument that the policies they propose can indirectly combat stratifying norms.

Social Structures and Structural Injustice

Social structures are difficult to define. Nevertheless, theorists of structural injustice tend to agree upon their central features. What follows relies on Sally Haslanger’s characterization of social structures, which is heavily influenced by William Sewell (Haslanger 2015, 2018; Sewell 1992). On her view, structures are networks of practices. Practices are composed of schemas and resources. Schemas are culturally shared rules, scripts, concepts, norms, conventions, categories, and the like, that individuals internalize and which condition or direct their behaviors toward resources, which are objects and human capabilities seen as having value or disvalue. Individuals enact and reproduce practices by conforming their behavior to schemas. Structures, then, can be described as interconnected webs created by individual actions and materialized through the organization of resources.

Housing markets are an example. Those are made up of many practices – selling, buying, renting, building, refinancing, etc. – that are configured by formal and informal rules governing the distribution and production of the resource of housing. Those rules include zoning laws, building codes, shared assumptions about which housing types and neighborhoods are desirable, informal norms governing interactions between landlords and tenants, expectations about the services of real estate agents and bankers, and so on. Housing markets determine not only how housing is distributed, but also its physical manifestation; the size of homes, their location and spacing, whether they are single-family dwellings, and so on.

Structures tend to affect individuals in certain predicable ways. First, they constrain and enable actions (Young 2011). For instance, zoning laws and status norms that favor suburban tract housing make it necessary for homeowners to purchase cars. Second, they create and allocate social positions, which map onto power differentials (Young 2011). Housing markets contain, for instance, landlords and renters and these positions represent power relations. Third, structures are apt to produce outcomes that are not intended by their participants (Young 2011). For example, housing markets in the U.S. tend to render some people homeless, despite participants not intending that outcome. Fourth, as the background conditions for choice, structures tend to mask themselves (Payson 2012). Individuals often do not see the extent to which choices are channeled by structures. For example, a White person might not realize that her preference for an apartment in a “safe neighborhood” is informed by norms inflected by anti-Black racism.

Theorists of structural injustice see structural injustice as injustice that can be explained adequately only by appeal to structures (Haslanger 2015; Powers and Faden 2019; Sangiovanni 2018; Young 2011). For example, the fact that some people have no dwelling and must live in public, or the fact that some must use such a large portion of their income for rent that they go hungry, cannot be fully or adequately explained without appeal to housing markets (among other structures, no doubt). These injustices cannot be explained merely by the choices, decisions, and actions of individuals.

Rawls on Structures

In constructing his theory of justice, Rawls focuses on the justice of structures maintaining, controversially, that the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society (Chambers 2013; Freeman 2014; Hodgson 2012; Melenovsky 2013; Miklosi 2008; Murphy 1999; Pogge 2000; Rawls 1999a; Scheffler 2006; Schouten 2019; Williams 1998). Below is a summary of his view of the basic structure and its status as the primary subject of justice. This reveals connections between his view and the account of structures and structural injustice given above suggesting that Rawls’s theory is in part designed to combat structural class injustice.

Consider first his description of the basic structure. He states:

The basic structure is the way in which the main political and social institutions of a society fit together into one system of social cooperation, and the way they assign basic rights and duties and regulate the division of advantages that arise from social cooperation over time. The political constitution within an independent judiciary, the legally recognized forms of property, and the structure of the economy (for example, as a system of competitive markets with private property in the means of production), as well as the family in some form, all belong to the basic structure. The basic structure is the background social framework within which the activities of associations and individuals take place. A just basic structure secures what we may call background justice. (Rawls 2001)

For Rawls, a social institution is species of social practice (Melenovsky 2013). He states:

[B]y an institution I shall understand a public system of rules which defines offices and positions with their rights and duties, powers and immunities, and the like. These rules specify certain forms of action as permissible, others as forbidden: and they provide for certain penalties and defenses, and so on, when violations occur. As examples of institutions, and more generally social practices, we may think of games and rituals, trials and parliaments, markets and systems of property. (Rawls 1999a)

As the distinct aim of the institutions of the basic structure is to distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation, the principles governing it, Rawls says, are not appropriate for governing the activities of associations and individuals because those entities have different aims (Cohen 2008; James 2005; Fischer 1997; Murphy 1999; Rawls 1995). To be sure, principles of justice indirectly regulate the conduct of individuals and associations by specifying the many legal and social rules that persons and organizations are required to observe in their day-to-day activity as a matter of justice – for example, rules concerning permissible contracts or exchanges of property (Freeman 2014).

