Putting Injustice First: An Alternative Approach to Liberal Pluralism

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Bernard Yack

(4) Shklar (1990: 17) suggests that Aristotle uses injustice in the same way as an indirect means of identifying the content of justice.

(5) It would not fit very well, of course, with the kind of deontological forms of liberalism associated with Rawls and Kant, since they insist that the right can be identified separately from the good, even from a good that is defined negatively.

(6) As Wohlgast emphasizes, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that justice represents only one way of reacting to wrong or injustice. We can and daily do react to it in other ways that do not involve justice and its cumbersome machinery.

(7) Of course, our judgments about causation cannot be completely abstracted from our expectations of hostile or benevolent behavior on the part of others. On this point see Marion Smiley, Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community.

(8) On the problems with identifying a community's implicit consensus or its shared social meaning, see the withering remarks Shklar (1990:114 15, 138n39) directs against the arguments that Michael Walzer makes in Spheres of Justice. See also J. Shklar, "The Work of Michael Walzer.""

(9) She does not deal here with the question of whether Plato made an exception for his own theory of justice in The Republic.

(10) This insistence that people who disagree with us do not know their own minds, their own deeper agreement with us, is one of the least palatable features of the neo-Kantian school of liberalism inspired by Rawls. See B. Yack, "The Problem with Kantian Liberalism."

(11) For this reason it is probably a mistake to identify Shklar's "negative liberalism" with Isaiah Berlin's concept of negative liberty, as does Amy Gutmann (referring to the Shklar of Ordinary Vices and "The Liberalism of Fear") in "How Limited is Liberal Government?"

References

Benhabib, Seyla. "Judith Shklar's Dystopic Liberalism." Liberalism without Illusions. Ed. Bernard Yack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Cahn, Edmund. The Sense of Injustice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1950).

Dunn, John. "Hope over Fear." Liberalism without Illusions. Ed. Bernard Yack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Gutmann, Amy. "How Limited is Liberal Government?" Liberalism without Illusions. Ed. Bernard Yack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Lucas, J. R. On Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

Nussbaum, Martha "The Misfortune Teller." The New Republic, 26 Nov. 1990: 30-32.

Rawls, John. Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

-- A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Shklar, Judith. The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

-- "The Liberalism of Fear." Political Thought and Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

-- Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

-- Political Thought and Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).