Justice and Being in a Position to Complain
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (lippert@ps.au.dk)
Abstract: It is sometimes assumed that if no one has a complaint, there is no injustice. However,
whether anyone is in a position to complain depends on factors that do not bear upon the justice of
the situation, or on factors that do so bear, but also bear independently thereof upon anyone’s being
in a position to complain. Sometimes one might not be in position to complain even if one suffers
injustice. I explore some of the factors that determine whether one is in a position to complain
drawing on recent work on being in a position to blame. The main upshot of the article is that it is
unhelpful to explain justice in terms of absence of complaints.
1. Introduction
It is sometimes assumed that if no one has a complaint, there is no injustice. An underlying idea
may be that justice is or involves each of us being in such a relation to all others that no one holds a
complaint against any other. Injustice, on the other hand, obtains when some of us hold complaints
– of a specific, justice-relevant kind – against others. Presumably, the fact that you can rightly
complain that I am not very generous has no tendency to establish injustice, since being generous
involves going beyond the duties of justice and, accordingly, complaints about lack of generosity
are not justice-relevant. Complaints are linked to justification in the following way: when no one is
in a position to complain, the shape and terms of our interpersonal relations are not unjustified. The
realization of this is what justice – or at any rate the absence of injustice – amounts to.
Against this view, I argue that whether one is in a position to complain depends on
factors that do not bear upon the justice of the situation or factors that do so bear, but also bear
independently thereof upon one’s being in a position to complain (see next paragraph). Sometimes
one might not be in a position to complain, even if one is being treated unjustly. For instance, if I
reject the notion of human rights, I might not be in a position to complain on the ground that my
human rights are being violated. Yet, if the principles of human rights are true, which, undeniably,
they may well be despite my rejection of them, nevertheless it may be the case that I am being
treated unjustly. In any case, one does not have human rights in virtue of (or even partly in virtue
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of) the fact that one does not reject them – were that so, very many individuals would have no
human rights – but this fact of rejection or endorsement is one in virtue of which one may or may
not be in a position to complain about human rights violation. Admittedly, if I reject human rights
and others who cherish them violate my human rights, I might be in a position to complain about
their failing to live up to their own moral standards. But the object of this complaint is different
from that of a complaint against a violation of human rights.
It is commonly thought that an aggressor forfeits his right not to be killed if, say, he
executes an intention to use deadly force against another, who can only defend herself through
killing the aggressor. So the fact that I threaten to use deadly force against another may affect both
what can permissibly be done to me – I forfeit my right not to be killed – and what I am in position
to complain about – I am not in a position to complain about being killed. This may be taken to
suggest that it is simply the permissibility of killing me that determines my not being in a position to
complain about being killed. To see this is not so, suppose that I threaten to use what I falsely
believe is deadly force, but in fact is harmless -- even beneficial -- to my intended victim. Now it is
impermissible to kill me and yet I am in no better position to complain indignantly about being
killed than I was in my initial version of the example. More generally, it appears that what I am in a
position to complain about is more dependent on what I believe to be the case than justice and
moral permissibility are.
In this paper I will explore some of the factors that determine whether one is in a
position to complain drawing on recent work on being in a position to blame. Along the way, I will
point out various parallels to being in a position to blame, which I take it, is one particular species
of complaining. In blaming someone for an action, necessarily one complains about it or/and them –
in casu not about one’s own circumstances, but about the conduct of others – and just as one may
not be in a position to complain about something in virtue of, say, the fact that in one’s private life
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one treats that thing as a blessing, as several authors recognize there is a comparable phenomenon
in cases where one is not in a position to blame others.
My invocation of this parallel means that one way – not a promising one, I think – of
objecting to parts of this paper is by denying that being in a position to blame and being in a
position to complain are relevantly similar. The general upshot of my argument is that it may be
harder to elucidate what justice requires through the notion of complaints than is widely assumed
and that the broader understanding of justice as involving the kind of interpersonal relations briefly
sketched in the first paragraph is flawed.
2. Justice and complaints
I start by offering two examples of philosophers who expound justice in terms of complaints. The
first example is comes from Jeffrey Reiman in relation to retributive justice and, specifically, the
justice of capital punishment. Reiman offers a Kantian argument for why imposing the death
penalty on murderers is not unjust. The argument goes as follows: whenever a rational agent acts,
he thereby implicitly authorizes “having done to him action similar to what he has done to another,
if he and the other are similar in relevant ways”.1 This premise follows from or constitutes the moral
equality of persons. Capital punishment involves the murderer having done to him action similar in
the relevant ways to what he has done to his victim(s). Moreover, one cannot validly complain of
having done to oneself actions that one has authorized. Hence, a rational being who is a murderer
cannot validly complain of his being put to death and “where there is no valid complaint, there is no
injustice”.2 Accordingly, there is no injustice in imposing capital punishment on a murderer.3
My main concern here is neither the desirability of capital punishment – Reiman
himself ultimately thinks that capital punishment should be abolished, because this is required by
the “civilizing mission of modern states”4 – nor the soundness of Reiman’s argument per se. My
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concern lies with the fact that a central premise in Reiman’s argument is the assumption that if no
one has a valid complaint about some state of affairs, then that state of affairs involves no injustice.
Call this the complaint principle.