In addition to making the general claim that there are different principles of justice for different subjects of justice, Rawls maintains that if the primary subject of justice were individual transactions between members of society, then the principles would be in a certain sense self-undermining. Applying principles to specific interactions, he says, will eventually produce circumstances that render many of the interactions unjust as judged by those very principles. Rawls says,

suppose we begin with the initially attractive idea that social circumstances and people’s relationships to one another should develop over time in accordance with free agreements fairly arrived at. Straightaway we need an account of when agreements are free and the social circumstances under which they are reached are fair. In addition, while these conditions might be fair at an earlier time, the accumulated results of many separate and ostensibly fair agreements, together with social trends and historical contingencies, are likely in the course of time to alter citizens relationships and opportunities so that the conditions for free and fair agreements no longer hold. The role of the institutions that belong to the basic structure is to secure just background conditions against which the actions of individuals and associations take place. Unless this structure is appropriately regulated and adjusted, an initially just social process will eventually cease to be just, however free and fair particular transactions may look when viewed by themselves. (Rawls 1995)

One cause of this veering away from justice is the fact that, in Rawls’s words, “a great variety of associations and modes of cooperation may form depending upon what individuals actually do and what agreements are reached” (Rawls 1995).

Rawls’s target here is libertarianism, which holds that virtually any configuration of holdings resulting from voluntary transfers is just, provided it arose from an historical starting point of just initial acquisitions. He observes that such a regime is apt to produce “modes of cooperation” characterized by inequality of opportunity and economic domination. Transfers of goods and services occurring under such conditions are not genuinely voluntary, or, alternatively, their voluntariness is rendered otiose from the point of view of justice. Examples include monopolies, oligopolies, and destitution among the least well-off (Freeman 2014).

The features of his view described above suggest that Rawls’s theory is informed by a concern about structural injustice. First, the basic structure is, for him, clearly a structure in Sewell’s sense: it is a network of institutions, which are a species of social practice, whose rules and norms allocate a specific sort of resource – the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Second, his understanding of the basic structure as maintaining background justice expresses an awareness that structures serve to constrain and enable individual actions. Third, his complaint against libertarianism describes ways in which individual actions create and sustain social practices, how those practices can produce injustice without individual wrongdoing, and how they can generate outcomes that no participants intend. Fourth, that complaint also exhibits an awareness that structures establish social positions that carry varying degrees of power.

Trouble in/with the Basic Structure

Young argues that despite Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society and his attunement to the tendency for injustice to inhere in, or be sustained by, structures, his theory cannot assess the justice of some structures typical of modern societies (Young 2006). These include, first, the division between skilled and unskilled labor and between waged work and unpaid domestic work; second, the structure of institutional decision-making power within private corporations and religious institutions, and third, the normalization of the standards, experiences, and capacities of dominant groups. She maintains that Rawls’s understanding of the basic structure must be further developed so that his theory can provide guidance on these issues of structural justice and concludes that the flaws she identifies do not warrant “shifting away” from Rawls’s view, but rather “deepening” it.

Each of the three types of structures listed above raises different issues. For ease of exposition, let us call the division between skilled and unskilled and between paid and unpaid labor the “organizational” aspect of the division of labor. Despite being part of the basic structure of society (qua division of labor) the organization aspect, Young thinks, is unreachable by Rawls’s principles of justice because the only tool he has for evaluating the justice of the division of labor is the principle of fair equality of opportunity (Young 2006). That principle, she says, regulates only the distributive aspect of the division of labor – how people, or types of people, are distributed across different occupations. It thus cannot assess the prior question of justice concerning how those jobs are delineated, yet this question is pressing, largely because the division between unpaid domestic work and public paid work is crucial to the gendered division of labor that Rawls himself acknowledges severely disadvantages women (Chambers 2013; Okin 1989; Neufeld and Van Shoelandt 2014; Rawls 1999b, 2001; Schouten 2019).

