Putting Injustice First: An Alternative Approach to Liberal Pluralism

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Bernard Yack

Although this line of argument may seem counterintuitive with regard to injustice, it gains some plausibility from the greater certainty we usually accord to our judgments about what constitutes the wrong, as opposed to the right, way to act. Moreover, this way of thinking about justice and injustice, with its denial that we can identify an inherently just order of things, might seem especially attractive for liberals, especially liberals of a skeptical temperament like Shklar. After all, peace and liberty, two of the principle goods that most liberals seek, can also be defined by means of negation, as the absence of war and the absence of constraint, respectively. Adding justice, the third principal good favored by most liberals, to that list of negatively defined goods might seem to fit in very well with the general reluctance of liberal theorists to come up with positive visions of the good.(5)

Shklar herself does not develop this view of the relationship between justice and injustice. But it receives a full elaboration in Elizabeth Wohlgast's fine book The Grammar of Justice. Wohlgast suggests that when we treat injustice as the mere violation or absence of justice, we are assuming that there must be, at least in the imagination, a just order of things that is disturbed by the acts we call unjust. If we treat murder as wrong, for example, it must be because there is, at least in our imagination, some antecedent right to life derived from that just order of things. Acts of injustice, from this point of view, upset the proper balance of things and must be rectified so that the original harmony and order can be restored (Wohlgast, 1987: 46-47).

The weakness of this way of looking at justice and injustice, Wohlgast argues, becomes especially striking when we think about our attempts to restore this antecedent just order by means of punishing acts of injustice. The metaphor of justice as the return of things "to their original equitable state" clearly fails at this point.

For when a criminal is punished for having committed rape or burglary or murder, say--things are not returned to their original state. Even though a theft is recompensed, the injury and wrong cannot be undone; they become a permanent part of the universe, never to be erased. Thus the condition of stasis, defined as the condition in which the wrong is essentially corrected, is unattainable. Such a debt cannot be repaid (Wohlgast, 1987: 126).

How does punishing a criminal--say, executing a child--murderer do anything to restore the prior balance of things? It may give us some satisfaction to establish a certain balance of suffering. But in one case the suffering was deserved and in the other it was not. Since the innocent life taken cannot be restored, the idea of restoring the balance of things before the act of injustice is an illusion. As Dostoevsky puts it in The Brothers Karamazov--in a passage that Wohlgast employs to especially good effect there can be no atonement, no recompense for the suffering of a tortured child. "How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured" (Dostoevsky, 1950: 254; Wohlgast, 1987: 127-132)? Even with lesser crimes, crimes that involve monetary loss rather than physical pain or death, the claims of justice to restore an antecedent order of things ring hollow. For even acts of injustice like theft harm us in ways that go well beyond the loss of purchasing power: the affront to one's dignity, the loss of trust and a sense of personal security, for example. No compensation, no matter how appropriate and valuable can restore the balance of things prior to the act of injustice.