by Graham Lister

Agents, of both a collective and individual nature, have an interest in some state of affairs if it enables them to achieve their wants. But it is quite another thing to be aware of this interest; that entails both an ideological and imaginative transformation that allows that interest to be fully visible and informs an agent on how to potentially realise its interest. Often within our political discourse a restriction upon the exercise of a given interest or frustration of a want will be expressed in the idiom of injustice.

Precisely what are justice and injustice are obviously both, at least partially, ideologically and imaginatively forged concepts. For the ancients justice typically occupied a primary place in the pantheon of virtues. It was often conceived as the master virtue, the one that orders all the others. Plato tells us in The Republic, a just individual is one in whom the three parts of the soul - reason, spirit, appetite - and the three virtues associated with them -wisdom, courage, moderation - stand in the right relation to one another.

In the just city, a precisely analogous situation prevails each class exercises its own distinctive virtue by performing the task suitable for its nature, and none interferes with the others. Most philosophers have rejected the specifics of Plato’s view. Almost no-one today believes that the just city is one that is rigidly stratified with a permanent ruling class, a permanent military class and a permanent working class, whose lives differ from one another in all major respects. Yet many philosophers have retained the belief that justice is not simply one virtue among others, but enjoys a special status as the master or meta virtue. A version of this conception informed Rawls’ treatise, A Theory of Justice, in which he claimed that “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought”. By this he did not mean that justice is the highest virtue, but rather that it is the fundamental one, the one that secures the basis for developing all of the rest. In principle, socio-political arrangements can display any number of qualities - for example, they might be efficient, orderly, harmonious, caring or ennobling. But the realisation of those possibilities depends on a prior, enabling condition, namely, that the socio-political arrangements in question be just. Justice is thus the first virtue in the following sense: it is only by overcoming institutionalised or systemic injustice that we can create the ground on which other virtues, both societal and individual, can flourish.

If Rawls is right on this general point then when evaluating socio-political arrangements, the first question we should ask is: are they just and more importantly for whom are they just? To answer, we might build on another of his insights: “the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society”. This statement orients our attention from the great variety of immediately accessible features of social life to the deep grammar underlying them, to the institutionalised ground rules which set the basic terms of social interaction. It is only when they are justly ordered that other, more directly experienced aspects of life can also be just. Certainly, Rawls’ specific views of justice - like those of Plato - are problematic. However, it may be useful as a starting point if we endorse his basic idea that the justice is a meta virtue and that our reflections on justice should concern the basic structures of a community. To explore this approach I will examine the Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro’s thoughtful and beautifully written novel, Never Let Me Go.

The story follows three friends, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, who inhabit a peculiar social-order. When we first meet them, they are children living at what appears to be a privileged English boarding school called Hailsham. As the novel unfolds, however, we discover that the children are actually clones. They have been created to provide vital organs for non-clones (the ‘originals’). In the second part of the novel, the protagonists have left Hailsham and are living at the Cottages, a forlorn transitional residence, where they await ‘training’. Now adolescents, they are preparing to begin their life’s work of ‘donation’, which will culminate after a maximum of four surgeries in ‘completion’. In the third part, the protagonists are young adults. Tommy and Ruth have become ‘donors’, while Kathy has become a ‘carer’, a clone who tends to others recovering from organ-removal surgery. After Tommy and Ruth ‘complete’, Kathy feels she cannot continue in her role. The book ends as she prepares to submit to ‘donation’ herself.

Never Let Me Go is a powerful work, which left me overcome with sadness upon first reading it. Some reviewers have interpreted it as a work of dystopian science fiction about the perils of genetic engineering; others have read it as a Bildungsroman in which young people with outsized hopes and little understanding of what is truly important in life acquire the wisdom to value relationships and accept the world as it is. Neither interpretation is wholly wrong, in my view; each captures a strand of the work. But both miss what I take to be the book’s vital core. As I read it, Never Let Me Go is a meditation on justice - a searing vision of an unjust world and of the profound suffering inflicted on its inhabitants.

What possible insights does the book offer us? First and foremost, it invites us to think about justice through negation. Unlike Plato, Ishiguro makes no attempt to represent a just social-order, but instead offers a chilling picture of one that the reader comes to view as deeply unjust and cruel. This already makes a profound point: justice is never actually experienced directly. By contrast, we do experience injustice, and it is only through this that we form an idea of justice. Only by pondering the character of what we consider unjust do we begin to get a sense of what would count as an alternative. Only when we contemplate what it would take to overcome injustice does our otherwise abstract concept of justice acquire any content. Thus, the answer to Socrates’s question, “What is justice?” can only be this: justice is the overcoming of injustice.

