Putting Injustice First: An Alternative Approach to Liberal Pluralism

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Bernard Yack

Someone less skeptical than Shklar about our cognitive and moral capacities might not see much of a loss in this imposition of order on the irretrievably subjective and contradictory mass of our complaints about injustice. But for her these complaints, irrational and one-sided as they so often are, provide us with a priceless source of moral insight. The self-absorbed and passionate character of our reaction to injustice may blind us to many things. But it opens our eyes to other things that the impartial perspective of the defender of a normal model of justice cannot see. When Shklar puts injustice first, it is to correct what she sees as the arrogance of philosophers and political theorists who mistake their often useful models of social justice for accurate pictures of our moral world. The raw and wildly diverse mix of complaints inspired by our sense of injustice gives us access to parts of that complex world that our most familiar theories of justice, even those that celebrate liberal pluralism, rarely enter. That is why liberal pluralists should be interested in protecting the openness and diversity of our claims about injustice from theoretical demands for consistency and consensus.

Shklar's famously "negative" approach to liberalism thus serves positive as well as negative goals. Rather than just aim at the negation of evils, such as the removal of obstacles to our motion or the prevention of cruel and arbitrary punishments, Shklar tries to promote a fuller and richer understanding of the world we build around our moral and political conceptions. 11 By focussing attention on vices rather than virtues, she seeks to open our eyes to some of the most important features of our moral and political experience, features that less pluralistic approaches to the issue of justice and injustice inevitably obscure from view.

Notes

(1) The approaches described in this sentence refer, respectively, to: John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, Jurgen Habermas, Rawls in Political Liberalism, and Michael Walzer in Spheres of Justice.

(2) I discuss the critical implications of Shklar's arguments for the normal model's conception of justice, as opposed to injustice, in "Injustice and the Victim's Voice." Shklar's reluctance to criticize the normal model's understanding of justice, as opposed to its "complacent view of injustice" reflects her political commitment to the "legalist values that it promotes" (1990: 18). Similar reasoning, I suspect, kept her from pursuing the critical implications of her critique of the normal model for Rawls's theory of justice.

(3) In "Active and Passive Justice" I suggest that there is another form of justice, which I call "active justice" in imitation of Shklar's own distinction between active and passive injustice, that does excite the kind of warmth and passion we ordinarily associate with injustice. But it is far rarer than the "passive" justice, which consists of simply following the standards outlined by a normal model of justice, that Shklar is talking about here.