Why economic agency matters: An account of structural domination in the economic realm

Authors like Iris Young and Philip Pettit have come up with proposals for theorizing ‘structural injustice’ and social relations marred by ‘domination’. These authors provide conceptual tools for focusing on concrete economic structures and re-focus the debate about justice onto questions of power. In this article we build on their work, but we argue that a positive notion of economic agency is needed as a criterion for what makes economic structures dominating and potentially unjust. We propose a notion of economic agency, which we relate to a more general notion of autonomous agency to create a dual-level account. Domination in the economic sphere happens where individuals are deprived of their economic agency, to the extent that such agency is necessary to lead an autonomous life in general. Using the example of creditor-debtor relations we argue for the usefulness of this theoretical framework. Finally, we define injustices in terms of threshold levels of economic agency, the latter being spelled out in terms of a set of capabilities. This proposal overcomes the artificial boundaries between those theorizing ‘justice’ and those theorizing ‘power’ when analyzing the economic domain.