On a natural reading of Ronald Dworkin’s response to Jerry Cohen critique of his
resourcist account of distributive justice also invokes the complaint principle. Cohen thinks that
people who have bad price luck – i.e. they have expensive preferences and are not relevantly
responsible for the expensiveness of their preferences – might be due, as a matter of justice,
compensation from people who have cheaper preferences. Dworkin rejects this view. On Dworkin’s
view, “it is our various tastes, convictions, and ambitions that define for us what a satisfying or
gratifying life would be, and treating these as impediments to our realizing such a life would be
incoherent”.5 An opera-lover, whose preference is expensive, “does not think his life goes overall
worse with a taste for opera than without it” and he would not take a pill that would substitute a
much cheaper preference for rock music for it, if it were available. So the opera-lover does not think
that he is worse off than the lover of rock music, all other things being equal, and accordingly he
cannot complain that he has been treated with less than equal concern and, thus, that in the absence
of a transfer of resources in his direction his community treats him with less than equal concern:
“[Equality of resources] proposes a politics that we can embrace as flowing from the rest of our
convictions, a politics in which citizens can make and respond to claims of justice without
switching to a special, made-for-politics morality. It allows us to cite, as disadvantages and
handicaps, only what we treat in the same way in our own ethical life.”6
Admittedly, Dworkin does not use the term complaint in this passage. Still, the point
he makes is that, say, the opera lover has no valid complaint on grounds of bad price luck, because
he does not in his “own ethical life” see his preference for opera as a disadvantage or a handicap
and accordingly it would be incoherent of him to represent this in the political sphere as a
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disadvantage that grounds a complaint. Dworkin contrasts his own view with Cohen’s according to
which justice might require, e.g., that we compensate people “whose religion imposes strenuous
burdens” on their lives even though the premises of such compensation “would be rejected as
abhorrent by those it is designed to benefit”.7
On Dworkin’s view, one cannot complain about something that one does not oneself
think makes one’s life worse (not necessarily is a prudential sense – the person with strenuous
religious beliefs might think that in a purely prudential sense, his life is worse than that of others)
than the lives of others. As Matthew Clayton puts it, Dworkin’s seems committed to a “first-person
test”. This test determines “whether one person is disadvantaged relative to another” in a way that
engages a concern for justice. The test says that if a person “cannot in good faith propose a metric
for interpersonal comparison that would treat himself as disadvantaged compared to” other
individuals, then he is not so disadvantaged relative to this person.8 One cannot in good faith
complain about a disadvantage that one does not in one’s personal life treat as such.
In view of Reiman’s and Dworkin’s views, I contend that the complaint principle is an
attractive principle and that it plays an important role in a number of arguments concerning the
justice of states of affairs. In the rest of the paper, I shall challenge this principle. I want to show
that factors other than those that determine the justice of situations determine whether one has a
valid complaint and, accordingly, that it might happen that, despite the presence of injustice, no one
has a valid complaint. Hence, my main claim here is that from the mere fact that one is not in a
position to complain, it does not follow that one suffers no injustice.
Two preliminaries: The kind of view I want to address is a view according to which
the notion of complaint has a standing independently of an account of justice: a pre-justicial notion
of complaint, as it were. That is, we have a grip of the notion of complaints that is not simply
derived from an understanding of what justice requires. Rather, we understand what justice requires
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partly through our understanding of the notion of complaints. To assume some such order of
explanation is not, I think, unusual.9 People who use the notion of complaint differently take it that
people can complain about something when and only when they are being treated unjustly, and they
determine what justice requires independently of any consideration about complaints. In neither
Reiman’s, nor Dworkin’s, case does the notion of complaint play such a purely derivative role.
Second, in what follows I shall use two notions: “being in a position to complain” and
“having a valid complaint”. If one is not in a position to complain about something, then, at least in
one important sense, one does not have a valid complaint about it. However, there is a sense in
which one might be in a position to complain about something, even if one has no valid complaint.
So, by way of illustration, if I have a good reason to believe that a friend of mine has broken a
solemn promise and if I have an impeccable record of keeping all of my promises myself, there is a
sense in which I am in a position to complain about his having broken his promise even if I have no
valid complaint, since, as a matter of fact, he has not broken his promise. There is nothing that,
independently of whether my friend has broken his promise, undermines my position to complain
about his having broken it.
3. Being in a position to complain
While complaints are often rebutted with the reply that the complainer has no grounds of complaint,
it is no less common for a target of complaints to reply that the complainer is not in a position to
voice complaints over her target – henceforth: the complainee.10 So when the US complains about
Chinese human rights violations, the response typically offered is not that no human rights
violations take place in China or that human rights are “nonsense upon stilts”, but rather something
along the lines embodied in the following news report: “China accused the United States … of
using a double standard to judge human rights in other countries, adding to a list of nations
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suggesting that the government that produced the Abu Ghraib prison abuses has no business
commenting on what happens elsewhere. “No country should exclude itself from the international
human rights development process or view itself as the incarnation of human rights that can reign
over other countries and give orders to the others,” Premier Wen Jiabao's cabinet declared, three
days after the State Department criticized China in its annual human rights report.”11 So, essentially,
this reply to US complaints is indirect. It does not challenge that there are ground for complaints
about the human rights situation in China, but challenges the US’ right to make this complaint given
the US’ own dubious human rights record in the War on Terror.12
An exclusively indirect reply involves a refusal to take a stand on the injustice implied
by the complaint and shifts attention to the putative fact that the complainer is in no position to
complain to the complainee. Hence, the fact that someone is not in a position to complain to
another about some object of complaint implies nothing about the justice of the object.13 An agent
might be treated unjustly even if he is in no position to complain about the way he is being treated,
e.g. because he has treated others in exactly the same way or because his conduct in his private life
manifests that he does not consider the relevant treatment disadvantageous.
Before I proceed I need to distinguish complaints in the sense I have in mind here
from two different phenomena. First, complaining is different from deeming something to warrant a
complaint. I cannot complain about being put to prison for my political views, when I did the very
same thing to my political opponents when my party was in power, but I might still be in a position
to deem the conduct of those who imprison me as something that warrants a complaint, e.g. because
being the experience of political oppression has taught me a lesson and made me change my views
about political liberty. When I complain about something, I am demanding a response from the
complainee, whether that response consists in offering me reasons why I have nothing to complain
about or consists in remedial action to address the disadvantageous situation that I complain about. I
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demand an uptake, so to speak. When I calmly express my judgment to a third party, about whose
conduct I am not complaining, I express my view that I have been treated in a way that is, as it
were, complaint-worthy, but I do not complain in the sense I am after here.