Unlike the division of labor, firms and churches are not part of the basic structure on Rawls’s understanding. Hence the justice of their decision-making structures is not merely overlooked, but rather explicitly excluded from the purview of justice. Young claims that this is perhaps a mistake because decisions are typically made in those institutions by a small group of people and yet determine the wellbeing and opportunities of many people both within and outside the institutions (Young 2006). (This observation anticipates Cohen’s claim that Rawls’s basic structure distinction does not comport with his justification for it, namely, that it has a pervasive effect on people’s life prospects (Cohen 2008).) She suggests this problem could be solved by treating such institutions as part of the basic structure. This would authorize the state to require or incentivize them to adopt a more democratic decision-making process expanding people’s opportunities to hold jobs that carry managerial responsibility.

Like the organizational aspect of the division of labor, normalization is what we might call a hidden part of the basic structure. It is not hidden, though, in the sense that the question of its justice is overlooked. Rather, it is hidden in two other senses. First, it is a process that emerges through the operation of institutions, yet it is unrecognized, Young says, by Rawls as a “basic structural process.” Second, it is largely unnoticed by members of society: people are generally unaware, she observes, of the way in which dominant ideologies inflect institutional rules and norms (Young 2006). One problem with normalization, she notes, is that it has a significant impact on people’s opportunities to hold jobs and positions that carry responsibility. Nevertheless, she says, it cannot be addressed by Rawls’s ideal of equality of opportunity, which prohibits, in her view, only explicitly exclusionary acts or policies (Young 2006).

Below is an examination of each of these critiques of Rawls. First considered is Young’s proposal to include churches and corporations in the basic structure. It turns out that including corporations in the basic structure is not necessary to place their decision-making procedures under the scrutiny of justice. Nevertheless, Rawls is clear that imposing a certain decision-making procedure may be unjustifiable by the standards of a political conception of justice. It turns out, further, that including religious institutions in the basic structure is incompatible with the status of Rawls’s theory as a political conception of justice. Second is an argument that the organizational aspect of the division of labor can be reached by the principle of fair equality of opportunity to a larger degree than Young contends and that it can also be reached by other aspects of Rawls’s theory. Third is a concession to Young that normalization is indeed beyond the (direct) influence of the principle of fair equality of opportunity. However, this is because its damaging processes and standards reside to a large extent in the background culture of society, not because of a weakness in Rawls’s principle, as Young claims. Last is an explanation of how Watson and Hartley’s proposal for eliminating domination in the background culture of society can be applied to the problem of normalization.

Decision-Making Authority

This section starts with outline of the idea of a political conception of justice. It is followed by an argument that Young’s suggestion that private corporations and churches should be part of the basic structure fails to recognize the significance of Rawls’s theory as a political conception. As noted above, the right conclusion is that including corporations in the basic structure is unnecessary and including churches is unwarranted.

A political conception of justice, Rawls explains, has three features: it treats the basic structure of society as the subject of justice, it is presented as a freestanding view, and its content draws upon fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society. The first idea is discussed above and the third is irrelevant to what follows, so consider briefly the second. A theory of justice is freestanding if it can be expounded apart from, or without reference to, any comprehensive doctrines. A comprehensive doctrine is essentially a view of what is meaningful and valuable in life. A standard example is a religious doctrine. Rawls maintains that a variety of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines will tend to arise in democratic societies. The significance of a political conception of justice is that, because it is not derived from any specific comprehensive doctrine, it can be accepted by citizens with a wide range of comprehensive doctrines and hence can stably govern a liberal democracy (Rawls 1995).

