The Faces of Injustice. - book reviews

Mind, Jan, 1993 by Georgia Warnke

Shklar's The Faces of Injustice reproduces two pictures by Giotto from the Arena Chapel in Padua. One is of Justice and portrays "a calm and majestic woman" (p. 103). The other is of Injustice, represented by "a male profile...cold and cruel with small, fanglike teeth at the sides of the mouth" (p. 46). Injustice wears a judge's or ruler's cap backward and carries a "nasty pruning hook". The archway behind him is in ruins; the consequences of injustice are displayed below his feet: a theft, a rape, and a murder watched by two soldiers who do nothing. The face of Justice, for her part, is benign. She carries two figures, one of winged victory on its way to reward someone, the other of Jove with a thunderbolt on his way to a beheading. Below her feet are the consequences of justice: two hunters, two men dancing and two men standing at their ease.

The point Shklar makes about these two pictures is that they are not opposites. Dancing and hunting are not the opposite of stealing, raping and killing; the act of distributing just rewards and punishments is not the opposite of pruning the trees of injustice; finally, if justice gives rise to feelings of calm and serenity, such feelings provide no rival to the passions inflamed by injustice--to feelings of resentment and hopes of revenge. For these reasons, Shklar claims that political theory cannot simply focus on justice and assume that injustice is merely its obverse image. Rather, acts of injustice require independent and analytical study of their own. "I do not know why" Shklar remarks, "a curious division of labour prevails, why philosophy ignores iniquity, while history and fiction deal with little else." But, she insists, "it does leave a gap in our thinking", a gap politicaltheory is suited to fill. "At the very least, one might begin to shorten the distance between theory and practice when one looks at our many injustices, rather than only at accounts of what we ought to be and do" (p. 16).

And if one looks at our many injustices, Shklar suggests, what becomes clear is how ordinary and pervasive they are. They do not involve only acts of obvious criminality but also failures of both government and citizens to act when they could, acts of what Shklar calls passive injustice in which we fail to report crimes, look the other way when we see someone cheating, decide not to speak up when we see someone being short-changed and so on. These acts cannot be adequately represented by the usual picture of a devil breaking up the scales of justice; rather they go on in the interstices of a functioning systems of justice, "within the framework of an established polity with an operative system of law in normal time" (p. 19).

Moreover, Shklar argues, they go on because injustice is so easily described as misfortune and because the line between injustice and misfortune is, in fact, so vague and political. Disasters such as infant mortality and famine that were once misfortunes are now injustices because the advance of technology means that where they occur political corruption must be to blame. But other disasters seem less easy to categorize: for example, an earthquake that wreaks its greatest havoc on the disadvantaged because they are forced to live in more poorly constructed housing than the rich is surely part injustice; but it is also a misfortune that the earthquake happened at all. Shklar reminds us that misfortunes are still possible and warns us that our technological advances should not either lull us into a false sense of security or lead us always to look for scapegoats when disasters occur. Still, her emphasis is the opposite: to regard acts of injustice as simply misfortunes is far worse a mistake and our greater obligation, then, is continually to speak out against what we feel are the injustices committed against us whether we are ultimately supported in that feeling by our society or not.

This argument leads in the last chapter of Shklar's book to a defence of a sort of robust democracy. Shklar denies that felt acts of injustice can ever be entirely eliminated. Still, because the line between misfortune and injustice is so vague, we must always allow for the expression of felt injustices on the part of those who think they have been victimized and democracy, in contrast to other regimes, not only allows for such expressions but thrives on them. For only if we voice our sense of injustice can we keep politicians honest and ourselves actively involved in our own rule. What is "dreadful", Shklar writes (p. 112), is that citizens do not always speak up because they have become cynical, because they do not expect support or success; in the United States we no longer even vote. One of the many virtues of Shklar's book is that it makes it clear that we do not need great strides in civic education to correct this situation. We need only rely on our own sense of the injustices done to us and let no one rob us of our voice, even if, in theend, they do not agree with us.