Putting Cruelty First

Putting cruelty first is Judith Shklar's signature contribution to political philosophy — the argument, developed across Ordinary Vices and The Liberalism of Fear, that cruelty is not merely one vice among others but the vice that destroys the conditions under which every other wrong can be addressed. A person subjected to systematic cruelty cannot resist, cannot organize, cannot articulate what is being done to her. Cruelty forecloses political agency. This priority is not abstract: it derives from Shklar's childhood flight from Riga one step ahead of annihilation, and from four decades of studying how political orders fail the people at their margins. The AI transition produces cruelty not dramatically but structurally — through institutional arrangements that inflict suffering without any individual intending it, through the amplified indifference of builders whose environment prevents the moral imagination from operating.