Any political conception of justice contains the following elements: a specification of certain basic rights, liberties, and opportunities typical of constitutional democratic regimes, the designation of a special priority for those rights, liberties, and opportunities, and measures assuring that all citizens have adequate all-purpose means to make effective use of their rights, liberties, and opportunities (Rawls 1995). Rawls’s theory of justice – justice as fairness – is, he says, a political conception. It contains the following principles where the first is lexically prior to the second:

  1. (a)

    Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; and

  2. (b)

    Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society (the difference principle) (Rawls 2001).

The basic liberties include freedom of association, political liberty (the right to vote and hold office), freedom of thought, freedom of political speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of occupation, freedom of the person (i.e., freedom from psychological and physical assault), and the right to hold personal property (Rawls 1995, 1999). Conditions of fair equality of opportunity obtain when individuals with similar abilities and motivations have roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement (Rawls 2001).

Young’s concern about the apportionment of decision-making power in private corporations and religious organizations can now be evaluated. Consider first the case of private firms. Young notes that a small group of officers of large corporations are authorized to make decisions about the investment of capital resources that affect many people, deciding, for instance, in what communities they will invest and whether their productive activities will enhance people’s quality of life (Young 2006). This concentration of power is arguably unjust and can be addressed by including firms in the basic structure so that they qualify as a subject of justice.

Her claim that firms are not the subject of justice in Rawls’s theory is weakened, however, by his assertion that worker-managed firms are in keeping with tenets of justice as fairness (Rawls 2001). Young recognizes this assertion but concludes from the briefness of Rawls treatment of the subject that he “seems to admit that his theory, which concentrates on issues of individual liberty and the distribution of wealth and income, is not equipped to support or refute claims about injustice in decision-making procedures” (Young 2006). This conclusion is unwarranted, for Rawls explicitly states his reason for not pursuing the subject of worker-managed firms. It is that their permissibility within a society governed by justice as fairness depends on certain speculative questions that he cannot answer. He notes that, historically, worker-managed firms have not emerged in capitalist societies, which may be because people do not prefer them or because they have not had a fair chance to establish themselves. If the latter answer is correct, Rawls says, it raises these questions:

[S]hould such firms be granted subsidies, at least for a time, so that they can get going? Would there be advantages from doing this that could be justified in terms of the political values expressed by justice as fairness, or by some other political conception of justice for a democratic regime? For example, would worker-managed firms be more likely to encourage the democratic political virtues needed for a constitutional regime to endure? If so, could greater democracy within capitalist firms achieve much the same result? (Rawls 2001)

Rawls’s main concern here is whether policies encouraging the dispersal of decision-making authority within private firms in specific historical circumstances can be justified within a political conception of justice. Notice that the legitimacy of the state’s regulating the decision-making procedures of private firms does not depend on firms being located in the basic structure; they do not need to be there to be regulated by principles of justice, a fact that Young implicitly recognizes in her assertion (to be discussed below) that the principle of fair equality of opportunity requires private firms to adopt non-discriminatory hiring practices (Chambers 2013). So, the question is not whether the basic structure should be broadened to include private firms. Rather it is whether mandating that private firms adopt a democratic management structure can be justified without appeal to a comprehensive doctrine, such as socialism. For if it cannot, then such mandating would be unjust by the lights of Rawls’s theory. It follows that the justice of corporations’ decision-making structures is (contra Young) within the reach of Rawls’s theory, but his theory, as an outline of a political conception of justice, cannot in itself issue a verdict on questions of its application to specific questions of policy.

Now consider the case of religious institutions. Young points out that leaders of religious organizations make decisions about membership, forms of worship, and resource use that affect many individuals. So religious institutions should arguably be part of the basic structure for the same reason that private corporations should. The problem here is that this proposal conflicts with one of Rawls’s motivations for making the basic structure the subject of justice in the first place. Here is why: Central to liberalism is the notion that people have a moral right to guide their lives by their own values – to follow their own comprehensive doctrines. The principles of justice are restricted to the basic structure so that they do not apply to people’s lives more generally, which would compromise their right to live by their own values, but rather apply to the institutions that produce the all-purpose goods (i.e., rights, opportunities, income) that allow people to live by own values (Freeman 2014). If the basic structure were expanded to include social institutions that are not designed to provide these special goods, then the principles would in essence apply to people’s lives more generally. But avoiding regulating people’s lives more generally is a central reason for confining the principles of justice to basic structure in the first place.

