Social positions and institutional privilege as matters of justice
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| Author | Johan Brännmark |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118788973 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EJPT
Article
Social positions and
institutional privilege
as matters of justice
Johan Bra
¨nnmark
Department of Global Political Studies, Malmo
¨University, Sweden
Abstract
Liberal political theory is often understood as being underpinned by an individualistic
social ontology, and it is sometimes objected that this type of ontology makes it difficult
to address injustices that involve social groups and informal forms of privilege. It is
argued here that, to the extent that liberals do fail to properly address such structural
injustices, the main problem can instead be understood to lie with a rules-centric
understanding of institutions – one which is actually out of line with a proper ontological
individualism. If institutions are instead understood as distributions of right and duties,
held by individuals, it becomes much more straightforward to identify institutional
privilege in terms of inequalities in those distributions. The relevant rights and duties
can be explicated in terms of informal Hohfeldian incidents and it is argued that pat-
terned distributions of such incidents can come to exist, and be maintained, through
how we develop a largely intuitive sense of where our interpersonal boundaries run and
form social expectations about which kinds of behaviour will typically receive pushback
in some form.
Keywords
Gender, individuals, institutions, privilege, race, social groups
Societies can be characterized by unequal distributions in at least two main ways,
either in the distribution of goods or in the distribution of rights and duties.
Such distributions are standardly seen as matters of justice. While liberals usually
accept some inequalities in the distribution of goods (although they might differ on
which), liberalism also tends to be characterized by a strong egalitarianism when it
comes to legal rights and duties. A standard worry about this kind of formal
egalitarianism, often expressed by feminist theorists and critical race theorists, as
well as activists outside of academia, is that legal equality does not quite take us to
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(3) 510–528
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118788973
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Corresponding author:
Johan Bra
¨nnmark, Department of Global Political Studies, Malmo
¨University, 205 06 Malmo
¨, Sweden.
Email: johan.brannmark@mau.se
real equality. The idea can then be that social positions like being white or being a
man are positions of privilege and that occupants of social positions like being
a person of colour or being a woman are oppressed or subordinated in a
structural way.
1
If one thinks that there are matters of justice that tend not to be addressed
adequately by traditional liberal theories of justice, one possible culprit is the
strong individualism of its underlying social ontology. For instance, one might
think that privilege ‘is properly attributed to groups primarily and to individuals
derivatively’ (McKinnon and Sennet, 2017: 487). We would perhaps then need a
more robust notion of social groups in order to make sense of privilege. This article
will, however, explore another option, one where what we need to do to address
injustices related to group belonging is not to abandon an individualistic social
ontology, but rather to more fully base our understanding of the relevant institu-
tions on it. It should be said that the aim here is merely to show how certain
informal societal patterns, considered as institutions, can be brought within the
scope of justice,
2
not to make any specific judgments on what is just or unjust
(although given an egalitarian starting point, it will certainly be morally and pol-
itically problematic if there are inequalities in the rights and duties characterizing
social positions that we occupy, especially since these would seem to pertain to
equality of opportunity).
There will be three main steps to the argument, corresponding to the first three
sections: first, that we should understand institutions as distributions of rights and
duties, which means moving away from a more traditional focus on rules; second,
that a Hohfeldian schema of incidents can be used to explicate such distributions;
and, third, that we can identify some social positions, involving complexes of
Hohfeldian incidents, as privileged or subordinated. The fourth section will then
address some concerns that one might have with respect to this type of account.
Institutions as distributions
In the opening passages of A Theory of Justice, Rawls (1999: 3) proclaims
that ‘[j]ustice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of
thought’ and then proceeds to clarify the scope of any principles of justice that
we might adhere to:
For us the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society, or more exactly,
the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties
and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation. By major institu-
tions I understand the political constitution and the principal economic and social
arrangements. (Rawls, 1999: 6)
The theory that Rawls then goes on to construct in order to fill this job description
is well-known and thoroughly discussed in the literature. One major objection to it,
as well as other theories belonging to the same liberal family, is that it fails to
properly address certain forms of injustice, gender and racial injustices being two
Bra¨nnmark 511
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