Putting Injustice First: An Alternative Approach to Liberal Pluralism

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Bernard Yack

Justice and the Marriage between Liberalism and Pluralism

PLURALISM with regard to the good, the broadest possible consensus with regard to justice--such are the terms of the marriage between liberalism and pluralism as defined by leading academic liberals such as Rawls, Walzer, and Habermas. In effect, they argue that living securely with deep and widespread disagreements about the best way to live requires a broad, if not very deep, agreement on liberal principles of justice.

There is, however, at least one obvious problem with this marriage: our disagreements about justice are often just as deep and intractable as our disagreements about the best way to live. As a result, contemporary liberal pluralists need to exercise considerable ingenuity to persuade us that a consensus about basic principles of justice lies somewhere beneath the disagreements of everyday life. They uncover this consensus in many places: implicit in relatively uncontroversial norms of rationality; hidden among the assumptions that make effective commication possible; embedded in our shared democratic public culture; or rooted in the historical meanings of different social goods.(1) Unfortunately, their accounts of the nature of rationality, the goals of communication, the content of our culture, and the historical meaning of social goods are no less controversial than competing characterizations of justice. As a result, their efforts to uncover our implicit consensus about justice lead to an infinite regress, an endless shuffle from the good to the just, the just to the rational, the rational to the communicable, the communicable to the shared culture, and so on. At each step, the second term of the pair promises a consensus that will sustain and contain our disagreements about the first--only to reveal itself, in the end, as a new site of disagreement and controversy.

Perhaps this infinite regress and the repetitive controversies associated with it are unavoidable. But before accepting this conclusion, it is worth considering other ways of bringing liberalism and pluralism together, ways that do not demand that we start with a broad consensus on basic principles of justice. To that end, I want to look closely at Judith Shklar's attempt, in The Faces of Injustice, to bring injustice out of the long shadows cast by liberal theories of justice.

In The Faces of Injustice, Shklar complains that almost all of our prominent theories of justice fail to give injustice its due. By treating injustice as the mere absence or negation of justice, rather than "as an independent phenomenon in [its] own right," these theories obscure "the full, complex, and enduring character of injustice as a social phenomenon" (Shklar, 1990: 15, 9). In particular, they encourage us to adopt the false and arrogant belief that we can capture in some systematic body of rules and principles the full range of actions that inspire reasonable complaints about injustice. Moreover, by treating injustice as a mere negation of justice, we are led, Shklar argues, to silence a large portion of the complaints made by individuals who think themselves victims of injustice. For victims of injustice raise a much broader range of complaints than mere departure from recognized standards and principles.

Clearly, a kind of liberal pluralism inspires Shklar's impassioned defense of the independence of injustice as a social phenomenon. But unlike the more familiar and influential versions of liberal pluralism, Shklar's pluralism covers conceptions of justice and injustice, as well as conceptions of good and evil. According to Shklar, we have as much to learn about justice from a plurality of competing perspectives as we do about the good life. As a result, liberal pluralists' strenuous search for consensus about basic principles of justice threatens one of pluralism's most important benefits, i.e., access to a greater variety of competing sources of insight. Moreover, according to Shklar, we have much to fear from officials who believe that they are armed with the community's agreement as well as its coercive authority. As a result, liberal pluralists' emphasis on consensus about basic principles of justice undermines one of liberalism's most important goals: protection from cruel and arbitrary exercise of coercive authority. Shklar's insistence on putting injustice first is designed to preserve and enhance liberal and pluralist goals. It allows her to develop a more pluralistic vision of liberal pluralism, one that does not rest on strained and implausible claims about the underlying consensus about justice that awaits us if we are willing to learn how and where to dig for it.

But there is an obvious problem as well with Shklar's liberal pluralism. How can injustice represent something more than the absence or violation of justice when the very term, in-justice, suggests the negation of something just? Shklar says a great deal about the range of human experience that we miss when we treat injustice as mere absence of justice. But she does not sort out the conceptual confusion that she creates with her claim that injustice can be treated as an independent phenomenon in its own right. Thus, she leaves herself open to the criticism that all she has done is point to a broader notion of justice for injustice to violate (Nussbaum, 1990: 30-32), which merely brings us back by a roundabout route to the search for a common and stable liberal vision of justice.