Permitting the state to oblige churches to adopt democratic decision-making structures prevents church leaders and members from living according to the values of their religion, for the decision-making procedures of churches reflect their religious doctrines. The Catholic Church’s hierarchical, non-democratic authority structure has a theological justification as does the egalitarian, democratic authority structure of the Society of Friends or the Unitarian Universalists. Requiring churches to adopt a particular decision-making procedure in the name of justice, then, compromises their leaders’ and members’ moral right to live by their own values.

To summarize: Incorporating private firms into the basic structure, it turns out, is unnecessary to apply the principles of justice to their decision-making structures. Whether these institutions should be regulated depends not on whether they are in the basic structure, but on whether regulating them can be justified by the political values of justice as fairness without appeal to a comprehensive doctrine. It follows that Rawls’s theory can assess the justice of decision-making structures in private corporations. However, his theory may deliver a verdict that allows or requires undemocratic structures, in which case Young’s objection to the form of Rawls’s view is converted into an objection to the substance: her case against him shifts from the claim that his view cannot theorize the justice of a certain structure to the claim that it does not recognize a certain structure as unjust. Furthermore, incorporating churches into the basic structure violates the rights of people to follow their own comprehensive doctrines the protection of which is a justification for applying principles of justice only to the basic structure in the first place. Insofar as Young agrees with Rawls’s restricting the principles of justice to the basic structure to allow space for individual autonomy, she should be wary of its expansion, even if it would address a case of structural injustice.

The Division of Labor

As we saw above, Young claims that the division between unskilled and skilled work and between domestic and waged work may be unjust. She observes that unskilled workers typically engage in menial, repetitive tasks and are subject to the decisions of others while skilled workers engage in tasks that demand expertise and carry autonomy and decision-making responsibility. She observes, further, that those who care for dependents and run households without pay, who are primarily women, are disadvantaged relative to the group that generates income for the family, who are more commonly men (Young 1990). The disadvantages accruing to women include restricted opportunities to develop other capacities or to achieve public recognition and vulnerability to poverty. Young maintains, again as we saw above, that these organizational dimensions of the division of labor are unreachable because Rawls’s primary means for addressing justice in the division of labor is the principle of fair equality of opportunity (Young 2006).

What follows is Young’s account of the principle of fair equality of opportunity, a reconstruction of her argument that it cannot assess the justice of the organizational component of the division of labor, and an argument that Rawls’s theory is better equipped than Young suggests to address the justice of the organizational component.

Young characterizes Rawls’s principle of equality of opportunity as follows:

Justice requires the absence of caste or status difference that would bar persons from pursuing the occupation of their choice in a fair competition for positions. The procedures for allocating positions should not discriminate by race, gender, family origin, or other ascriptive characteristics, and the education system should enable everyone to develop his or her skills and qualifications as they wish. (Young 2006)

Her argument against Rawls can be reconstructed thusly:

  1. 1.

    The basic structure is the primary subject of justice.

  2. 2.

    Therefore, the principles of justice of fairness apply to the basic structure.

  3. 3.

    The division of labor is part of the basic structure.

  4. 4.

    Therefore, the principles of justice apply to the division of labor.

  5. 5.

    The division of labor contains a distributive element, which is how people are distributed among occupations.

  6. 6.

    The division of labor also contains an organizational element, which is the way in which the occupations into which people are distributed are defined, delineated, and interrelated.

  7. 7.

    In justice as fairness, the chief means for judging the justice of the division of labor is the principle of fair equality of opportunity.

  8. 8.

    This principle (as characterized immediately above) is capable of judging only the justice of the distributive element of the division of labor.

  9. 9.

    Therefore, justice as fairness cannot judge the justice of the organizational element of the division of labor.

