Individuelle Verantwortung für globale strukturelle Ungerechtigkeiten: Eine machttheoretische Konzeption

This paper suggests a novel, power-based model of moral blame-responsibility for individuals’ implication in global structural injustices. It starts from the problem that most conditions for the attribution of moral blame-responsibility are not met in cases of individual involvement in global structural injustices. For example, when a person buys a T-Shirt that has been produced under exploitative conditions, her action is neither necessary nor sufficient for the structural injustice to come about, often she has not intended the structurally unjust effects of her action and cannot foresee them. Last but not least, her involvement in the global economic order is non-voluntary. This paper discusses the solution Iris Marion Young has suggested for such problems in her social-connection model of responsibility, but finds it wanting with regard to criteria of causal relevance. It then suggests an own solution to these difficulties by sketching a power-based model of moral blame-responsibility. This model conceptualizes individual blame-responsibility not just with regard to the effects of individual actions but also with regard to individuals’ structurally generated, generalised and relational capacity for action. Such relational capacities, or in short: social power, is transferred onto individuals by social rules and amounts to a social status vis-à-vis others. I suggest that moral responsibility for the adoption of their social status-functions can be attributed to individuals precisely because their social power constitutes the precondition of their generalised capacity for action. Accordingly, any kind of action amounts to an implicit acceptance and adoption of one’s social status-functions vis-à-vis others. One must not intentionally will to exercise one’s (dominating) social power over others in order to hold it. However, as soon as a person acts and thereby adopts her social status-functions with regard to others, she