Second, there is a difference between publicly complaining about something – e.g.
confronting the complainee and telling him off – and privately harbouring a complaint against
someone that often occupies one’s mind – perhaps against one’s own willing – but one takes care to
prevent from ever manifesting itself in public agonizing over the target. While I believe that one can
fail to be in a position to have a private grudge against someone – e.g. because this person has even
stronger grounds of complaint against oneself in the very same dimension as one’s grudge is located
– for simplicity, I focus on publicly expressed complaints and then explore when one’s position to
make such complaints is undermined.
4. Different ways of not being in a position to complain
There are various ways in which one can fail to be in a position to complain, and correspondingly
there are several kinds of indirect replies to complain. I now sketch some of these, although I do not
take my remarks to offer a comprehensive overview of indirect dismissals.
A common response to parental complaints involves pointing out that the parent did
not complain in equally strong terms to the child’s sibling for an act that was no less blameworthy
than the action of the first child (illa quoque). In contrast with cases where the tu quoque reply is
appropriate, where the parent herself does what she complains about the child doing, the
incoherence here lies not in the clash between one’s own norm-violating behaviour and one’s
complaining about the other person’s less serious violation of the very same norm, but in the clash
between one’s complain over one child’s violation and one’s omitting to complain about the other
child’s equally or more serious violation of the very same norm. Politically speaking, the relevant
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parallel would be if China dismisses US criticisms of human rights violations in China by pointing
to the fact that US do not condemn human rights violation in countries playing a useful role as allies
in the War of Terror.
A related confounder of complaints is hypocrisy. The hypocrisy here lies in
specifically motivated selectiveness in the complainer’s application of the norm to which she is
appealing. No such selectiveness need be involved in cases where the tu or illa quoque replies are in
order, yet these cases and the case of hypocrisy are easily confused. The key difference is this. In
the tu and illa quoque replies an appeal is made to faults that the complainer or third parties actually
have, whereas the charge of hypocrisy appeals to what the complainer believes (or ought to believe)
to be faults the blamer herself, or a relevant third party, has. No doubt, in most cases the complainer
is aware of her own faults (which is in part why the tu quoque charge and the charge of hypocrisy
are easily confused). But suppose a complainer has simply forgotten about a certain fault of hers
and complains about someone else’s identical fault. In this case, the complainee might dismiss the
complaint using the tu quoque reply, though she cannot charge the complainer with hypocrisy. The
complainer might be extraordinarily conscientious about identifying own faults and about not
complaining about others having faults that she believes herself to have. The reverse situation is
also possible. Suppose the complainer believes that she herself has a certain fault, but in fact does
not. In that case, the tu quoque reply is out of order.14 However, it remains hypocritical of the
complainer to condemn the complainee.
The impropriety involved in complaints that can be dismissed in part because they are
vulnerable to variants of tu quoque and the charge of hypocrisy consists in a clash between the
content of the principles the complainer is applying and (how she thinks of) her own conduct (or the
conduct of relevant others).15 In cases where I complain about someone’s minor fault in the
presence of a relevant other whose fault is greater there is only a prima facie incoherence. For, in
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most cases, the standard the violation of which I complain about does not in itself tell us whether or
how we should complain about those who violate it, and we might have other norms implying that,
in some cases, one should complain about someone’s minor fault and not complain about another’s
greater faults. An example of this latter kind of norm is the principle that one should not complain
counterproductively: in the case at hand, complaining about the latter’s greater fault might be
counterproductive because the complainee would respond defiantly. There are other cases where
one’s position as a complainer is undermined by principles that are external to those on which the
relevant complaint is based. I shall refer to these as cases of incoherence-free complaints.
Clear examples of incoherence-free failure include occasions where one’s position to
complain is undermined by one’s not having sufficient warrant (e.g. “You cannot imagine what
pressure a soldier is subjected to in the heat of battle and thus are in no position to pass moral
judgement on a soldier in such a situation”) and cases where one is not in a position to complain
about someone because one is not relevantly affected by this person’s conduct (e.g. since I know
neither you, nor your spouse, it is none of my business to complain about your not keeping
promises you made to your spouse). He one dismisses a complaint, not because one thinks that the
complainer has no complaints, but because one is not the right addressee of the complaint.
Two incoherence-free cases are less easily distinguished from the category that is the
focus of this talk. First, one’s entitlement to complain may be undermined by one’s having played a
causal role in bringing about the conduct of someone else.16 Often this charge of complaintundermining involvement involves what we might call a global incoherence charge as well. Local
incoherence arises where the complainer applies the very standard to which she appeals in her act of
complaining incoherently. Global incoherence occurs where the complainer applies a set of
standards, of which the standard to which she appeals in her complaint is a member, incoherently.
Suppose I complain about someone’s lying where I helped this person to lie, and that I hold lying to
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be wrong because I accept some more basic moral principle that also implies that helping others to
lie is wrong. This case involves a global incoherence, in my application of my standards, that
undercuts my position as a complainer, since the principle which, in my view, motivates the specific
principle to which I appeal in my complaint also forbids my helping the complainee to do what I
complain about her doing. However, I may not be in a position, morally speaking, to complain
about someone’s lie the production of which I am involved in even if the incoherence charge does
not go through: that is, I might still not be in a position to complain about someone’s doing what I
have helped her to do even though neither the moral principle that motivates complaint nor the
deeper moral principles from which it derives forbid me from helping to assist the complaintworthy act. So when Western countries complained about the cruelty of Saddam Hussein’s
treatment of the Kurds (among others), many felt given that they had been selling arms to him that
were used to oppress the Kurds knowing that these might well be used for internal repression, they
were in no position to complain, even though many others definitely were, e.g. the Kurds.
