The Concept of Injustice challenges traditional Western justice theory. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Rawls have subordinated the idea of injustice to the idea of justice. Misled by the word's etymology, political theorists have assumed injustice to be the sheer, logical opposite of justice. Heinze summons ancient and early modern texts, philosophical and literary, with special attention to Shakespeare, to argue that injustice is not primarily the negation, failure or absence of justice. It is the constant product of regimes and norms of justice. Justice is not always the cure for injustice, and is often its cause.
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The quote above, from Plato's Republic, translates as follows: âThose who reproach injustice do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it. So, Socrates, injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.â2 That proclamation sounds as impudent today as it did over two millennia ago when Plato placed it in the mouth of the sophist Thrasymachus. The Republic still stands as Plato's peremptory reply to the question, âWhat is justice?â3 Generations of readers have witnessed one of Western philosophy's great showdowns: the pugnacious Thrasymachus sings the praises of injustice, as Socrates strains to shoot down his arguments one by one. Power or wealth, Socrates' proto-Nietzschean4 nemesis urges, are handily acquired through unjust actions. The select few, the clever and the daring, ought not to toil when they can prosper5 through force or stealth. Law and justice are risible weapons, forged by a mediocre, cowardly multitude, the weak and the meek, who, at the hands of the powerful, merit not justice but disdain.6
Many of us, like Socrates, disagree. We assume justice to be better than injustice. We assume that âdoing what's unjust is actually the worst thing there is'.7 Countless children grow up with some version of that lesson. For us adults, it is too obvious for discussion.8 Our mediatised political and ethical debates never ask what justice and injustice âareâ. They focus on particular issues. Is it just or unjust to go to war? To lower taxes? To prohibit addictive substances? To open marriage and child rearing to same-sex partners? Lurching towards pragmatism, our hunch seems to be that such questions can be decided without our having to examine concepts of justice and injustice more broadly. We often believe that, by attending to the specific, concrete problems, one by one, we can work progressively towards justice throughout society as a whole, towards overall justice someday.
If justice is nevertheless so conspicuously superior to injustice, in the eyes of adults and children alike, we would certainly expect one who does take the time to ponder it in abstraction â Plato, the founder of systematic ethical and political theory in the Western canon â to have little difficulty demonstrating the point. After a few volleys, Socrates does seem to prevail: â[A] just person (
) has turned out to be good and clever, and an unjust one (
) ignorant and bad.â9 On closer reading, however, what leaps out is how unpersuasive Socrates' replies to Thrasymachus are. One interlocutor, Plato's brother Glaucon, notes that Socrates has left crucial points of Thrasymachus's challenge unanswered. Perhaps all that matters for injustice to prevail is for unjust people to appear just.10 Glaucon tells the legend of a poor shepherd who had found a magic ring. It enabled him to turn invisible while he committed unjust acts. He âseduced the king's wife, attacked the king with her help, killed him, and took over the kingdomâ.11 At that point of achieving absolute power, the shepherd no longer needs to fear justice. In becoming king, he effectively becomes the law. He becomes law's source, power and authority. He becomes the arbiter of justice. It is he who will now decide what is and is not just.12
Glaucon, still playing devil's advocate, suggests to Socrates that we would not hesitate to do injustice if we knew with certainty that no harm, and indeed great personal good, would come to us as a result of doing it.