There are two problems with this argument. First, Young confuses the policies necessary for achieving equality of opportunity with the content of the principle itself (a mistake contained in an earlier work (Stark 2013)). Second, she underestimates the extent to which facets of Rawls’s theory other than the principle of fair equality of opportunity may determine the justice of occupational organization.

In Rawls’s view, fair equality of opportunity is not identical with eliminating status differences that bar people from certain jobs through policies of non-discrimination and equal access to education. Rather, as indicated earlier, it is the state of affairs wherein offices and positions are open to all within a background system guaranteeing individuals with similar abilities and motivations roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement. Hence, all policies needed to achieve this state of affairs should be enacted, including those addressing the organizational aspect of the division of labor, if necessary, provided they are consistent with the basic liberties enumerated above. Perhaps non-discrimination in hiring and equal access to education is all that is necessary for offices and positions to be open to all. But those policies are not sufficient to ensure that similarly talented and motivated people have the same prospects of culture and achievement. So, Young presents an emaciated version of the principle of equality of opportunity.

There are many obstacles to ensuring that similarly talented and motivated individuals have similar life prospects, including, for example, unequal access to healthcare, unconstrained wealth inheritance, and uneven access to travel and cultural experiences, and Rawls’s theory probably cannot handle them all (Daniels 1985). Nevertheless, Young underestimates the power of Rawls’s theory to address the organizational element of the division of labor. Here are two examples of ways to regulate the paid/unpaid division so as to promote equality of opportunity for women. (Below I explain how such policies might be justifiable within a political conception of justice.) The first is the provision of paid leave to waged workers while they care for family members, which essentially pays them to do domestic work. The second is state-funded childcare, which pays people other than parents to care for children, converting unpaid domestic work into waged work while assuring that parents of all income levels have access to the labor market. While social convention might encourage women to do this paid care work, or discourage men from doing it, these policies are directed at the paid/unpaid division itself and not at what Young identifies as the distributive issue regarding which types of people do which types of work (Schouten 2019; Watson and Hartley 2018).

Furthermore, the principle of fair equality of opportunity is not the only feature of Rawls’s view that addresses the justice of the division of labor. A society’s regime of property rights, for example, will determine how widespread the ownership of the means of production is, which will in turn affect whether occupations are arranged in a pyramid with comparatively few high-paid positions at the top and a multitude of low-paid positions at the bottom (Young 2006). Moreover, Rawls’s demand that the basic structure of society be designed to support the self-respect of all citizens suggests that arrangements in which workers are greatly subordinated by their employers or where some workers have greatly diminished workplace autonomy cannot be justified (Rawls 1999, Brake 2013, Stark 2012).

In summary, Rawls’s conception of equality of opportunity is more robust than Young assumes. Hence, it can dictate elements of the organizational component of the division of labor. Moreover, other aspects of Rawls’s theory also bear upon the justice of the organizational component.

Normalization

Below, first, is an account of the phenomenon of normalization and Young’s diagnosis for why normalization cannot be theorized by Rawls’s view. Second is a consideration against that diagnosis and a proposed alternative. Last is an outline of Watson and Hartley’s reformulation of Rawls and an explanation for why their view has the potential to address normalization.

Normalization is the set of social processes whereby the experiences and capacities of some members of society are converted into standards used to judge everyone. The content and predominance of these standards stigmatize and disadvantage certain groups by constructing them as deviant or abnormal. Persons with disabilities are an example (Young 2006, 2007) (Rawls’s ability to address justice for the disabled is discussed by Hartley (2009), Kittay (1999), Stark (2007).). They tend to be positioned as defective by nature, Young explains, when in fact their limitations are largely produced by the way in which society has been structured, both materially and ideologically. The standard case is those with limited physical mobility: their ability to move about in society would be no different from those with (relatively) unlimited physical mobility if physical spaces and conceptions of efficiency were altered. Other examples include the way in which dominant standards of civility and politeness position members of some racial groups as disrespectful or untrustworthy and the way in which workplace norms, modeled after the typical life trajectory of men, position working women as less competent or less dedicated.

