Misfortune vs. Injustice

Developed most fully in The Faces of Injustice (1990), the distinction between misfortune and injustice is Shklar's most analytically powerful tool. The distinction sounds descriptive but is fundamentally political: it determines whether suffering generates obligations of structural remedy (injustice) or merely of compassion (misfortune). Shklar spent the most rigorous pages of her career demonstrating that the classification is not a neutral empirical observation but a political act — performed by those with the authority to classify, in the interest of those who benefit from the classification. When the powerful classify the suffering of the powerless as misfortune, they are making a political claim disguised as a factual one: that the suffering could not have been prevented, that no institutional arrangement could have distributed costs differently, that the transition was as natural and blameless as weather.