Now, no one, it seems, would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice or stay away from other people's property, when he could take whatever he wanted from the marketplace with impunity, go into people's houses and have sex with anyone he wished, kill or release from prison anyone he wished, and do all the other things that would make him like a god among humans. [âŚ] This, some would say, is a great proof that one is never just willingly but only when compelled to be. [âŚ] [W]herever [a] person thinks he can do injustice with impunity, he does it. Indeed, every man believes that injustice is far more profitable to himself than justice.13
No enterprise becomes more desperate or more suspicious in Plato's writings than his hundreds of pages of mind-numbing acrobatics to establish what we mostly take to be trivially obvious, namely, that justice is better than injustice. Children will readily agree14 that justice is better because it is fairer, making society happier, more prosperous, more peaceful. The more Plato tries to defend justice on those or any other grounds, however, the less convincing his arguments become. Plato claims, for example, that any perpetrator of injustice, even Glaucon's shepherd, always ends up more miserable than the victim. â[A] just person is happy, and an unjust one wretchedâ,15 even if the unjust person has gained great power or wealth by inflicting, with impunity, horrendous brutality upon those who are just. Socrates insists that individuals who commit injustice must ultimately end up more miserable than their victims. Any unjust agent, be it an individual or a group, always becomes tormented,16 âmiserableâ,17 âan enemy to itselfâ.18 Neither through argument nor example, however, does Socrates show that unjust people do in fact suffer much despair at all, let alone pangs sharper than those suffered by their victims. Nor can we, looking back on a further 2,500 years of history, do much to bolster Socrates' view. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ceaucescu, Kim Il Sung, Saddam, Qadaffior Kim Jong-Il may have faced bad ends â and some of them suffered not even that â but, for the most part, not terribly protracted ones, compared to what they inflicted,19 and compared to their decades of relishing power, wealth, and often glory.20 â[C]urrent events quite sufficeâ, Socrates is reminded in another exchange, to show âthat many people who behave unjustly are happyâ.21
Plato does sometimes add afterlife myths about divine or ultimate justice.22 But those tales scarcely reassure us. His other brother, Adeimantus, reminds Socrates that, in ancient Athens as today, any supernatural order that will reward the just or punish the unjust remains shrouded in doubt. Perhaps âthe gods don't exist or don't concern themselves with human affairsâ.23 Christianity will later hail divine justice to urge us that âit is not the kind of suffering but the kind of person who suffers that is importantâ.24 But why would we believe that Christianity's divine order exists?
Countless Western thinkers, in their various ways, will rush to the defence of justice, from Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas through to Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill or Marx, and many more in our own day. It remains questionable whether they can defeat Thrasymachus's views any more convincingly than Plato does. Little in their work tackles Thrasymachus's challenge head-on. To be fair, Socrates does add other arguments. He claims, for example, that persons united by âa common unjust purposeâ â we need only recall a long line of Mafia films â inevitably render themselves unable to attain it. They become wracked not only by the internal psychological divisions of each unjust person, but by inter-personal strife.25 Once again, however, history often suggests otherwise, scarcely showing that high-minded projects inevitably prosper better than despotic ones. The Weimar Republic hardly flourished better than the Third Reich. Elevating justice above injustice, and even clearly distinguishing them, remains a complicated business.
1.2 A mutual exclusion?
For all their differences, Socrates and Thrasymachus share a crucial assumption. Most of us share it with them. Without it they would have no disagreement at all. They both presuppose that justice and injustice form a mutually exclusive pair, not merely as a matter of empirical observation, but as a tautology. Injustice by definition negates justice; justice by definition negates injustice. In Aristotle's words, âthe just will be both the lawful and what is fair, and the unjust will be both the lawless and the unfairâ.26
The justice or injustice of some acts is, of course, debatable. Consider the age-old controversies about whether it is ever justified to sacrifice one person to save many; or the debates concerning how much force counts as âreasonableâ to ward off a physical attack. Consider also complex factual scenarios, including armed conflict or natural calamites, in which a web of human actions, variously just or unjust, may become impossible to disentangle. For Plato and most of his successors, Aristotle or Aquinas, Kant or Hegel, Mill or Marx, Rawls or Dworkin, the fact that some scenarios are ethically complex in no way means that justice becomes inscrutable.27 The binarism therefore remains intact. Insofar as Socrates deems justice superior to injustice, it is precisely because the one term is assumed to negate the other that Thrasymachus can construct, in symmetrical opposition, his argument that injustice is better than justice. If âunhappyâ is the opposite of âhappyâ, if âuntrueâ is the opposite of âtrueâ, then, in the same way, âinjusticeâ and âjusticeâ, must be mutually defined opposites. When Aristotle writes, âif the unjust is unfair (
), the just is fair (
)â, he deems that observation to be âtrue to everyone without argumentâ.28
What would it mean if there were something incorrect about that seemingly obvious, seemingly necessary, assumption? On the one hand, it is easy enough to note that terms can function as mutually exclusive without sharing an etymological link, such as terms like âgoodâ and âbadâ, or ârightâ and âwrongâ. On the other hand, and more importantly, as I shall argue, it is far from obvious that an etymology of logical opposition strictly corresponds to mutually exclusive realities. A long tradition has emerged in the West, embodying what can be called the âclassical modelâ of justice. That binary model relentlessly mirrors the etymology whic...
