#marion-young

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While those committed to family values think these values apply across the society, only poor people are punished for deviating from them in the eyes of state officials. If a woman seeking public assistance refuses to name the father of her child or children, she will be denied assistance, even if she has reason to think the named man may harm her or her children. The purpose of the requirements is to make fathers take financial responsibility for the children they have fathered, a laudable purpose in principle. The problem is that many biological fathers are poor themselves, and the legislation does not exempt them from the requirement. Many states either will not provide benefits for underage single mothers, or require them to be living with their parents in order to receive benefits. On the groundless theory that some women bear more children in order to receive additional benefits, several states provide no additional benefits to a child born to a single woman while she is receiving public assistance.

Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 6

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The shift in the United States from understanding public assistance as entitlement, on the one hand, to an understanding of public assistance as something that recipients should work for, for their own good, on the other hand, has also occurred to one degree or another in most other Western welfare states. Most of the strong welfare states of Western Europe, including some not experiencing the economic stresses of fiscal crisis and high unemployment, such as Norway, have instituted policies that tighten eligibility for the receipt of public assistance and require recipients to take jobs or enter programs whose objective is to put them in the active workforce as soon as possible. European welfare states now give more opportunities to single men and couples to access workfare programs, and increasingly these policies also apply to single parents, most of whom are women, except those with very young children. Most of these European policies are not as punitive with time limits and sanctions as American policies, but on the whole the philosophy motivating them is similar.

Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 7-8

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The PRWORA generalizes a trend that had been growing in welfare programs in the United States and elsewhere since the mid-1980s. With only a few exceptions, it makes working at a job, or engaging in what the welfare program considers a ‘work activity,’ a condition of public assistance receipt. Most states do not allow enhancing one’s skills by attending college or some other post–high school vocational training to count as such a work activity. They follow a ‘work first’ philosophy: the problem with the people who need public assistance is that they are not motivated to work outside the home, do not understand the expectations of the work world, and lack work experience. Once public assistance programs get them into jobs, these impediments to self-sufficiency will fall away as long as the recipients get to their jobs. They will accumulate experience, skill, and discipline and will be able to climb the job ladder. Many critics have pointed out many flaws in this theory: it does not account for lack of child care, especially at nonstandard hours, or for the difficulties recipients have dealing with sick children or unreliable transportation. Public assistance rules are generally punitive about missed appointments, including a failure to show up for work, and the threat of losing benefits along with jobs is real. Even if recipients do manage to get to and keep their jobs, those jobs usually pay so poorly that these people cannot maintain anything close to a decent standard of living for themselves and their children. For the most part, finally, the service and clerical jobs recipients do manage to keep fail to open any opportunities for significant increases in wages or skill development.

Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 7

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personal responsibility discourse attempts to isolate the deviant poor and render them particularly blameworthy for their condition, which then justifies the application of paternalistic or punitive policies to them. What would happen, however, if we found out that poverty is relatively common and that persons with many diverse characteristics might be poor, at least for a certain period of time? Mark Rank has studied poverty in the United States in a way that considers the life course of individuals. Most people who live under the federally defined poverty line do not stay there all their lives. ‘Spells’ of poverty are most common. Even fewer of these receive public assistance, either because they do not meet eligibility criteria, or because they do not know they are eligible, or because they choose not to access public assistance benefits. Rank finds that taking into consideration their entire lives, however, the majority of Americans experience at least one ‘spell’ of poverty, and many experience multiple spells separated by better times.

Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 23-24

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attributing deficits in well-being to luck or chance generally encourages people to resign themselves to those circumstances. Attributing disadvantage or suffering to bad luck allows us to be what Shklar calls ‘passively unjust’: we do not feel obliged to take action to remedy the harms people suffer, because we construct their sources as inexplicable and beyond our power to change. We may say that persons to whom luck has given advantages ought to help those less fortunate because they can, but it is difficult to argue on this basis that the disadvantaged are entitled to redress or prevention of their situation. To judge that a suffering or disadvantage is unjust, on the other hand, implies that we acknowledge the circumstance as grounded at least partly in institutions and the social processes they generate. When we acknowledge such social causes of suffering or disadvantage, we thereby at least implicitly recognize an obligation to try to improve those social processes.

Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 32-33

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promoting justice in social structures and their consequences implies restructuring institutions and relationships to prevent these threats to people’s basic well-being.

Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 34

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structural injustice…is distinct from at least two other forms of harm or wrong, namely, that which comes about through individual interaction, and that which is attributable to the specific actions and policies of states or other powerful institutions.

Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 45

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As individuals we experience much about the society in which we live as objectively constraining. Jeffrey Reiman uses the metaphor of 'channels' to describe social structures. The operations of social-structural processes create 'channels' for the actions of individuals, guiding and constraining them in certain directions, but not disabling their flow. As I will discuss later, at the same time that structures constrain, they also enable. They structure possibilities for action such that individuals can take them up and take advantage of them.

Iris Marion-Young, Responsibility for Justice pg. 53