Class 10.2: Legitimate Injustice

It is now week 10 - coming up on two thirds of the way through our semester. After a brief introduction in week 1, we began in weeks 2-4 by looking at how ideas from philosophy might help us to understand how people can be at odds with one another, first by examining why it makes sense for us to sometimes have conflicting goals or values, and then by examining why it makes sense for us to end up with conflicting beliefs. Then in weeks 5-9 we turned to try to think about what makes conflicts personal. First we examined how we care about what other people think or feel about us and so actions can make us feel bad that someone else does not care about us in the way that we had hoped or expected. And then we looked at how some actions might be properly overlooked because they don’t reflect how someone really feels or what they really think, and saw that when this misfires, it can lead us to treat one another in disrespectful and dehumanizing ways.

In this brief unit in weeks 10-11, we are turning our attention to a new question - how to get along in the face of our differences in beliefs and values. It turns out that philosophers have thought a lot about this topic, though often in the context of political philosophy, rather than in the context of families or workplaces or romantic relationships. We’re going to try to learn a little bit from the political philosophers about some of these challenges.

Justice and Legitimacy

Our topic today is how there can be what political philosophers call “legitimate injustice”. An injustice is just something that is not just or fair. We can think of it, in the context of today’s reading, as a government policy that is unfair to someone or some group, but the very same issues arise in the context of small-scale interpersonal relationships like the family. Some ways of organizing household labor, for example, are unjust.

A law is “legitimate” just in case it would be wrong to resist it being carried out. For example, one law in Los Angeles says that if you park your car in a location where the signs say not to park for street sweeping at the wrong time, then you may receive a fine. To say that this is a legitimate law is just to say that it would be wrong to try to stop the traffic officer from carrying out their duty of writing tickets for people parked in the street sweeping zone. It is to say that the officer has a right to carry out this law.

Importantly, some kinds of injustice are so flagrant that it is important to resist them, and there is nothing morally wrong about doing so. For example, the Fugitive Slave Law was deeply unjust, and there was nothing wrong with Northern abolitionists assisting escaped slaves to evade being returned to bondage in the American South. On the contrary, it is highly plausible that this wasn’t just permissible, but a moral duty. Similarly, in a family or small-scale relationship, some kinds of injustice are flagrantly unjust and there is nothing wrong with resisting them - for example, if a father expects his daughter to cook and clean the house while his son plays video games. These are examples of laws that are both unjust and illegitimate.

Now, if all unjust laws and policies could be fairly resisted, that would make a of sense. The idea would be that because the law is unfair, we don’t have to follow it. But the problem of legitimate injustice arises because there are some laws that are unfair that we do have to follow and respect. In fact, given how difficult it is to figure out the fairest thing to do in complex situations, it is likely that many laws are unjust. So if we are required to obey the law at all, there must be a lot of unjust laws that we are required to obey. There is a lot of legitimate injustice. This feels puzzling. The goal of today’s reading is to try to offer a new answer to why there is legitimate injustice.

Scale

The problem of legitimate injustice is similar to problems that can arise in small groups and relationships. If there can be legitimate injustice in the laws of the state, then perhaps we can also be required, sometimes, to go along with the wrong decision when it is made by our friend or project partner or loved one. The reading focuses mostly on this problem at the scale of laws, but in our class we should be interested in it as a problem that potentially arises at all scales. You’ll see that Professor Quong’s explanation of why there is legitimate injustice also raises other issues about joint decision-making that arise within relationships.

Jonathan Quong

Jonathan Quong is Professor of Philosophy here at USC - his office is right across the hall from Professor Schroeder’s. He conducts research in moral and political philosophy and is famous for his work on the morality of self-defense and the concept of political liberalism, each of which is the subject of one of his published books. He is also a faculty fellow of the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project. He told me that he is anxious to see what you guys think of his argument in this paper!

Legitimate Injustice

Professor Quong’s paper is longer than we need to read for this week. The full paper is 28 pages, but I am only asking you to read the FIRST NINETEEN PAGES. In the final two sections of his paper, Quong contrasts his account with another published view that he expects his readers to be familiar with, and then poses objections to himself that he thinks his readers might have thought of or that will shed light on his view and answers them. You don’t need to read these sections for our class - I think the first nineteen pages will be enough of a challenge. Professor Quong writes very clearly, but he is also very concise and so sometimes ideas go by very quickly. He is also writing for an audience who know more about political philosophy than you do, and so when he considers alternative explanations of legitimate injustice in early sections of the paper, he only explains as much of each idea as he thinks he needs in order to remind people of the idea and say why he doesn’t like it. If you have trouble following these sections, then don’t worry too much about it - the main thing I want you to get out of the paper is his own main idea later in the reading - not his objections to other ideas.

Explainer Video

In January 2020, Professor Quong shared this paper in the very first workshop of the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project here at USC, and I made a little explainer video about its main idea, which you can watch below. I recommend that you read the paper first and then watch the video, but you may find it helpful to go back and re-read the part of the paper where he explains his own view after you watch the video.

Quiz Time!