Laidlaw Week 5 Journal
What is injustice? In truth, even after a year of reading philosophy, I do not know how to clearly define justice and injustice. More often than not, justice is an ideal concept that moral philosophers use to justify their arguments instead of a concept that they seek to clearly define. Yet, it is often very easy to discriminate between justice and injustice in everyday life. Roughly, I think we often think of justice in daily life as doing what is deserved and injustice as doing what is not deserved or at least refusing to give someone what they deserve. For example, it is unjust for me to toture an innocent person to death because they didn’t do anything to deserve such treatment.
When we encounter such injustices, is there anything within our power to change it? Some may suggest that this depends on context. If you have power over those who are committing the injustice or if you could, without dealing with those committing the injustice, intervene to mitigate the situation. Others may suggest that we have a power to prevent injustice every time we encounter it because we can always do simple things such as calling out such injustice or even refuse to participate in perpetuating such injustice. However, this claim does not seem to hold up to scrutiny. There are many cases where refusing to participate or advocacy do not result in meaningful prevention of injustice. In these cases, it does not seem like there is much within our power to change it.
What responsibility flows from having this power? I would argue that this depends on the setup of this injustice. It reminds me about the different ways we conceptualize our obligations to others. Firstly, we can think about whether we are facing a perfect or imperfect obligation. When we face a perfect obligation, one where the person on the receiving end of this obligation has a corresponding right, we have a responsibility to act to actively prevent injustice. For instance, if your child is not being fed by your estranged partner, you may have a responsibility to intervene in this injustice. This is because the child has a right to be given food by their parents. Meanwhile, a child starving in a developing country does not have a corresponding right to being given food by you even if this is unjust. Given this imperfect obligation, you may not have a responsibility to feed them. In this sense, responsibility does not always flow from your power to prevent injustice.
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Poj, this is a rigorous and appropriately unsettled reflection. You resist the appealing but overly simple claim that we always possess the power to prevent any injustice we encounter. Calling something out, refusing participation, or expressing disapproval may preserve one’s integrity, but these actions do not necessarily alter the conditions producing the harm. Your emphasis on context, capability, and likely consequences is therefore important.
Your initial account focuses on the idea that justice means giving people what they are due, and not subjecting them to treatment they have done nothing to warrant. This captures one important aspect of justice, but perhaps not all of it. Torturing an innocent person would be unjust not only because they had done nothing to deserve it, but because torture violates their dignity and fundamental rights. Justice can also concern how resources are distributed, whether procedures are fair, whose identities and contributions are recognised, and whether wider structures systematically advantage some people over others.
I would also distinguish between successfully preventing an injustice and possessing a responsibility to respond. An intervention may fail without being morally meaningless, while a poorly judged intervention may worsen the situation despite good intentions. Responsibility may therefore require us to consider effectiveness, risk, our relationship to the injustice, whether our own conduct contributes to it, and whether collective action offers greater possibilities than isolated protest.
Your use of perfect and imperfect obligations introduces a valuable distinction, although the example of the starving child requires further qualification. The child may still possess a right to food; the more difficult question is who bears the corresponding duty to secure it. That responsibility might fall across parents, governments, institutions, and, more diffusely, those capable of assisting. An imperfect duty of beneficence may leave discretion over whom and how we help, but it does not necessarily imply that we have no responsibility towards distant suffering.
There is also a danger in treating responsibility solely as a direct relationship between an identifiable victim and an individual actor. Many injustices are sustained structurally through laws, institutions, markets, and routine practices. No single person may be able to eliminate them, yet people may still carry differentiated responsibilities according to their power, benefit, contribution, expertise, and capacity to organise with others.
For leadership, the difficult question may therefore be not simply, 'Can I personally stop this injustice?' but: What influence do I possess, how am I connected to the situation, what risks would intervention create for others, and what responsible contribution can I make to a wider response?
An excellent philosophical reflection. You have not resolved the meaning of justice, but you have identified precisely why moving from recognising injustice to assigning responsibility is so difficult.