What Is the Opposite of Injustice?

Abstract

Scholars have long assailed binary notions of justice by challenging dichotomies between, for example, superior and inferior classes, ethnicities, or sexualities. What has remained intact is the seemingly obvious assumption of mutual exclusion between the concepts of justice and injustice. That logical distinction is expressly articulated with the very birth of programmatic Western social theory in ancient Greece and it persists still. Within any classical programmatic model, injustice emerges as a sheer imperfection in the achievement of that model’s conception or conceptions of justice. We come to view that concept of injustice as logically obvious. But the programmatic tradition exemplifies that logic of mutual exclusion even within existing, positive legal systems. Contrary to that tradition, it is argued here that injustice must be construed not merely as the inadequate realisation of one or more given conceptions of justice, but more importantly as the product of those same conceptions.