The Politics of Injury: A Review of Robin West's Caring for Justice

In Caring for Justice, Robin West argues that patriarchy operates by harming women on every conceivable dimension but especially in sexuality and reproduction; that women nevertheless gain access in both domains to an ethic of care that is redemptive for the world; and that bringing that ethic fully to bear as the sublime mode of justice will turn law to the remedy of harm and the promotion of care. West's aim is to redeploy women's experience of harm into an ethic of care that will—through law—“heal[] the world”. In many ways West's argument is highly distinctive. But it shares many features with other left-multicultural identity-political subordination-theory (LMIPST) projects, and therefore has considerable exemplary value as well. You can find in some critical race theory, gay identity politics, disability rights projects, indigenous-nationalist projects and human rights projects not only a firm and admirable resolve to work for emancipation, but a tendency to see emancipation in the following terms: - an imagery of subordination that replaces domination, exploitation, expropriation, oppression, etc., with harm and injury; - a natural or infantile default of “no injury” so that injury is imagined as an intervening event--a “trauma”; - a subordination binary, with a super-ordinate and a subordinate group imagined as diametrical opposites; - a strong experiential divide between these groups, with an identity practice making shared injury or harm a marker of subordinated group membership and the predicate for authority to speak for the group; - a framing of harm and injury as ethical wrongs, and a substitution of power by ethics as the keyword in the vocabulary of emancipatory transformation; - a insistence that harm has a redemptive dimension that produces distinctive access to ethical insight; - in ethics, therefore, a strong form of subordinated-group exceptionalism and supremacism; - a requirement that emancipation will be achieved only by a transformation of the superordinated-group-members' “hearts and minds”; - a view of law both as a tool of injury on the one hand, and on the other as the super-legitimate site for “sending the message” that injury is unethical, and as a pivotal device for addressing injury and for changing hearts and minds; - a vision of the ideal rule structure as a transparent representation of the ethics to which the subordinated group has distinctive access. Not everyone doing a LMIPST project thinks this way, but many do. West is surely among them. So I offer the following close reading of substantial parts of West's argument to show the internal coherence of one version of the emancipatory imaginaire which I'm calling, for shorthand, the politics of injury. I also suggest some reasons why one might want to bring some skepticism to the social theory embedded in these politics. And finally, I will suggest that two of the chief, if not the chief modes of legal argumentation in the US today—rights argumentation and policy balancing—may ratify and intensify social and cultural tendencies to see the politics of injury as true and just. If such constitutive forces are indeed in play, and if as critically inclined leftists we are prepared to regard injury politics with skepticism, then we might well want to bring some skepticism, as well, to those elements of legal argumentation.