Putting Injustice First: An Alternative Approach to Liberal Pluralism

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Bernard Yack

These expectations may reflect moral judgments about the high standards of behavior that we expect from rational and civilized creatures. Or they may reflect little more than the habits formed by repeated actions of one sort or another. As Robert Solomon and others have pointed out, many social animals such as dogs and apes clearly react with the kind of anger and sense of betrayal that human beings show when subjected to an unexpected punishment or deprived of an unexpected reward (Solomon, 1990: 106-111; de Waal, 1996: 159-160). The sense of injustice, it would seem, requires only enough reasoning power to recognize the connection between some harm and the failure to live up to the expectation that one creature has for another.

In the end, I do not think that you can entirely get rid of the "in," the negating element, in injustice. We may not need a full-blown sense of a just order of things in order to recognize injustice. But without some sense of what we can expect from the behavior of others, I do not think that we can satisfactorily account for the passions inspired by injustice.

Injustice and the Preservation of Moral Pluralism

If injustice involves the betrayal of preexisting social expectations for Shklar, what can she mean by insisting that we treat injustice as an "independent phenomenon in its own right?" Clearly, she cannot be suggesting, like Wohlgast, that injustice is a fundamental and unconditioned phenomenon, at least not without contradicting herself. Such a view would, in any case, fit very badly with Shklar's general skepticism about moral knowledge. There is no more reason, from her point of view, to believe that we have access to some primary, unconditioned knowledge about injustice than to believe that we can have a similar kind of knowledge about justice. Nor is there any reason, from her skeptical perspective, to believe that injustice is waiting out there somewhere to be discovered at all. When describing injustice as an "independent phenomenon in its own right," Shklar is, pointing to its independence from some prior set of standards of justice rather than, like Wohlgast, to its fundamental status as an unconditioned phenomenon, directly apprehended by our moral sentiments.

But if Shklar acknowledges that injustice involves the violation of expectations we have about each other's behavior, how can she deny that the negation or violation of our standards of justice represents the most plausible definition of injustice? Shklar does not pose or answer this question directly in The Faces of Injustice. Implicitly, however, she does seem to draw a distinction between justice and the social expectations that she connects to our complaints about injustice.

Most theorists of justice identify these social expectations with justice and tend to treat them as primitive or inchoate visions of what justice requires, visions that theorists have the duty to clean up and rationalize into what Shklar calls a "normal model" of justice: a coherent and consistent body of rules and principles capable of ordering and maintaining a community's basic practices and institutions (1990: 17-20). Shklar does not. Of course, many of the social expectations associated with complaints about injustice are inspired by the standards of justice that we assert or have been socialized to recognize. Others, however, often represent, as we have seen, little more than habit. For example, we grow used to getting away with certain activities or receiving certain benefits and react indignantly when people suddenly change the way we expect us to behave. Our normal models of justice treat such expectations as evidence of an implicit commitment to certain principles of justice: render like unto like or the authority of custom, for example. But in doing so, Shklar suggests, they overreach themselves and try to impose an order on our sense of injustice that both misrepresents our moral sentiments and stifles a most valuable source of moral insight.