Sensitivity to InjusticeWhen Sensitivity Becomes a Moral Value

We have become very attentive to the injustices we may suffer, and this attentiveness goes hand in hand with a growing appreciation of sensitivity. Feeling conflicts, remarks or tensions strongly is readily taken as a quality: to feel more would mean to perceive more finely what others fail to see. The figure of “the highly sensitive person”, often presented in a favorable light, is one of the visible expressions of this trend.

It is this presupposition that I propose to question. Feeling more strongly does not necessarily mean perceiving more accurately. A keen sensitivity can make us attentive to certain aspects of a situation, but it can also amplify what affects us personally and give disproportionate importance to whatever touches our image, our expectations or our need for recognition. The intensity of a feeling is not a measure of lucidity.

Feeling as Verdict

The more hurt I feel, the more I tend to consider that what was done to me is serious; the more humiliated I feel, the more I conclude that the other person humiliated me. Yet the intensity of my emotion does not measure the seriousness of what happened: one can react very strongly to a trivial remark and much less to a more serious injustice.

The problem begins when we turn our suffering into proof of the other’s fault. The one who suffers then becomes both judge and party, and the measuring instrument of the harm. The feeling is no longer a piece of experience: it becomes the verdict. The center of gravity of judgment shifts from what actually happened to the effect it has on me. It is in this sense that sensitivity can become egocentric.

This logic makes any ranking of injustices difficult. An annoyance, an interpretation we dislike, a public humiliation, discrimination or violence all end up being described with the same vocabulary of aggression. The objective differences between situations fade behind their subjective intensity.

Situation, Interpretation, Emotion

The fact that I feel hurt attests to a real feeling. But the reality of that feeling is not enough to establish the truth of the interpretation that accompanies it.

We can distinguish three levels that we tend to confuse: the situation itself, that is, what was said, done or left out, insofar as it can be established; the interpretation we make of it, when we attribute an intention or a meaning to what happened; and finally the emotion aroused by that interpretation. These levels are linked but do not merge. An emotion can be very strong while the interpretation is mistaken; conversely, one can suffer a real injustice without feeling any intense emotion.

And even when the injustice is established, the emotion does not dictate the response. If someone insults me, I can insult them back, ask why, leave, defend myself or let it go. Being the victim of an unjust act confers no moral infallibility as to how to respond to it.

A Mistake About Me Is Not an Attack on Me

The difficulty appears even more clearly when the injustice itself is uncertain. For example, in the training sessions I lead, it sometimes happens that someone introduces themselves by insisting on their degrees, their positions or their experience. I may offer them a hypothesis: “It seems important to you to show your legitimacy. One might see in this a concern for recognition.” This interpretation may be right or wrong. The person can answer that this was not their intention, and we can examine together why they chose to present these elements rather than others.

But it also happens that the interpretation is no longer contested as false: it is denounced as an attack. The person feels put in a box, locked in, subjected to violence. Yet an interpretation can be mistaken and unpleasant without constituting an aggression. That it displeases us tells us nothing yet about its truth: an interpretation can be false and unpleasant, but it can just as well be true and unpleasant. Unpleasantness is not a criterion of truth.

We are then confusing two levels. On the cognitive level, someone is wrong about me: they attribute to me an intention I do not have. On the affective level, this mistake is experienced as if the other were diminishing me or striking at my very being. But why would someone else’s interpretation have such power? If someone is wrong about me, their mistake remains first and foremost their mistake. I can correct it, question it or let it stand; it does not change what I am.

Of course, things are different when the other acts toward me on the basis of this interpretation, for example when it leads them to exclude me, discriminate against me or accuse me unjustly. We must therefore distinguish between the interpretation the other makes of me and what they do to me in the name of that interpretation.

Paradoxically, the more we demand to be understood exactly as we wish to be, the more dependent we become on the gaze of others. We claim our autonomy while demanding that the other confirm the image we have of ourselves. We would like to be able to say: “I know who I am,” while implicitly adding: “but you must see me as I want to be seen.” Yet such control is impossible. Faced with an interpretation we dislike, either the other is wrong, and their mistake can be corrected or left where it is; or they touch on something true, and the remark becomes an occasion for reflection. In both cases, a disproportionate reaction perhaps tells us less about what has just been said than about our difficulty in tolerating an image of ourselves that escapes our control.

Moralizing Unpleasantness

Another difficulty arises when we immediately turn unpleasantness into a moral fault. Instead of saying that a remark bothers us, we call it aggressive, violent or abusive. We move from describing our inner state to an accusation leveled against the other.

This moralization offers a psychological advantage: it spares us from examining what bothers us. Once the other has been designated as the aggressor, the question “Why does this affect me so much?” disappears. Our emotion stops being something to understand and becomes a piece of evidence for the prosecution.

This is obviously not to conclude that every accusation of violence is a dramatization. There are real forms of violence, humiliation and injustice. It is precisely because they exist that it matters not to use the same words for an aggression, an annoyance and an interpretation we dislike. By calling everything violence, we lose the distinctions needed to think about violence itself.

Less Sensitive to Oneself, More Sensitive to the World

Philosophical practice can work against this inflation of the self. It does not seek to suppress emotions, but to make us less sensitive to whatever touches our image, our status or our need to be understood. It trains us to bear that an interpretation may be right without this constituting a humiliation, and wrong without the other’s mistake becoming an aggression. In this sense, philosophizing involves a kind of desensitization to oneself.

Learning to philosophize also means learning to bear not being understood exactly as we would wish. This ability to let the other be wrong without trying to regain control of their gaze frees up a considerable share of our attention: we stop being constantly busy defending our image.

This is perhaps one of the most interesting effects of philosophical practice: becoming less sensitive to oneself in order to become more sensitive to the world. Being less sensitive to oneself does not mean becoming less sensitive to injustice; it might even be the opposite. When every personal annoyance no longer takes up all our attention, we become able to look at what happens independently of us and to recognize injustices of which we ourselves are not the victims. But this sensitivity to injustices suffered by others must itself be examined, for it can still be a way of taking oneself as the measure. We sometimes believe we are moved by what the other is going through, when we are mostly reacting to what we imagine we would feel in their place. We may even become indignant on behalf of someone who does not consider themselves wronged. Being sensitive to what the other is living through therefore does not consist in projecting our own emotion onto them, but in suspending it enough to try to understand their experience.

Educating Our Sensitivity to Injustice

Our sensitivity to injustice therefore does not need to be exalted further; it needs to be educated. It is not a matter of being less attentive to real injustices, but of becoming better able to distinguish them from what merely bruises our image, our expectations, our projections or our desire to be understood.

An emotion tells us that something is happening within us, without yet telling us what, in the situation, explains it. It may respond to an injustice, but also to a disappointed expectation, a dependence on the gaze of others, a projection or a difficulty in tolerating contradiction. The point is to learn to ask two questions at once: “Is this really unjust?” and “Why does this affect me so much?” The first forces us to step outside ourselves to examine the situation; the second, to look at what our reaction reveals about our expectations and the image we have of ourselves.

Emotion can then teach us something about the situation, but also about the person who feels it. It ceases to be a verdict and becomes an object of examination.