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What to do About (Housing) Injustice? Developing the Social Connection Model’s Prioritization and Action Guidance and Investigating Landlords’ Responsibility for Housing Injustice

This thesis develops the prioritization guidance and action guidance provided by Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model of responsibility for injustice. Young’s parameters of reasoning are limited in their ability to assist responsible agents in determining what they ought to do to fulfill their responsibilities, as they are severed from the structural analysis characteristic of the rest of the SCM. This thesis addresses the resulting limitations by developing categories of prioritization and an action guidance framework. I develop 6 categories of prioritization: power, benefit, interest, centrality, contribution, and control. Applied to social-group-based analysis, these categories determine the strength of the prioritization claim which a given injustice holds over a given social group. The action guidance framework takes the perspective of the political community and works its way through three questions and their corresponding considerations: “What can we do?” –structural change, altering practices, and harm alleviation; “How can we do it?” –understanding sub-issues and sub-options, determining interests, and organizing collectives; and “What can I do?” –eliminating contributory behaviours, and considering personal circumstances. Through this framework, agents can analyze the capacities of the political community and the structures of an injustice to determine which projects should be undertaken and how agents ought to contribute. Finally, the developments of this thesis are applied to the case of landlords and housing, therein establishing the necessity of landlords abandoning rental profits so as to fulfill and not contradict their responsibility to eliminate housing injustice. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This thesis develops the prioritization guidance and action guidance provided by Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model of responsibility for injustice. Young’s parameters of reasoning, meant to provide this guidance, are limited in their ability to assist responsible agents in determining what they ought to do to fulfill their responsibilities. This thesis addresses these limitations by developing 6 categories of prioritization and an action guidance framework. The categories of prioritization determine which social groups ought to prioritize a given injustice. Through the action guidance framework, agents can analyze the capacities of the political community and the structures of an injustice to determine which projects should be undertaken and how agents ought to contribute to them. The developments of this thesis are applied to the case of landlords and housing injustice, therein establishing the necessity of landlords abandoning rental profits.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/29003
Date January 2023
CreatorsBatista, Mackenzie
ContributorsIgneski, Violetta, Philosophy
Source SetsMcMaster University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

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