Putting Injustice First: An Alternative Approach to Liberal Pluralism

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Bernard Yack

At this point we must bear in mind Shklar's skepticism about moral knowledge. Justice, for Shklar, is not an account of the natural laws or rights ordering human society, nor an account of the principles that rational people would choose were they given an opportunity to do so, nor an account of the implicit consensus, overlapping or otherwise, that is embedded in our practices and institutions. Claims to know what rationality requires or what members of a community implicitly accept have no greater plausibility for her than claims to have identified the moral order of the cosmos.(8)

For Shklar, justice represents, instead, a system of social accountability, a set of rules and principles that we establish in order to make it possible to live relatively safely and decently with each other. These rules and principles are, in part, a reaction to injustice, a way of responding to and satisfying the feelings of outrage that we feel when others harm us in ways we expect them to avoid. But justice represents more than just a reaction to injustice from this point of view. It also represents a means of controlling behavior in the name of social peace, solidarity, collective power and other values that go well beyond the correction of injustice. That is one reason why there is such an imbalance between the loss that injustice causes and the correction that justice offers. The choice of punishment of a wrongdoer that justice offers always involves a principle of communal good beyond the correction of injustice that the victim desires: deterrence, the elimination of revenge cycles, the purging of some curse on the community, for instance. Because our models of justice involve such considerations, they almost always will leave the victim of injustice feeling unsatisfied. Not that personal revenge on the wrongdoer can provide victims with complete satisfaction, since there will always remain some imbalance between the innocent and the guilty victims of suffering. But personal revenge, at least, represents a direct reaction to the act of injustice without all of these "extraneous" social concerns mixed into the case.

When theorists of justice treat injustice as nothing but the violation of justice they are, in effect, attempting to reeducate our expectations of each other. They are attempting to train us to treat as unjust only those actions that harm the good of the community as they reconstruct it. Shklar is not completely opposed to such retraining since she recognizes full well the violence that would be unleashed by our all acting all of the time on an unrestrained sense of injustice. But she is deeply concerned to make sure that we do not take this process of reeducation so far that we can only recognize claims of injustice when they correspond to the violation of an order established by some model of justice. For, like Plato, Montaigne, and the other notable objectors to the normal model that she cites (1990: 8),(9) Shklar scoffs at the idea that such partial and short-sighted creatures as ourselves could come up with models of justice without committing new and grave injustices of our own. Where there is justice, there is necessarily injustice for Shklar, given the ineradicable cognitive and moral limitations of human beings. Reeducating our sense of injustice to conform to the contours of our normal models of justice means subordinating our moral sentiments to the limited and untrustworthy visions of our moral reasoning. There are good reasons to do so in many situations, according to Shklar, but only if we keep in mind the limited purpose of the models of justice we employ.