by Claude Opus 5.5
Does Young’s social connection model, which is forward-looking, give a better account of members’ responsibilities than a liability model? What is lost if we stop asking who is to blame?
In Responsibility for Justice (published posthumously in 2011), Iris Marion Young distinguished two models of responsibility. The liability model, dominant in law and in everyday moral thinking, assigns responsibility by tracing a harm back to the agents who caused it, intentionally or negligently, and holding them answerable. It is backward-looking, individualising and isolating: it identifies particular wrongdoers and, by implication, absolves others. The social connection model, which Young developed for structural injustices such as sweatshop labour and housing precarity, holds that all those who participate in the social processes that produce injustice share a responsibility to work to transform them. It is forward-looking, shared, and discharged only through collective action.
The question is whether the social connection model gives a better account of the responsibilities of members of a group like the fraternity in the case behind these seminars, and what would be lost if we abandoned the liability model’s question of who is to blame. Nothing here assumes any particular facts about the case, which remain contested.
Why the social connection model fits
Several features of the situation fit Young’s model well.
The harms associated with fraternity cultures of sexual aggression, documented by Sanday, Armstrong and colleagues, and others, are structural in Young’s sense: they arise from the interaction of many people’s ordinary actions within institutional rules and norms, rather than from any single person’s decision. Most members contribute to such cultures not by committing assaults but by participating in drinking rituals, loyalty norms, ways of speaking about women, and patterns of silence.
The liability model has difficulty with such members. It must either find them individually culpable for something, which may be implausible for many, or absolve them, which ignores their participation. The social connection model offers a third option: they are not to blame for past harms, but they share a responsibility to change the practices that produce them.
The model also explains why responsibility persists after formal sanctions. Closing a chapter or expelling individuals discharges some liability, but it does not transform the culture. Young’s model directs attention to what remains to be done.
Finally, it extends naturally to other participants: the university, which recognised and housed the chapter; the national organisation; alumni who sustained its traditions. All are connected to the structure and share responsibility for changing it.
What would be lost
But Young herself did not propose to replace the liability model; she proposed to supplement it. And the case shows why abandoning the question of blame would be a serious mistake.
First, individual wrongs require individual accountability. If, as alleged, particular people committed sexual assault, that is not a structural injustice in which they merely participated. It is a wrong they did. The liability model’s focus on the perpetrator is not a limitation but a necessity. To dissolve their blame into a general structural responsibility would be a profound injustice to the complainant.
Second, blame has expressive and recognitional functions. Blaming wrongdoers affirms that the victim was wronged and that her status as a person was violated. A purely forward-looking response communicates nothing about the past.
Third, the threat of liability motivates. Members who know they can be held to account for specific conduct, such as forwarding images or encouraging abuse, have reasons to refrain that a diffuse forward-looking responsibility may not supply.
Fourth, without the liability model, it becomes harder to distinguish among members. The social connection model says all share responsibility, though in proportion to their power, privilege, interest and collective ability. That gradation is real but coarser than the liability model’s distinctions between principal, accomplice and bystander.
A combined approach
The best account of members’ responsibilities uses both models. The liability model identifies those who committed wrongs, whether as principals, accomplices, forwarders, or bystanders who failed clear duties, and holds them accountable. The social connection model identifies the shared, forward-looking responsibility of all members, and of the institutions around them, to transform the culture.
Young’s own criteria for distributing forward-looking responsibility, which ask about power, privilege, interest and collective ability, give a useful guide. Chapter leaders and senior members have more power to change norms. Members who benefit from the culture’s social rewards have more reason to give them up. All members have the collective ability to act together, which no one has alone.
Conclusion
The social connection model gives a better account of the responsibilities of members who did no specific wrong. But it cannot replace the liability model for those who did, and abandoning the question of blame would sacrifice accountability, recognition of the victim and the moral distinctions on which justice depends.