The question of what an ideally just society looks like has been one of the perennial philosophical questions. In recent decades, it has essentially dominated the field of analytic political philosophy. Charles W. Mills, a distinguished philosopher who passed away on 20 September 2021, believed that was a mistake. An exclusive focus on the conditions of ideal justice meant ignoring the injustices of the real world, treating them as incidental rather than structural in nature. In exposing the ways in which ideology, oppression and racism can be systematic barriers to achieving the goal of justice, Mills cemented injustice as a philosophical problem worthy of study as much as any, writes Jason Stanley.

Pressed for a definition of the discipline of philosophy, some might provide it as the study of the nature of truth, beauty, goodness, knowledge, wisdom, virtue, skill, and justice. Such a conception of philosophy seems to be borne out by its history – the central question of Plato’s Republic is, after all: what is justice? But if philosophy is an investigation of (say) the different possible ideals of justice, or the nature of knowledge, what does philosophy have to say about the persisting nature of injustice and ignorance? Is it a philosophical issue, a matter for the field of philosophy, to explain? Is there a systematic structure to injustice, a set of puzzles and contradictions the study of which is characteristic of philosophical inquiry?

According to Charles W. Mills, one of the most eminent philosophers of the last half century, the answer is, resoundingly, in the affirmative. Mills argued powerfully that philosophy must study injustice, oppression, and ignorance as subjects in their own right. In his work, Mills argues that the failure to do so, to characterize political philosophy as simply the study of which form of justice a perfect society should aim towards, is in fact a pernicious ideological project – tantamount to whitewashing oppression, by relegating the study of its history and nature to a secondary task. If the study of barriers to justice and knowledge is not “philosophical”, that suggests that such barriers are incidental and temporary – Mills is adamant they are not.