In a liability concept of responsibility, what counts as a wrong for which we seek a perpetrator, or a harm for which we seek to assign liability to make compensation, is generally conceived as a specific deviation from an acceptable baseline. We assume a normal set of background conditions that we consider morally acceptable, if not ideal. A crime or an actionable harm consists in a morally and often legally unacceptable deviation from this background structure. We usually conceive the process that brought about the harm as a discrete, bounded event that breaks away from the ongoing normal flow. Punishment, redress, or compensation aims to restore normality, or to ‘make whole,’ in relation to the baseline circumstance. A model of responsibility derived from an understanding of the mediated connection that agents have to structural injustices, on the other hand, does more than just evaluate harms that deviate from the normal and acceptable; it also often brings into question precisely the background conditions that ascriptions of blame or fault assume to be normal.
Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 106-107