Life is Hard Chapter 5: Injustice, by Devin Walker

 

Why do we try to fight injustice or should we?

We’re afraid of being caught 

Setiya introduces us to a story told by Socrates brother Glaucon. The story is about a shepard boy who stumbles upon a ring that grants the user the power of invisibility. The boy then takes the ring and uses it to take the kings wife and overthrow him, gaining control of the kingdom. The invisibility of this story hints at the idea of integrity and that if we were invisible or incapable of being caught, then would we truly act as if we care for the injustices of the world? Would we even go as far as to use the injustices of the world to benefit ourselves? Maybe there is something deep within us as a human race that keeps up from putting up with injustice. 

 

 Self interest vs. morality

This thought brings us to Setiya’s next talking point of self-interest vs. morality, or possibly self-interest and morality. He starts this thought by trying to define “self-interest”. One definition is simply just happiness or seeking joy for ourselves. If self-interest is simply happiness then it may conflict with morality as it would cause us to put our happiness before the needs of others at times. If self- interest is defined as “human flourishing” or the desire for a good life amongst humans, then it agrees with morality. “If there is reason to care about the rights and needs of others, it follows we cannot life our own lives well without concern for them.“ Some scholars and philosphers such as Immanuel Kant view them as conflicting sides rather than working together. "Morality involves concern for the interests of others and that can come at the expense of your interests. The main concern with self-interested motivations, in turn, is when they lead people to act at the expense of others," stated by Bernard Williams in Morality, and Introduction to Ethics. John Rawls can be seen as a large advocate for the idea that self-interest can be defined as the desire for human flourishing. His idea of justice, stated in Distributive Justice, is defined as all the rights that we have as humans are distributed amongst us all unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage. 

 

Love and injustice 

“Love is a moral emotion”

“you do not really love someone unless you see a value in them that would survive the loss of love. They would matter even without you; and since anyone can be loved, the same is true of every human being” Setiya focuses on the concept of love to attack the moral side of why we are drawn to seek justice. Because we love other humans and every human is loved by someone, it draws people to want the best for others. The idea of friendships helps this concept as weil explains it “consists of loving another human being as we would like to be able to love each soul in particular of all those who go to make up the human race. This thought ties in with another idea brought up by Weil and Murdoch as “attention.” Their definition of attention for someone was recognizing their humanity and their value as a human, despite how their personality or actions conflict with your own. Giving this “attention” to others can allow a person to see the needs of them thus forcing them to seek justice for when they are wronged. Attention to other human beings can coincide with unconditional love to an extent as it helps us to put the needs of others first no matter who they are because they are human too. Murdoch writes, “The more separateness and differentness of other people is realized, and the fact is seen that another man has needs and wishes as demanding as one’s own, the harder is becomes to treat a person as a thing.” An article titled, "Simone Weil on Attention and Grace" highlights a quote from her saying We have to cure our faults by attention not will." Attention gives us grace and humility with other human beings, something that pride and greed eliminate from our society and horrible affect it. The article does an excellent job of highlighting this. A large part of why attention is important is because it also has to do with how to view ourselves in relation to others; giving them the grace we believe we deserve. 

 Iris Marion Young: Structural Injustice

• Structural Injustice: “Injustice that is not localized in unjust attitudes or actions, but emerges interactively” Injustice stemming from systems put in place rather than on societal levels.

EX: racism, sexism, poverty, and environmental injustice. Unequal opportunities and access to education, disparities in healthcare, biased policing and sentencing, gender pay gap, unequal wealth distribution, poverty and homelessness, child labor and exploitation

“Even if no one held sexist views about women’s abilities or denied them employment because they are women… the gendered division of labor in which women do the majority of unpaid childcare and domestic work would systematically disadvantage them”

Setiya’s explains that Young believes we are responsible for this injustice and that it is our duty to work towards changes. Even if schools in the US are now desegregated, educational opportunities and access to efficient and effective education are not at all the same across the country. Funding between schools in the country is not equal as well. Young writes that “the social connection model of responsibility says that individuals bear responsibility for structural injustice, because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes” Setiya emphasizes Young’s point was not about blame or guilt but more about the fact that our society should make effort towards reformation. He explains how Young’s ideas shouldn’t just be limited to how some play a role today in structural injustice but also to those who have benefitted from unjust pasts, for many Americans benefitted from the use of colonial exploration and slavery, alluding at the large disparity of wealth amongst black and white families and the even larger disparity between white and indigenous. At the end of the paragraph he states “We needn’t be to blame for these disparities to profit from them and so to be beneficiaries of injustice” ("We don’t have to be the ones who caused these inequalities to still benefit from them—and that still makes us part of the problem.”) Just because someone did not cause the inequality does not mean they are exempt from being part of the problem. Structural injustice may be the cause of epistemic injustice, injustice where wrong doing is brought to a person based on stereotypes. An example of structural injustice leading to epistemic injustice would be employers choosing not to hire African Americans due to them seeing African Americans as "uneducated", despite the structure of the country not funding schools in those communities and putting laws and regulations in place throughout history for black to seek education. This idea is touched upon in Epistemic Injustice by Rob Sinclair. 

 

Conclusion

Theodore Adorno once said, “we cannot live well in conditions of injustice that sully every aspect of social life; we cannot even know what flourishing would be.” Adorno believed that it was important that we as human not only focus on the fight against injustice. He idealized that always seeking to fight injustice in times of trouble would take away from experiencing a fulfilling life. Even though we are in a continuous fight for justice, we shouldn’t let it be the focal point of our life. We still need to make time for things that are also important such as spending times with those we love, our hobbies, and our passions. Things that he calls “ the little human things”

Does self-interest agree with morality?

Do you agree that humans have a natural urge to seek justice? If so, what distractions today have caused us to abandon that urge?