Despite that normalization is, as Young sees it, a “basic structural process” that embeds its standards in “elements of the basic structure,” Rawls’s theory of justice cannot, in her view, condemn it (Young 2006). She alleges that an aspect of this failure is the narrowness of Rawls’s principle of equal opportunity. She argues as follows: Because normalization diminishes some people’s job opportunities (among other harms), curtailing their access to positions of authority and responsibility, within a Rawlsian framework, it should partially fall within the scope of the fair equality of opportunity principle. Yet it cannot, she says, because normalization is not an overtly discriminatory policy or action. Instead, it is a covert social process that facilitates discrimination by creating unnoticed assumptions that become congealed in institutional rules, social conventions, and the material infrastructure. Her criticism seems to be that because the equal opportunity principle proscribes only overt job discrimination, it cannot regulate unnoticed assumptions that determine people’s access to positions but are independent of explicitly discriminatory acts and policies.

This view is vulnerable to the objection raised above to Young’s characterization of the principle of fair equality of opportunity, namely that that principle does not merely prohibit overt discrimination; it also requires policies that give people with the same talents and motivation the same chances of success. It is true that the principle cannot reach the unjust social standards that normalization produces. The reason for this, however, is not a defect in the principle. Rather it is that the dominant ideologies Young identifies are arguably part of what Rawls calls the background culture of society, and that domain is for the most part beyond the reach of his principles.

What follows is support for this claim. The background culture of society is characterized by Rawls as follows.

[T]he public political culture of a democratic society…comprises the political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge. Comprehensive doctrines of all kinds – religious, philosophical, and moral – belong to what we may call the “background culture” of civil society. This is the culture of the social, not of the political. It is the culture of daily life, of its many associations: churches and universities, learned and scientific societies, and clubs and teams, to mention a few. (Rawls 1995)

This account arguably suggests that many social processes of normalization occur in the background culture. Furthermore, it is possible to distinguish (analytically) the norms themselves, the processes that spawn them, and the sites in which they embed themselves. As stated earlier, Young maintains that both the processes of normalization and the institutions in which its standards are embedded reside in the basic structure. She does not defend that idea, nor does she explain what these processes are like. Moreover, her examples of social entities in which the norms are embedded are, for the most part, those that are not in the basic structure, and to the extent that they are, they are not exclusive to it. They include “institutional rules, the material infrastructure of social action, and everyday habits of comportment and interaction” (Young 2006). Given Young’s description of normalization it seems intuitive that its processes and the places it embeds its norms are (also) outside of the basic structure: surely, normalization happens through, and influences, universities, churches, scientific societies, clubs, and teams. It also likely operates through, and influences, news media, art, literature, and popular culture. In the end, then, normalization seems to operate to a large extent in and through “the culture of everyday life.”

For that reason, the principles of justice cannot prohibit or control normalization’s unjust status norms. The principles can regulate to some degree the formal rules of institutions in the background culture, as we saw in the case of private firms’ hiring policies. But these regulations are to be minimal: non-basic institutions are for the most part to refrain from violating the principles of justice. So, for instance, universities cannot prohibit faculty from voting and employers cannot require employees to practice a particular religion. The inability of Rawls’s theory to address unjust status norms is a serious problem for his political conception of justice. If the type of injustice many people face is bound up with these norms – if what regularly diminishes people’s opportunities (or otherwise wrongs them) is contained in the schemas constituting myriad social practices both in and outside of the basic structure, as Young’s account of normalization suggests, then an adequate theory of justice must contain measures for addressing the justice of those schemas.

