End the culture wars by ending the blame game

• Published date: 15 April 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

And if you do take a stand on anything these days it means making yourself a target for resentment, if not hate

A cynical response to this dilemma is to say that because I am not personally responsible for an injustice I’ve no stake in the matter. I didn’t benefit from slavery, for example, so the legacy of historical racism is no concern of mine.

Such thinking, though, is a path to political apathy. Moreover, it is based on what political philosopher Maeve McKeown argues is a mistaken conflation of responsibility and blame.

In a new book, the Belfast-born academic has produced a clear-sighted analysis of the scope of individual liability for other people’s woes.

Structural injustice is different to other types of injustice, she points out, as it cannot be linked to individual wrongdoing. It relates to large-scale processes that create systematic disadvantages, like gender and racial hierarchies.

While these topics have led to angry debates and much finger-pointing in recent years, McKeown writes in With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice, “the lack of intent and the lack of direct causal connection [to structural injustice] means that holding each other blameworthy for [it] is inappropriate; individuals’ contributions to structural injustice are inadvertent or the product of social duress and therefore excused”.

‘Awful’

McKeown, who is based at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, knows about such injustice first hand, having experienced ill-health and job insecurity. “I have applied for over 300 jobs and had 16 job interviews in the course of writing this book,” she says. “Really, the conditions in academia right now are awful. It is structurally unjust.”

But her main focus is on righting errors in our thinking, inspired by the work of American human rights theorist and feminist Iris Marion Young.

That McKeown has a cat called “Magnus Wolfe Tone” gives an indication of her philosophy, which leans towards unity rather than division. Asked whether she was trying to carve out a middle ground in the culture wars, she replies: “I think that’s a fair characterisation, but it’s where the philosophy led me, rather than being a response to the culture wars or other political debates.

“People feel defensive or powerless when they are blamed for things like sweatshops, global poverty or climate change, and there are good reasons for this. Many philosophers try to connect our individual actions to these structural injustices...