Political philosophy should focus not on uplifting ideals, but rather, so I argue, on minimizing serious suffering. This is so not because other things do not ultimately matter (they do), but rather because in the political context, the stakes in terms of suffering are usually extremely high, so that any other considerations are almost always outweighed. Put in moderately deontological terms: the high stakes carry most political decisions across the thresholds of the relevant deontological constraints. While the argument is substantive (...) rather than exegetical, I engage in detail Judith Shklar's “Liberalism of Fear”. I share with Shklar her pessimistic starting point, but I also show how a focus on suffering (rather than cruelty and fear) is what plausibly follows from such a starting point. I then pursue the implications of this difference—they are theoretically profound, but perhaps less significant practically. (shrink)

This article analyzes the relationship between the ideas of cruelty and injustice in Judith Shklar’s political theory. Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is sometimes read as an instantiation of the liberalism of fear, which regards cruelty and the fear that it inspires as the summum malum. I challenge this interpretation and instead argue that her account of injustice should be read independently of her commitment to the liberalism of fear. In doing so, I show how her exploration of the faces (...) of injustice—especially the importance she accords to passive injustice and the sense of injustice—raises important challenges for the liberal case for putting cruelty first. Although democratic attitudes and institutions constitute the best available remedy for the sense of injustice, on Shklar’s account, those who focus too much on the requirements of democratic citizenship risk treating injustice as a greater evil than cruelty, which could, in turn, facilitate cruelty and undermine liberal democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the republican-inspired theory of citizenship from The Faces of Injustice, which Shklar outlines in response to the problem of passive injustice, reflects a distinct strand of her political theory that goes beyond the more familiar defense of law-bound constitutional government associated with the liberalism of fear. (shrink)

Realists and non-ideal theorists currently criticise Rawlsian mainstream liberalism for its inability to address injustice and political conflict, as a result of the subordination of political philosophy to moral theory, as well as an idealising and abstract methodology. Seeing that liberalism emerged as a theory for the protection of the individual from conflict and injustice, these criticisms aim at the very core of liberalism as a theory of the political and therefore deserve close analysis. I will defend Judith N. Shklar’s (...) liberalism of fear as an answer to these challenges. I will argue that the liberalism of fear maintains realism’s conflictual and inherently political thrust while also integrating a perspective on injustice. I will defend the claim that in contrast to the two aforementioned criticisms, the liberalism of fear develops its own normative standard from which political arrangements can be assessed. It does so by replacing the idealising approach to political philosophy with a non-utopian methodology, which opens a negative perspective on what is to be avoided in the political sphere, and how to detect and deal with injustice. Due to this standard, it is a liberal theory that is uniquely able to meet the realist and non-ideal challenge. (shrink)