The second case I have in mind is one in which I am not in a position to complain
about your failing to comply with a certain principle, because I do not accept it. This case involves
the incoherence of appealing to a certain principle and at the same time not endorsing it. However,
this incoherence does not involve a clash between the content of principle one endorses, or
professes to endorse, and one’s conduct, so it still differs from the tu quoque and hypocrisy charges.
John Rawls makes a comparable point in relation to complaints: “A person’s right to complain is
limited to violations of principles he acknowledges himself”. 17 A Jihadist cannot complain of the
lack of democracy in Egypt, given that he himself rejects principles of democracy.
The fact that one’s position as a complainer can be undermined for a variety of
reasons suggests that there may be no general account of why one’s position to complain is
undermined. In the remainder of this paper I focus on the two incoherence-based cases. These are
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the cases, mentioned above, where complaints are undermined by the sort of incoherence pointed
out in the tu quoque and hypocrisy charges.
4. Dimensions of incoherent complaints
I now want to consider four dimensions bearing on one’s being in a position to avoind the charge of
incoherent complaining: (1) whether the faults of the complainer and the complainee are of the
same kind (quality); (2) how their faults compare in terms of severity (quantity); (3) how the faults
that the complainer would manifest under merely possible circumstances affect her position to
complain (modality); (4) how the past or future faults of the complainer affect her position to
complain (temporality).
(1) On a very restrictive view of the quality factor – on what we might call the ‘faultidentity view’ – the complainer’s position to complain is undermined only if her faults are of the
same kind as the faults of others about which she complains. Gerald Dworkin accepts this view:
“What seems crucial is that the fault one is criticizing is the very same fault one has.”18 A similar
view may be embodied in Reiman’s notion of an action that is “similar in relevant ways”, i.e. a
rapist cannot complain about being raped, but he may be in a position to complain about being
robbed, since rape is relevantly different from robbery and in raping one does not authorize robbing.
Quite how much the fault-identity view narrows the scope of the tu quoque and
hypocrisy replies will depend on how faults are individuated. The richer the descriptions under
which we identify flaws, the harder it becomes for the complainer to have the same fault as the
complainee.19 However, for rather standard ways of distinguishing faults, the fault-identity view is
false. Sexual harassment and rape are different faults, yet a rapist is in no position to complain
about the conduct of his sexually harassing victim.
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The alternative to the fault-identity position is the view that the complainer’s and
complainee’s faults need not be of the very same kind. This view comes in different versions. One –
the genus view – holds that the critic’s faults need not be of the same species as the addressee’s to
undermine her position to complain. It suffices, and is required, that the two faults are of the same
genus. So if I complain about your pick-pocketing and I myself have a spotless pick-pocketing
record, you may reject my complaints on the ground that I myself often rob people at gunpoint and
that this is a worse species of stealing. It speaks against the genus view, however, that, in the
absence of an unusually undemanding understanding of when faults are of the same genus, there are
contexts in which faults might undermine one’s position to complain even if they are not of the
same genus, e.g. a person who has just beaten up his spouse cannot then turn to the kids and
indignantly complain about their being lazy at school.
In the light of the objections to the faulty-identity and the genus view, I accept a
contextualist version of the non-identity view. On this view the context of complaint determines
whether the critic’s faults have to be of the same kind as the faults she deplores in the target of her
criticism. The context is set by (i) the critic’s moral principles, and especially those which in the
eyes of the critic render complaint improper, and (ii) the target of the complaint. By (ii) I have in
mind whether the complaint specifically concerns a particular act or is directed more broadly
against the person who performed that act on the ground that it shows her character as a whole to be
at fault.20 Hence, if I complain about your lying, and if I consider lying wrong because it is a way of
being disrespectful of people and endorse the principle that one ought not to be disrespectful of
other people, any act of mine that is disrespectful may serve you as a ground to deny that I am
entitled to complain about your lying on pain of global incoherence (see Section Three). However,
if I hold no moral principles connecting the fault about which I complain with other faults, then for
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my position as a complainer to be undermined by my faults, these faults must be of the very same
kind as those of the person’s that I complain about.
(2) The significance of the severity factor given the self-other asymmetry thesis – or
the ‘favourable comparison view’ – is this: you can complain about someone only if your faults are
in some sense less serious than those of the complainee.21 Some such view is embodied in both
Reiman’s and Dworkin’s views on complaints – a murderer, unlike a pickpocket, cannot complain
about capital punishment and one cannot complain when one is no worse – perhaps even better –
off than others in one’s own view, albeit one might be able to complain if one is less well off.
This view is unsatisfactory. First, the favourable comparison view does not state a
sufficient condition for being in a position to complain. If I persuaded you to lie and this
involvement of mine conflicts with the underlying moral principle – e.g. that acts of lying are
morally undesirable – on which my complaint is based, I may not be in a position to complain even
if my fault at having persuaded you to lie is smaller than your fault for lying. More seriously, the
necessary condition for being in a position to complain should be strengthened so that what we can
call the very favourable comparison view requires not just a smaller fault but a substantially smaller
fault. Complaining about someone’s killing two persons seems different when it comes from one
who has herself killed exactly one person than when it comes from someone who is not a killer. The
reply “Look who’s talking!” seems appropriate in the former case even if the complainee concedes
that the fault of killing once – however great a fault that is – still is less of a fault than the fault of
killing twice. Finally, the favourable comparison view should be revised to accommodate the fact
that, generally, one can put oneself in a position to complain by applying a suitable dose of selfreproach for one’s own, perhaps not significantly lesser, but relevantly similar, flaws (where selfreproach involves more than simply judging oneself to be at fault).22 In fact, at least in the case of
some faults one may even be in a position to complain about another whose faults are smaller
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provided that one’s complaint is accompanied by a suitably harsher self-condemnation. For
example, if I severely and sincerely reproach myself for serious lies I told in my past, and if I
initiate my act of blaming you for a particular act of lying by conceding that I have done much
worse myself, I seem to be in a position to complain about you. The view motivated by these
considerations – the self-reproach-sensitive, very favourable comparison view – says that you can
complain about someone only if your faults are significantly smaller than those of the complainee,
unless your complaint is accompanied by a suitably calibrated dose of self-reproach.