How, then, do we recognize injustice? If we examine the social-order portrayed in Never Let Me Go and ask why and in what respects it is unjust, we are struck by an obvious answer: this social-order is unjust because it is massively exploitative. The clones are created and maintained for the sake of the originals. They are sources of organs, walking stores of spare parts, which will be cut out of their bodies and transplanted into the bodies of originals, when needed. They live, suffer and eventually die so that the originals can live longer, healthier lives. Treated as mere means to the originals’ ends, they are accorded no intrinsic value. Their needs and interests are nullified or at best subordinated to those of the originals. The clones, in other words, do not count as subjects of justice. Excluded from consideration and respect, they are not recognized as belonging to the same moral universe as the originals.

Here Ishiguro makes an acute observation, which concerns exclusion, identity and alterity. The clones can be exempted from moral consideration because they are seen as categorically different from the originals. It is this allegedly basic, ontological otherness, that justifies their exploitation and their lifelong segregation from the originals. Their relegation to special places like Hailsham, where they live in a self-enclosed world with no outside contact, interacting only with one another and their teachers - whom Ishiguro calls, in a gesture to Plato, ‘guardians’ - serves a functional purpose. Barring direct acquaintance between clones and originals precludes experiences of similarity or affinity between them, which would contradict the assumption of ontological difference. That assumption is paradoxical, to be sure. The clones are in fact exact genetic replicas of the originals and yet a total form of differentiation along an in-group/out-group basis exists. However, their utility to the latter consists precisely in the fact that they are biologically indistinguishable from them. Granted, their subjectivity differs, as the clones have experiences and memories of their own. But genetically, the two groups stand in a relation of absolute identity, a proximity so extreme as to be uncanny, even unbearable. We can speculate that this might provoke severe anxiety; if so, it would explain the originals’ need to insist at all costs that their own ontological status is fundamentally different, and thus to legitimise the exclusion of clones from the universe of moral concern.

Nevertheless, as Ishiguro shows us, the clones in fact participate in the same scheme of social cooperation as the originals. They are subject to the same basic structure of society. The two groups operate jointly under a common set of ground rules, which dictate that the life substance of the one be placed at the disposal of the other, that it be made available for the originals’ benefit, irrespective of the harm inflicted on the clones. Thus the two groups participate in a single, shared bio-economy, a common bio-political matrix of life and death. The originals rely on the clones for their own survival; yet they deny them the standing of partners in interaction.

To us, the readers, this situation is unjust. We recognize a mismatch between the restricted circle of those who count as subjects of justice - originals only - and the larger circle of those who are jointly subject to that society’s basic structure - originals plus clones. And we deem this incongruity to be morally wrong. For us, accordingly, justice requires that all who are governed by a common set of ground rules be recognized as counting, in the sense of belonging to the same moral universe. Some participants should not be instrumentalised for the sake of others. All of them deserve equal concern. For this reason alone, the social-order portrayed in Never Let Me Go is deeply disturbing.

What makes the world portrayed in the book truly horrifying is something else: its protagonists do not perceive it as we do. The clones do not see their situation as unjust. They were created for, and socialised into, this highly treacherous order. Because it is the only community they know, its terms appear natural and normal to them. Granted, one of them, Tommy, is often angry. As a child living at Hailsham, he is prone to outbursts of temper for no apparent reason. But the others, including his closest friend Kathy, treat his rage as a personal problem. No-one, including Tommy himself, ever considers the possibility that he has good reason to be angry. All encourage him in various ways to calm down; and so he does. When we meet Tommy later, as an adolescent living at the Cottages, he has mastered his rage. All that remains is a trace of sadness - a brooding quality which suggests some inaccessible and uncomprehended inner depths.

Here Ishiguro conveys another profound intuition. Clearly, injustice is a matter of some objective measure of victimisation, a structural relation in which some exploit or abuse others and deny them moral standing as subjects of justice. But the harm is compounded when the victims lack the means to interpret their situation as unjust. This can happen by deliberate manipulation - when, for example, the beneficiaries fully understand the injustice, but hide it from those on the receiving end. However, it can also happen in a more subtle way - when, for example, the public sphere in a seemingly democratic society is dominated by individualising discourses, while structural perspectives are absent or marginalised. Or when anodyne, euphemistic and vaguely elevating terms are routinely used to refer to murderous realities - as, for example, when forcible surgical removal of bodily organs is called ‘donation’ and the associated killing is called ‘completion’. In such cases, the dominant interpretative schemas reflect the experience and serve the interests of the exploiters. Conversely, the victims of injustice have few if any words that can adequately voice their experience and even fewer ways effectively to articulate their interests as a group. The result is yet another aspect or level of injustice: the ideologically constructed means of interpretation and communication do not serve all its members equally well.

Under these conditions, the victims lack an essential condition for responding appropriately to their situation. The fitting response to injustice, we assume, is indignation. However, that response is possible only where the victims of an injustice have access to interpretative schemas that permit them to categorize their situation not simply as unfortunate, but as unjust. Failing that, they tend to blame themselves. Convinced that their inferior status is deserved, they bury their legitimate anger and tie themselves in emotional knots. Thus an injustice in the social organisation of discourse produces psychological fallout.

