superiority – and greater justice – of a world without slavery. In asserting
such a conclusion they were not also making the further claim that all the
alternatives that can be generated by variations of institutions and policies
can be fully ranked against each other. Slavery as an institution can be
assessed without evaluating – with the same definitiveness – all the other
institutional choices the world faces. We do not live in an ‘all or nothing
world’.^93Judith Shklar, in her The Faces of Injustice , makes a strong case for bringing injustice
into focus as a central consideration in political theory, and it is her description of “a
sense of injustice” that will bring the issues so far explored in this chapter into
focus, and provide a bridge to the more normative turn of the final chapters.
For Shklar, injustice, which she contrasts (although she argues that the
distinction is slippery) with misfortune, is consistently neglected in discussions of
justice. She uses the example of John Stuart Mill, but her point would hold for most
theories of justice mentioned above. She argues that theorists such as Mill generally
begin with the intuition that justice can best be defined by its opposite, and then
briefly sketch an account of injustice. In Mill’s case, the concern is with injustices
such as violating laws, breaking promises, rejecting valid claims or punishing
crimes.^94 Shklar suggests that such sketches merely represent a negative image of
the theory of justice at issue, that the real concern is “to show why justice is binding
upon us and why it is the first of the social virtues”. Her view is that “injustice
should not be treated intellectually as a hasty preliminary to the analysis of
justice”.^95
This kind of beginning is recognisable in the writing of global social justice
theorists. For instance, it is frequently employed by Thomas Pogge. To take one
example, he introduces a major symposium on his work with the following
paragraph:
Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings
are still condemned to life-long severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of
low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and
93
94 Ibid., 398.
95 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice , 18-19.
Ibid., 19.