(3) Turning to the modality of faults, one might think, initially, that it is only actual
faults that affect one’s position to complain. However, this cannot be right. If I complain about a
particular objectionable action and I have not myself performed any relevantly similar objectionable
actions, it still seems possible to the complainee to retort with the counterfactual tu quoque that if I
had been in her circumstances, I would have acted (or I presently endorse my acting) no differently
(or worse), and that it is merely my good luck that I am not in her circumstances. 23 No doubt, it will
often be hard to know what a person would do were she in someone else’s shoes when she has
never been in these shoes, so it will often be hard to tell if a counterfactual tu quoque is successful.
However, this is no reason to doubt that it is in principle perfectly coherent.
One issue that modality raises is whether what matters is what the critic would in fact
do were she in the relevant counterfactual situation or whether, instead, the relevant factor is what
she believes (or ought to believe) she would do were she in the relevant counterfactual situation. To
prise these apart imagine a critic who, in a sense germane to the present discussion, reasonably
believes that she would behave differently and much better were she in the complainee’s shoes, but
who would in fact behave even worse. Accordingly, the counterfactual tu quoque, which concerns
how the critic would act were she in the criticized person’s shoes, should be distinguished from a
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closely related counterfactual hypocrisy charge which concerns what acts the critic believes she
would perform were she in the other’s shoes. 24
The analogue to the counterfactual tu quoque may play an important role in relation to
justice complaints. For instance, when untalented people complain that talented people demand
incentives to make extra efforts that they could make in the absence of incentives, talented people
might respond: “You would have done the same had you been in our shoes”. And if they are right,
this might, I think, undermine the untalented people’s complaint, albeit it might not undermine the
resulting injustice of the resulting inequality. (Perhaps it reduces the injustice of the inequality, but I
do not see why it should remove it altogether.) As Jerry Cohen puts it: “A slave need not be
impressed when a master says: “Had you been born into slaveholder class, you too would have
lived well and treated your slaves like slaves”. Such counterfactual predictions do not show that
what people at a certain social level typically choose to do is justifiable.”25 In fact, I think Cohen
wants to make a stronger claim. I think he means that such counterfactual tu quoques do not show
that what people at a certain social level do, without exception, is justifiable. At least, this is what
the reply he puts into the mouth of the anti-apartheid advocate – “Quite: I’m sure it does blind one’s
vision” -- to the white South African – “You would see things differently if you were in my
position”.26 This reply does not lose its force, even if being in the relevant pair of shoes blinds
everyone and not just most people.
(4) Temporality raises two issues. First, whether the complainer’s future faults can
undermine her standing as a legitimate complainer about the present or past faults of others; and
second, whether the complainer’s past faults can undermine her standing as a complainer. In
relation to the first issue it should be noted initially that, as in the case of the counterfactual tu
quoque, it is often difficult to know which future faults the complainer will develop, and for that
reason the future-fault tu quoque is rarely employed. Moreover, consideration of cases in which the
16
blamer, after condemning the complainee, acquires the very same fault herself supports the
temporally neutral view of the relevance of faults. It is normal for complainers in such situations to
come to regret their past condemnation. When confronted with the complainer, the blamee here
might retort with force: “You once took me to task for this!” If one’s standing as a legitimate
complainer is unaffected by one’s future faults, this is hard to explain.
The second issue with regard to temporality concerns past faults of the complainer.
The baseline position here is that these are relevant to one’s being in a position to complain.
However, arguably, there are ways in which an agent can restore her right to complain despite past
faults, even if those faults were greater ones – namely, if the agent disidentifies with – e.g. feels
genuine and proportionate regret or compunction about – these faults and acts to avoid similar faults
in the future.27 This possibility does not undermine the temporal neutrality view of the relevance of
faults to being in a position to complain, because presumably one can complain now even if one
will acquire the relevant kinds of fault in the future provided that one disidentifies oneself with the
kind of person one will become in the future.
5. Infelicitous complaints: Scanlon
So far I have considered various reasons why one’s position to complain can be undermined
through incoherence and a number of dimensions relevant to incoherence. I now want to consider
three accounts of what it is about incoherent complaints that undermine their force; Thomas
Scanlon’s, Jerry Cohen’s, and my own. I have two interests. First, I am interested in the question for
its own sake. Second, I am interested in it because of what it implies for whether one can be a
victim of injustice that one is in no position to complain about. To pre-empt the conclusion, let me
say that all of the three accounts, this – that one can be a victim injustice even though one is in no
position to complain -- seems to me to be a possibility. Also, I should add a reservation: both
17
Scanlon and Cohen discuss being in a position to blame, not being in a position to complain. For the
general reasons already offered (see Section One), and for more specific reasons offered below,
their analyses and claims are applicable to being in a position to complain as well and, accordingly,
I will discuss these as such.
