Taking responsibility in an unjust world
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219867103 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Review Essay |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219867103
Journal of International Political Theory
2020, Vol. 16(1) 106 –118
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219867103
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Taking responsibility
in an unjust world
Joe Hoover
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Brooke A. Ackerly, Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018.
Michael Goodhart, Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2018.
Catherine Lu, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018.
Ours is an age of irresponsibility and injustice. The associations that make responsibility
and justice possible have broken down due to negligence, deliberate subversion and
changed social conditions. To be responsible is to be bound by legitimate social rules and
to be able to demand recognition of the social rules from others. Responsibility is the
activity of calling and responding appropriately in our social transactions, while justice,
most simply, is our reflective judgement of the quality of the rules and practices by which
we live. Our responsibility, and our capacity to be responsible, is dependent upon the
justice of the rules and practices with which we organise social life, upon the fairness of
the way we bind ourselves together. Justice and responsibility, then, are associational
concepts that characterise our relationships, as well as the norms and institutions through
which those relationships are built. Therefore, to live in an irresponsible and unjust age
means social rules and practices fail us, as our actual experience is not adequately
reflected in the institutional and normative world we inherit. We no longer know how to
respond to each other.
Convention in political theory dictates we work out an ideal conception of justice,
which provides a guide for the non-ideal world of lived experience. Yet, the irresponsi-
ble and unjust character of our age leads to alienation from the world of common expe-
rience, to feeling isolated, unseen, ignored, exploited and abused. The pervasive sense
Corresponding author:
Joe Hoover, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End
Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: j.hoover@qmul.ac.uk
867103IPT0010.1177/1755088219867103Journal of International Political TheoryHoover
review-article2019
Review Essay
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