CONCEPT
The Misfortune-Injustice Distinction
Judith Shklar’s argument that the line between unavoidable bad luck and preventable harm is not a neutral empirical observation but a political act—performed by those with the power to classify suffering, in the interest of those who benefit from having it classified as nobody’s fault.
When a factory closes and a thousand workers lose their livelihoods, is that misfortune or injustice? The question sounds philosophical, but
Judith Shklar spent the most rigorous pages of
The Faces of Injustice (1990) arguing that it is a political question—and that the answer is almost always determined not by the facts of the case but by the power of the classifier. Misfortune is suffering that no one could have prevented: the earthquake, the drought, the genetic disease. Injustice is suffering that was produced by choices—by decisions made by identifiable actors within identifiable institutional arrangements that could have been otherwise. The distinction matters because it determines what follows: misfortune demands compassion, while injustice generates obligations to change the structures that produced it. Those with the power to classify suffering therefore have a systematic incentive to call injustice misfortune—to say that the factory closure was the market, that the displacement was