Putting Injustice First: An Alternative Approach to Liberal Pluralism

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Bernard Yack

Injustice, for these theorists, provides an indirect route, a via negativa, to identifying the content of justice. Start with injustice, they say, if you want to understand by justice. Logically, however, justice still has priority over injustice in their thinking (Wohlgast, 1987: 132n11). For they still treat injustice as nothing but the absence or violation of justice. They merely recommend that we start with the negation, injustice, in order to identify the positive good, justice, whose absence leads us to get so upset. Putting injustice first, for them, is just a means of thinking more clearly about justice.

Since this way of conceptualizing the priority of injustice denies its existence as an independent phenomenon, it gives us little help in making sense of Shklar's characterization of injustice. Shklar may be obsessed with negative phenomena like the vices, but she expresses little interest in the via negativa. When Shklar focuses attention on the vices and other negative features of moral psychology it is to force us to face up to the deep and far too often overlooked impact that they have on the structure of everyday moral and political life, rather than to help us identify their positive counterparts. When, for example, she urges us "to put cruelty first" among the vices (1984: 7-44), it is to highlight what she took to be the most important goal of liberal politics, the restraint of our propensity to act cruelly, rather than to help us understand its positive counterparts, such as compassion or gentleness. Her intense study of the vices was part of an effort to construct a more realistic picture of moral and political life rather than an attempt to open an indirect route to a theory of justice and the other virtues.

Injustice as a Primary Phenomenon

Perhaps then what Shklar means by the independence and priority of injustice is that it does not reflect any prior judgments about the just behavior of other individuals. From this point of view, it would be injustice that would be fundamental, while justice would represent a reaction to injustice. Of course, characterizing injustice in this way requires that we discount the evidence of linguistic usage, which in most languages--at least in the languages with which I am familiar--affixes a negating prefix to the word for injustice. But linguistic usage is often misleading. Maybe it is misleading in this case as well and it is the concept with the negative prefix, injustice, that is primary and its positive counterpart that represents the negation.

After all, while many negative values, discord for example, are clearly negations of something positive, there are others that do not take the form of a negation of something positive. War, for example, may be a negative value, but it is peace that is best understood as a negation. When we long for peace, what we are longing for is an end to war, an end to the fighting. Similarly, health might best be defined as the absence of illness, rather than illness as the absence of health. By insisting that we treat injustice as an independent phenomenon in its own right, Shklar seems to be suggesting that injustice, like war or illness, is not a negation of its positive counterpart and that we must therefore put injustice first in our conceptualizations of right and wrong.