Never Let Me Go works through some of these repercussions. At first, during most of their years at Hailsham, the protagonists do not know they are clones. Ignorant of the terms of the social-order into which they are being inducted, they do not know that they are being raised to supply body parts for an überclass. Much of the drama of the novel’s first section inheres in a series of incidents in which the characters encounter anomalies in their situation, hints of another, darker reality underlying their relatively carefree school-days. Meanwhile, the reader, who is also initially naive, comes to understand the truth - and waits anxiously for the clones to grasp it too. However, any hopes for a cathartic revelation remain unfulfilled. The reader watches with growing consternation as the protagonists repeatedly verge on uncovering the truth, only to pull back from the brink again and again. Unable or unwilling to entertain such terrible knowledge, they ignore the hints, explain away the anomalies, and concoct increasingly convoluted rationales in order to shield themselves from a disastrous and devastating truth.

Certainly, the staff at Hailsham encourage the children’s ignorance. One teacher, momentarily overcome with sympathy for her charges, who do not after all seem so different from her, blurts out the truth and is summarily fired. She has violated the institution’s policy, which is to let the truth emerge gradually, in tiny doses, telling the clones only as much as they are deemed able to handle at a given moment. This technique is like that in the famous anecdote of the frog which, when thrown into a pot of boiling water, immediately jumps out. If, however, it is placed into a pot of cold water that is warmed gradually, the frog remains calmly inside as it boils to death. The Hailsham policy of titrating knowledge keeps the child-clones in the pot.

Eventually, they do learn the truth. But by that point, they are not disposed to feel indignation. Responding with sorrow instead of anger, the adolescent clones find their situation unfortunate, but they do not judge it - or the basic structure that underlies it - to be unjust. Nor do they contemplate collective protest or revolution. On the contrary, they latch onto the promise of escape for a lucky few. Specifically, they become obsessed with the possibility of ‘deferrals’. Another interesting choice of term, reminiscent of exemptions from the draft for university students in the US during the Vietnam War. In Never Let Me Go, word spreads amongst the clones that it is possible, under special circumstances, to postpone the start of one’s organ removal surgeries for three years. To qualify for a deferral, so the rumour goes, a clone couple must demonstrate that they are truly and deeply in love.

The notion that being in love could constitute a basis for postponing forcible surgical dismemberment is ingenious on Ishiguro’s part. This posits a link between affective individuality and intrinsic value. The premise is that a being heretofore deemed to possess only extrinsic value, and thus to be a mere means to others’ ends, can nevertheless be elevated in status, at least temporarily, into a being that is valuable and deserving of consideration in its own right. The further premise is that what enables this transmutation is the interiority and individuality of that being, as embodied in the affective experience of sharing with another in romantic love. What confers value, then, is personal subjectivity through and because of love.

The young-adult clones invest all their hopes in this idea. The rumour offers them considerably more than the promise of three more years of relative bodily integrity: it allows them to see themselves as something more than walking collections of spare body parts. It tells them instead that they are unique individuals, irreplaceable persons, each with a singular inner life (but here only through the ‘medium’ of romantic love). And where did the clones get this idea? At Hailsham, which we learn had been founded as a progressive alternative to the squalid hostels where clones had been previously stored. Squeamish about the conditions under which their biological duplicates were warehoused, sentimental liberal reformers had conceived of a special institution where clones would be educated and shown to have a soul. The school emphasized creative self-expression, encouraging the clones to produce artworks; the best, they were told, would be exhibited in an off-campus gallery. Later, when Tommy as a young man seeks to secure a ‘deferral’, he decides to make his case through the production of art. He will prove the depth of his love by displaying his paintings.

Again, Ishiguro’s insight into (in)justice is penetrating: namely, individuality is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is the mark of personhood and intrinsic value, the admission ticket for moral consideration. On the other hand, it is easily made into a ruse of power, an instrument of domination. When divorced from a structural understanding of an unjust social-order, individuality can become a cult object, a substitute for critical thinking and an impediment to overcoming injustice. In liberal ‘democratic’ mass-consumption societies individualism is the dominant form of ideology, the chief way in which subjects are interpellated. It is as ‘individuals’ that we are exhorted to assume responsibility over our own lives, encouraged to fulfil our deepest longings by purchasing and owning commodities, and steered away from collective action toward ‘personal solutions’ - invited to seek deferrals for our own precious, irreplaceable selves.

