The Faces of Injustice (The Storrs Lectures Series)

I'm teaching this year in New Orleans, but I'm new to the area since the initial season of distress. I have, however, learned a great deal from my new colleagues as well as my neighbors-- people from diverse social milieus and ideologies-- and if I have gained at least one insight from them all, it is the growing indistinction between natural and man-made disasters, and the potential feedback between forms of injustice and misfortune in the wake of Katrina. This very point seemed provocative when it was made by the late political theorist Judith Shklar in her "Faces of Injustice" (Yale University Press, 1990), collected from her Storrs Lectures of 1988. This short book is a favorite of mine to re-read, and it seems more prophetic every time I read it, though to many residents of New Orleans it would seem uncontroversial. Shklar uses the public response to the Lisbon earthquake to illustrate how people who once regarded certain kinds of suffering as misfortunes, "acts of God," came to view them as injustices-caused by the action or inaction of the powerful."Someone simply must be blamed to maintain the unquenchable belief in a rational world, but the exculpation of God has not made it easier to know whom to accuse. Nor has it helped us to decide which of our travails are due to injustice and which are misfortunes. When can we blame others and when is our pain a matter of natural necessity or just bad luck? . . . . The very distinction betweeninjustice and misfortune can sometimes be mischievous . . . .On the border between misfortune and injustice we must deal with the victim as best we can, without asking on which side her case falls." When the horror stories of Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and the Gulf Coast gave way to a surge of criticism of Federal disaster preparedness; the Bush Administration seemed prepared at least for one aspect of this disaster: the spin. It's not that there weren't people on the other side already poised to find fault with the Administration's handling of the crisis, but the White House was already set to shape the discourse on disaster? President Bush stated and his partisans followed in chorus over the next several days? They weren't going to play the "blame game." Shklar says: "In mature democracies, planning to minimize the harm of natural disasters or contain their consequences has become institutionalized." Government responsibility models for us civic responsibility, and Even if God is not available for our blame, there are still responsible agents, and in our society we have a duty to protect, a duty to warn, a duty to prevent, a duty not to contribute to harm, not to make worse. And if this is not pushing too far in the direction of Europe and Vermont, perhaps even a duty to rescue. It has now been a year since the Bush Administration spun the phrase the "blame game," suggesting that these disasters by their nature, by their connection to nature, are conversation stoppers, they are acts of god, and unless