Iris Marion Young

Iris Marion Young (New York, 1949 – Chicago, 2006) was an American political philosopher and feminist whose work centred on justice and social difference. She taught political science at the University of Chicago, where she was affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies and the Human Rights program, and her research spanned contemporary political theory, feminist social theory and the normative analysis of public policy.

She studied philosophy at Queens College and earned her PhD at Pennsylvania State University in 1974. Before Chicago she taught political theory for nine years at the University of Pittsburgh and philosophy at several other institutions, and she held fellowships at places such as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A childhood episode, when she and her siblings were placed in foster care after her father's death and her mother's depression, shaped her attention to the oppression of women confined to the domestic role, a theme she explored in House and Home (2005).

In Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) she argued that justice cannot be reduced to individual desert, since rules and institutional routines bear on whole groups. From this she defended a politics of difference that addresses group-based oppression, departing from the procedural egalitarianism of Rawls and Dworkin. Her model of the five faces of oppression distinguishes exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural domination and violence. In Responsibility for Justice, published after her death, she developed the concept of structural injustice and a social connection model of responsibility, under which those who contribute through their actions to such processes share a collective duty to remedy them.

Her influence extends to global justice, political ethics and gender studies, and several awards and lectures now bear her name.