Here is how Watson and Hartley’s view can help, even though they do not frame their worry about domination in terms of structural injustice or normalization (Watson and Hartley 2018). Start with Rawls’s idea that citizens of a liberal democracy must agree upon their constitution and the laws enacted under it. They must agree, that is, to their terms of cooperation. This agreement ensures the legitimacy of exercises of political power. The process by which this agreement is achieved is governed by a moral duty that Rawls calls the criterion of reciprocity, which states:

For…terms [of cooperation] to be fair terms, citizens offering them must reasonably think that those citizens to whom such terms are offered might also reasonably accept them… .And they must be able to do this [i.e., accept them] as free and equal, and not as dominated or manipulated, or under the pressure of an inferior social position. (Rawls 1995)

Terms are fair then, only if citizens’ deliberation about them happens in a political arena untainted by oppression and social hierarchy – where, that is, citizens as such are genuinely on a footing of equality with one another. Watson and Hartley interpret this ideal of equality to entail that all citizens have equal opportunities to participate in the social spheres of life central to citizenship, including the labor market, the political sphere, and civil society. They maintain that ensuring this equality of opportunity requires that the state act to dismantle practices of domination existing in the background culture of society. In essence, Watson and Hartley argue that because of his fundamental commitment to equal citizenship, Rawls must be committed to an extensive conception of fair equality of opportunity that targets structures located both within and outside of the basic structure.

To be sure, Watson and Hartley do not support the state directly attacking the pernicious norms circulating in society as this would conflict with the right of individuals to adopt their own comprehensive doctrines. Hence it would abrogate some of the basic liberties designed to protect that right, including freedom of thought and freedom of speech. What they propose is that the state destabilize practices structured by those pernicious norms by making it relatively easy for people to opt out of the practices. The idea is that this will weaken the practice, diminishing the prevalence and power of its norms.

Here is an example. To have equal opportunity to participate in the spheres of society relevant to citizenship, women’s non- or under-participation must not be caused by norms and practices that assign women the primary responsibility for caring for children and the elderly. This would include standards created by the normalization of masculine roles that portray women as undesirable employees. The principle of fair equality of opportunity, then, obliges the state to enact policies designed to help people avoid complying with those norms and practices if they wish. It must enact policies designed, that is, to allow women to opt out of caregiving and men to opt in. These policies include those discussed above – state-funded childcare and mandatory family leave available to both men and women – as well as a shortened work week and job sharing. Watson and Hartley claim that these can be justified within a political conception of justice because they can be justified by a political value – equal citizenship; they need not be justified by the values of a feminist comprehensive doctrine (Baehr 2013).

At this point, what effect such policies would have on unjust gender norms and the processes that generate them is largely a matter of speculation because the policies have never been comprehensively implemented and because their affect will likely depend on many social factors – for example, the prevalence of patriarchal religions. Experience shows, however, that the relationship of mutual reinforcement between norms and patterns of behavior makes it possible to upend norms by changing patterns of behavior. For instance, reorganizing the institution of marriage so that people may marry someone of any gender has arguably weakened norms stigmatizing non-heterosexual sexual orientations.

To summarize this section: Young is right to point out that Rawls’s theory of justice cannot (directly) oppose stigmatizing social standards produced by normalization. However, this limitation is not traceable, it turns out, to a defect in Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity but rather to the location of those standards in social space, as it were. These standards can be attacked indirectly, on a Rawlsian approach, through policies that aid people in circumventing the practices those standards govern.

Conclusion

Rawls’s theory of justice, as a form of political liberalism, is equipped to theorize certain types and aspects of structural injustice. This is due, first, to his focus upon the basic structure, second, to his broad and deep notion of equality of opportunity, and third, to the demand implicit in his theory, according to one interpretation, to use equality of opportunity to dismantle structures of domination in the background culture of society. Yet, like all liberal theories, its ability to combat structural injustice is limited because many unjust social practices, as Young demonstrates, arise organically in domains judged to be beyond the legitimate reach of the state. We can see Young’s critique as a call for liberal egalitarians to confront the problem of unjust social processes and structures and move away from their traditional focus on the relationship between state power and individual freedom. To do this, liberals must examine the normative and empirical dimensions of such things as ideology, stereotypes, normalization, ethoses, hierarchy, micro-aggressions, and unconscious bias. They must investigate the relations among these phenomena and their connection to both individual choice and the realization of the ideals of equal citizenship, equal opportunity, and the equal value of political liberties.