Your mid-week read!
Maeve McKeown on responsibility and structural injustice
Maeve McKeown is an exciting emerging voice in political theory whose first book will be published later this year. Maeve is hugely influenced by the political philosopher Iris Marion Young and Young’s idea of structural injustice. You can watch Maeve discussing Young in this event we hosted in 2021.
“Responsibility” is Maeve’s contribution to our New Basics series. In this essay, she explores the historical contingency of the concept of responsibility before considering the kinds of responsibility entailed by living in a highly-interdependent, globalised economy in which our cumulative activities can impact on millions of people around the world in deeply harmful ways. For Maeve, we need a new model of responsibility that is able to respond to the ever-evolving conditions of our world.
Very interesting legal concepts of responsibility are also strongly influenced by mental health science particularly around capacity and capability too in addition to social and historical influences