Consider Scanlon’s account of being in position to blame.28 On his account, to blame
someone for an action “is to take that action to indicate something about the person that impairs
one’s relationship with him or her, and to understand that relationship in a way that reflects this
impairment… To blame a person is to judge him or her to be blameworthy and to take your
relationship with him or her to be modified in a way this judgement of impaired relations holds to
be appropriate.”29 An analogous point applies to complaints. If you complain to someone else about
how she has treated you, you certainly seem to take “your relationship with him or her to be
modified in a way this judgement of impaired relations holds to be appropriate”.
Something similar to this, I think, is the case even if you do not blame the other
person for the way in which she has treated you, e.g. you think she has treated you unjustly even
though she cannot be faulted for having so done, but now that you state your complaint you
certainly indicate that your relations have been modified, and if no action is taken by the addressee
of your complaint your relations will have been impaired.
One attractive implication of Scanlon’s account (and of the implied account of
complaining) is that blame is personal in the sense that what it amounts to depends on the
relationship you have with the person you are blaming. Blaming your spouse for betrayal differs
from blaming a business partner for betrayal. Another attractive aspect of Scanlon’s account is that
on his view, “if praise is the [mere?] expression of a positive appraisal, it is not the opposite of
blame.”30 An attitude similar to blame, though with the opposite valence, must involve “awareness
that one’s relationship” with the person towards whom one has this attitude “has been altered by
18
some action or attitude on that person’s part”. Scanlon suggests that gratitude is the “clearest
example” of a “positive correlate of blame.” It involves not just a positive appraisal, but a change in
the sort of relationship that one now considers appropriate. When, for example, one is grateful one
typically has “a greater readiness to help a person who has gone out of her way to help [one], should
the occasion arise”, and to think that such help is required by the nature of their relationship.31
Scanlon thinks that his account captures an important part of the moral impropriety of
blaming someone when one’s own faults are greater: “I cannot claim that the attitudes revealed in
your willingness to stand me up constitute an impairment in our relations, because the mutual
expectations and intentions that constitute those relations were already impaired by my own similar
attitudes, revealed repeatedly in my past conduct… In blaming you I would be holding that your
willingness to behave in this way makes you someone toward whom I cannot have the intentions
and expectations that constitute normal moral relations, such as the intention to trust you and rely
on you. But insofar as these normal expectations and intentions are mutual, my own conduct
already reveals me to be a person who cannot be a participant in these relations… So there is
something false in my suggesting that it is your willingness to act in ways that indicate
untrustworthiness that impairs our moral relationship.”32 In short: part of the moral force of tu
quoque and the hypocrisy charge derives from the fact that, in blaming and, more generally,
complaining, the incoherent complainer implies a false claim about what impairs the moral
relationships between the complainer and the complainee.
There are at least two reasons why Scanlon’s account is unable to explain the
impotence of incoherent complaints. First, incoherent complaining need not imply any false claims
about what impairs the complainer-complainee relationship. So much emerges in a case of
hypocrisy where the complainer falsely believes that her faults in a certain dimension are greater
19
than the complainee’s and where, accordingly, the hypocritical complaint implies a true claim about
what impairs their moral relationships: namely, that the faults of the complainee do so.33
Note also that the scenario just described shows why Scanlon’s account is
incompatible with the complaint principle. So let us return to Dworkin’s response to Cohen’s
criticism of resourcism. Suppose I have false beliefs about my ambitions in life. I am under the
illusion that certain expensive preferences of mine define what a worthwhile life is. Suppose that as
a matter of fact I have the very same ambitions as someone else, who given these ambitions, is
much better off than I am. Given my false beliefs about my own ambitions I may not be able, in
good faith, to complain about my being worse off, but justice might well condemn the inequality
between me and the other person provided I am not at fault for having false beliefs about my
ambitions. So here we have a case where the features in virtue of which I am not in a position to
complain about being worse off are not features in virtue of which it is not unjust that I am worse
off. This is inconsistent with the complaint principle which says that the absence of complaints is
sufficient for absence of injustice.
Second, consider cases where the person who complains has different and greater
faults than the complainee and the following two facts obtain: (i) the complainer’s faults are
isolated in the sense that they in no way suggest that this person cannot engage in all sorts of other
unimpaired moral relationships to which the relevant greater faults are irrelevant, and (ii) the
complainee’s faults are much smaller when considered on their own, but are tied to a whole range
of other faults in a way that suggests she cannot engage in all sorts of other unimpaired moral
relationships. For instance, a person who steals from her parents has acted in a way that is much less
blameworthy than a person who has stolen much more, and much more often, from the parents of
others.34 I take it that, intuitively, the latter is not in a position to blame the former for stealing. Yet
Scanlon’s account seems to suggest otherwise, because the theft of cash from one’s own parents
20
impairs all personal relationships with the agent as a result of what it indicates about her, whereas
stealing from strangers does not indicate any comparatively severe impairment of the agent’s ability
to enter into normal relationships with others. Hence, if the more serious thief here blames the less
serious one she implies no false claims about what impairs their relationship. As we have seen,
there are reasons to be sceptical of Scanlon’s account of incoherent complaints. But whether these
reasons are compelling, his account seems incompatible with the complaint principle.
6. Infelicitous complaints: Cohen
Cohen proposes a different account according to which “what explains the force of tu quoque is…
something to do with a certain form of inconsistency”.35 He does not propose this account as an
analysis of what makes incoherent complaints morally inappropriate, but he seems to think their
moral inappropriateness has at least something to do with their inconsistency. Whatever Cohen’s
explanatory purpose is, it is worth exploring the role inconsistency plays in relation to the moral
impropriety of incoherent complaints – partly because inconsistency is their distinctive trait, and
partly because of the problems, explored in the previous section, tied to an attempt to provide an
account in terms of the moral impropriety of implying a falsehood.
