The Hardest Cases of Global Injustice: The Responsibility to Inquire

Do we have responsibility for injustice when we don’t know of an injustice or whether we are in a position to cause it, exacerbate it, or ameliorate it? Do we have responsibility if the unknown injustice is a global injustice affecting people unknown to us? When those who suffer injustices reach out to us through new or old media and appeal to our sense of justice, they are counting on our answering “yes.” This chapter is about why those privileged with cognitive capacity distanced from certain injustices by geography, socioeconomic status, and time should answer, “yes.” 1 The first section introduces a category of injustice, what I call the “Hardest Cases” of injustice, which are those that are most easily dismissed by those distant from the injustice either because the injustice is not visible or our connections to it are tenuous. Certain forms of gender injustice and climate injustice take this form. The second section reveals the key features of the Hardest Cases, those features that often render the harms invisible to all but their sufferers..