Ishiguro provides a masterful account of this paradox of individuality. What is most cruel and perverse about the world he portrays is that the protagonists are sold a bill of goods. Socialised to think of themselves as individuals, they cannot get past the idea, even when the truth becomes clear: they are actually collectively nothing but bags of spare parts, created to be cannibalised. The emotional climax of the novel’s closing lines, narrated by Kathy, now in her early 30s. As a ‘carer’, she has spent the last ten years nursing her fellow clones, including Tommy and Ruth. She has tended their frail and depleted bodies, successively dispossessed of one vital organ after another. She has kept them alive and available for additional ‘donations’, providing what solace she could, as if to rebut Ruth’s despairing claim that their kind were modelled from human ‘trash’. Now with both friends gone, Kathy can no longer bear to continue her work. Having decided to start ‘donations’ of her own, she anticipates ‘completion’ and looks back on the course of her life: “The memories I value most, I don’t see them ever fading. I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them.” Though she tries not to go searching for remnants of the past, Kathy recalls:

“The only indulgent thing I did, just once, was a couple of weeks after I heard Tommy had completed. I drove up to Norfolk, even though I had no real need to. I wasn’t after anything in particular . . . Maybe I just felt like looking at all those flat fields of nothing and the huge grey skies. At one stage I found myself on a road I’d never been on, and for about half an hour I didn’t know where I was and didn’t care . . . I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things breaking the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on a sea-shore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles before finally coming up against these trees and these two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing . . . I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that - I didn’t let it - and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”

Kathy speaks here for all those whom the social-order simultaneously interpellates as individuals and treats as spare parts; as raw material to be used up, ground down and spat out, when the system and those that most benefit from its present form has got from them all that it wants. In another era, they were christened “the wretched of the Earth”. However, today they are too omnipresent, and too close to home, for that designation. Indeed given the prospective global favela and an associated era of neo-feudalism on a global scale (with a ‘quite happy to be cosmopolitan’ transnational elite in charge), we suspect that we ordinary, non-plutocratic, Europeans - whom are unable to buy our way out of the range of toxic externalities produced by the system - are historically well on our way to such a state of wretchedness. Yet Kathy does not issue a call to arms. Rather, she expresses all the hurt, confusion, self-deception, betrayed hopes and longing that have coursed through her short and tragic life. Above all, she makes a stubborn claim to a measure of dignity in the face of a social-order that disrespects her and her group at every turn. She persists in the effort to make meaning, even when the basic structure of her society has granted her nothing from which to fashion it except debris. It is this heart-rending mix of all-too-human emotions that makes the words of this doomed clone so moving.

But let us now leave the world of Never Let Me Go, put aside its pathos and think in a hard-headed way about what it has taught us. How might Ishiguro’s many insights be applied to our social-order? First, the strategy of approaching justice negatively, through injustice, is powerful and productive. Pace Plato, we do not need to know what justice is in order to know when something is wrong. What we need, rather, is to sharpen our sense of injustice, to cut through obfuscation and ideology. Focusing on the wrong, we need to determine why it is so and how it could be made right. Only through such a process of negative thinking can we activate the concept of justice, redeem it from the realm of abstraction, concretise it, enrich it and make it effective for this world.

To see who deserves moral consideration, we should determine who is jointly subjected to a common set of ground rules, ultimately a communality of fate which define the terms of social cooperation in matters of justice. We should question the tendency to redefine structural inequities as personal problems; scrutinise interpretations that attribute people’s unfavourable circumstances only and exclusively to their own failings; and resist efforts to dismiss bellwether emotions, like anger, which can possess diagnostic value. Thus, we should look beyond explanations grounded in methodological and ideological individualism to the broader patterns and the causal mechanisms which reproduce forms of injustice or harms to Europeans in our homelands and the ideological strategies, such as personalisation, that seek to obscure them.

We should not assume that the absence of explicit critique or overt protest means that injustice does not exist. We should understand, rather, that organised opposition to injustice depends on the availability of discursive resources and interpretative schemas that permit its articulation and open expression. We should examine the public sphere for biases that impede equal access to political voice, and figure out how to overcome them, by broadening the terms available for naming social problems and disputing their causes.

We should distrust all one-sided paeans to individuality; and beware societies that fetishise interiority and our private life at the expense of our acknowledgement as public and social beings. Ideologies that do not recognise the interdependence between the parts and the whole are not to be endorsed - if of no other reason that ultimately they profoundly distort our view of the underlying ontological realities with their obfuscation. As such those ideological delusions can only be maintained for so long without inflicting great harms upon ourselves. There is an irreducibly social aspect to our being in the world. We should reconnect subjectivity and objectivity. Finally, we should appreciate and validate the longing for a better and more secure life both individually and together – to be ‘beloved’ - and the drive to make meaning, even under the most unfavourable of circumstances that hold in our present phase of hyper-liberal modernity; and cultivate our social indignation and renew our political imagination. Let us make justice the master virtue - not only in theoria, but also in praxis. Liberalism does not exclusively own the concept; nor should anyone ever think that it did.