The inconsistency account has pleasing implications with regard to the scope of tu
quoque. First, it explains the effectiveness of the strategy of what we might call concessive
complaints. If my faults are greater than yours I may nevertheless complain about yours provided
that my other-directed condemnation is supplemented with self-directed condemnation such that
differences in self- and other-directed condemnation fit differences in the strengths of the relevant
complaints. With this proviso met there is no longer any incoherence between the stance I adopt
towards you and the stance I adopt towards myself. Moreover, the inconsistency account implies
that tu quoque is inappropriate for the same reason as illa quoque, i.e. the case where, for no good
21
reason, I single out and complain about one person for something I know a relevant other has done
as well. In both cases it is the inconsistent application of the norm appealed to that explains the
inappropriateness of complaints.
No doubt inconsistency is what explains the root inappropriateness of incoherent
complaints, but it plays no fundamental role per se in an account of why incoherent complaints are
undermined when they are. For consider the case where someone condemns herself because of the
mote in her own eye, but fails to consider the beam in her sister’s eyes. This case involves the same
inconsistency (or, as I prefer to put it, incoherent application of a standard) as the admittedly more
common case in which a person condemns her sister for the mote in her eye but fails to notice the
beam in her own. Yet, unlike in the standard case, we do not take the presence of the more serious
sinner to show that it is morally improper for the less serious sinner to condemn the mote in her
own eye. It seems that it is only when other-directed inconsistency is involved that a prospective
condemner deprived of the entitlement to condemn. We do not say “Look who’s listening!” as a
way of exposing the moral impropriety of another’s scorching and disproportionately harsh selfcriticism.36 Similarly, one cannot insinuate that a saint is denied the right to praise someone for a
minor good deed by the doer of that deed by exclaiming “Look who’s talking!” These facts confirm
that inconsistency alone is not the full explanation of the force of tu quoque.
It might be suggested that what matters is not whether the inconsistency is otherdirected, but whether it is motivated. Normally, when inconsistency is other-directed it is motivated:
a desire to have a positive self-image will often be part of the larger psychological background.
When the inconsistency is self-directed, by contrast, it is unmotivated: the condemner simply fails
to keep in mind the fact the interlocutor has even greater faults.
While this is a competing explanation, and one that will often explain the same cases
as the self-other asymmetry thesis, if we pry the explanations apart we will see that it is the latter
22
that matters. I am morally entitled to put forward motivated self-criticism in front of a person whose
faults are greater, and I am vulnerable to tu quoque when I complain about the mote in another’s
eye while omitting, in a non-motivated way, to complain about the beam in my own. I cannot then
note that I have no ulterior motive and proceed with the criticism.
Note, finally, that even if Cohen were right, it would seem to follow that what
explains the undermining of one’s position to complain – that one believes or ought to believe that
one has violated the norm to which one appeals in one’s complaints against others in an equally or
even more serious way than those others whom one complains about – is a fact that is irrelevant to
moral obligations that others have to one. As I have already pointed out: my false beliefs about my
violations of norms bear on my position to complain but they do not bear on what others may
permissibly to do me.
7. Infelicitous complaints: demeaning others
In view of the discussion presented in the two previous sections, I suggest that incoherent
complaints are morally problematic when they demean others. The basic idea here is that it is prima
facie morally wrong to demean others and that incoherent complaints are often, though not always,
demeaning to the person whose faults are condemned in the presence of a greater sinner. So, for
instance, in blaming someone for a fault that I have to a much greater extent I am acting as if, and
thereby communicating the message that, I am in an elevated position: the position is such that the
complainee must account, and possibly apologize, to me for her faults, whereas I am under no
comparable obligation with regard to my own similar, or greater, faults.37 So it is as if – to put this
point in Reiman’s terms – I did not by my own faulty behaviour authorize others to engage in
comparable or even less faulty behaviour and withholding such authorization would seem to
involve a denial of others status as moral equals given what I have authorized myself to do.
23
This account captures the intuitive moral character of incoherent appraisals. First, it
delivers self-other asymmetry mentioned in my discussion of Cohen’s account, since incoherent
self-reproach in the presence of another whose faults are greater, but one refrains from complaining
about, might be demeaning of oneself, but intuitively one does not act immorally by demeaning
oneself.38 Incoherent self-praise tends to demean others and is morally problematic. True,
incoherent self-reproach can be demeaning of others too when it signals that one holds oneself to
much greater standards than others with a sense of one’s own superiority, but in those cases
incoherent self-reproach becomes morally problematic – at least, to the extent that it involves a vice
– exactly for this reason.
Second, incoherent, or prima facie incoherent, complaints need not always be
demeaning, and it seems that in cases where they are not, nor do they seem to be morally wrong.
Praising a child for a deed that is surprisingly good, for a child, in the presence of an adult whose
deed is better than the child’s (when one abstracts from facts about the age of the agents) is not
demeaning to the latter, since there is a reason in this case why praise is not calibrated to the
goodness of the deed, and this renders the praise coherent. This reason involves no denial of the
adult’s equal moral standing, but rather the view that you can reasonably expect more from an adult
than you can from a child, and perhaps the view that, instrumentally speaking, it is more effective,
and thus more important, to praise children than it is to praise adults.
Third, the account casts light on the dimensions of incoherence examined in Section
Four. It seems, for instance, to cohere well with the contextualist view of the quality of faults. If the
context within which a particular criticism of me is made concerns a very specific issue and the
complainer explicitly denies that this fault bears on other issues, it is not demeaning to me that the
complainer’s more serious, but in the present context irrelevant, faults are unaddressed. Indeed, to
deny someone, such as a convicted killer, the right ever to make very specific criticisms of non24
killers’ faults on the ground that her overall faults are greater would seem to demean her by
depriving her of her status as someone who can not only be subjected to, but also subject others to,
warranted moral criticism.
Finally, this account explains why some others are relevant others, while other others
are not, e.g. I cannot dismiss your complaints about my lying with accusing your of failing to
complain about the much more serious lies of Hitler. In complaining over someone, I invite them to
convey to me their regret over their wrongdoing. This is demeaning if there is someone present to
whom such an invitation is more warranted because he was involved in greater wrongdoing. But
such an invitation makes no sense if it is extended to, say, evil dictators long dead, however more
serious their faults were; and this explains why, normally, such persons are not relevant others for
the purpose of determining the propriety of blame.
8. Conclusion
The topic of what is involved in being in a position to complain is relatively uncharted territory.
Incoherent complaints involve the incoherent application of the standards appealed to – a form of
inappropriateness that we encounter outside morality, e.g. in relation to incoherent application of
norms of humour. This does not go to the heart of the matter, however, which is that, in a wide
range of context, incoherent complaints over others demeans them. Incoherent complaints very
often involve a specific way of demeaning others. This involves elevating oneself (or one’s
favourites) above one’s complainee by presenting him in an unwarrantedly negative light,
comparatively speaking. This is what makes incoherent complaints morally wrong, when they are.
The main upshot of my paper is that we should reject the complaint principle, i.e., the
thesis that if no one has a valid complaint about some state of affairs, then that state of affairs
involves no injustice the reason being that factors that do not determine the injustice thereof may
25
undermine my being in a position to complain. Hence, absence of complaints is not sufficient for
justice. Whether presence of complaints is sufficient for injustice is another interesting question, but
not one that I have addressed in this paper.39
1
Jeffrey H. Reiman, “Justice, Civilization, and the Death Penalty: Answering van den Haag”,
Philosophy & Public Affairs 14.2 (1985), pp. 115-148, p. 125.
2
Reiman, “Justice”, p. 124.
3
Saul Smilansky explores a similar line of argument in his Ten Moral Paradoxes (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 90-99, p. 95: “wrongdoers cannot complain when treated as they have
legislated”. However, he thinks this is paradoxical because it is also a commonsense truth that “if
wronged one can complain, and... if one cannot complain about an act done to one, then presumably
that act may be done to one”, p. 98.
4
Reiman, “Justice”, p. 115.
5
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 293.
6
Dworkin, Sovereign, p. 294.
7
Dworkin, Sovereign, p. 295.
8
Matthew Clayton, “The Resources of Liberal Equality”, Imprints 5.1 (2000), 63-84, pp. 77-78.
9
Cp. Larry Temkin on complaints in his Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 15.
10
Compare G. A. Cohen, “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the
Terrorists”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 81 (2006), 113-136, p. 120.
11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3840-2005Mar3.html
26
12
Of course, nothing prevents the complainee from offering a direct as well as an indirect response
to complaints, e.g. “There are no human rights violations in China, and even if there were, the US is
in no position to point fingers at us”.
13
However, compare Smilansky, “Paradox”.
14
An analogous point applies to the illa quoque reply.
15
By “(im)proper” and “(im)propriety” I mean the same as I mean by “(in)appropriate” and
“(in)appropriateness”, respectively, and in the interest of stylistic variation I use both pairs of terms.
16
Cohen, “Casting”, p. 127.
17
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2000), p. 190.
18
Dworkin, “Morally Speaking”, p. 185.
19
Cohen, “Notes”, p. 4.
20
I return to this in Section Six in the course of discussing Scanlon’s views.
21
Compare Cohen, “Notes”, p. 2. Dworkin endorses the favourable comparison view: see “Morally
Speaking”, p. 185.
22
Dworkin might accept this view, since, as already mentioned, he allows for infelicity cancellers
(p. 184).
23
Compare Cohen, “Casting”, p. 123n17.
24
Compare the discussion of the relationship between hypocrisy and tu quoque in the third
paragraph of Section Three.
25
Jerry Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008),
p. 61
26
Cohen, Rescuing, p. 61n32. See also “Casting”, p. 123n17
27
27
Compare Cohen, “Casting”, p. 127, n.21.
28
I discuss Scanlon’s views more fully in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, “Motes and Beams: Who
Can Praise or Blame Whom for What?” in Michael Kühler and Nadja Jelinek (eds.), Autonomy and
the Self (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming).
29
Scanlon, “Blame”, p. 122-123, 128-129.
30
Scanlon, “Blame”, p. 151.
31
Scanlon, “Blame”, p. 151.
32
Scanlon, “Blame”, pp. 176-177.
33
Recall my discussion of the relationship between hypocrisy and tu quoque in the third paragraph
of Section Three.
34
Even more problematic are cases where the greater faults are indicative of their possessor being a
more trustworthy participant in normal moral relationships.
35
Cohen, p. 8. Later in the notes he suggests that inconsistency is not the whole explanation: respect
enters the picture as well.
36
If we do, it is in order to change the self-reproacher’s view of the seriousness of her faults, not to
deny her the right to reproach herself.
37
Apart from the element of sending a message, this is true even in the case of complaining in foro
interno. Arguably, such complaints do not wrong the complainee, but it still reflects a vice of the
blamer’s, e.g., vainglory or partiality.
38
Some philosophers, including Kantians perhaps, might affirm a moral duty not to demean
oneself. However, they might still accept that the right account of the morality of incoherent
complaints should be based on considerations having to do with the wrongness of demeaning
someone, since presumably they will think that incoherent self-reproach is morally wrong and
demeaning to the person incoherently reproaching herself.
28
39
Jerry Cohen’s interpersonal test suggests that, on his view, presence of complaints implies
injustice. Elsewhere, I have suggested that the mere fact that people are in a position to complain
something, e.g. because they hold false but reasonable beliefs about their situation, it does not
follow that injustice obtains, see “Inequality, Incentives, and the Interpersonal Test”, Ratio 21.4
(2008), pp. 421-439.
29