This, for Sen, is a mistaken way to think about justice. First, we are unlikely ever to agree on what is a “just society”. The idea of justice is necessarily multi-faceted, not smooth-cut. To illustrate the “pervasive plurality” of the idea of justice, Sen gives us an example. Imagine three children quarrelling over a musical instrument, let’s say a flute. The first claims the flute is hers because only she knows how to play it; the second demands it because he, the poorest of the group, lacks toys of his own, and this will give him something to play with; the third notes that she has laboured for months in making the flute, and it would therefore be unjust for her not to have it. The claims of justice collide here: and no singular meaning of justice will help us.
Rejecting Rawls and his intellectual lineage, Sen favours a more motley thought-line: Adam Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marx, John Stuart Mill. Each, according to Sen, thought about justice in comparative rather than absolutist terms. Instead of asking what is a perfectly just society, their ideas were incited by particular injustices. Sen also takes inspiration from Indian philosophy. Sanskrit has two distinct words to refer to justice: niti, which denotes the rules and behavioural norms of justice; and nyaya, the actual social “realisations” of justice – the lives people can lead, regardless of whether or not the institutional architecture and laws have been perfectly rendered. From the perspective of nyaya, the prevention of blatant injustice can be more important than the pursuit of perfect justice.
The advancement of justice therefore relies,
Sen concludes, on democracy, understood in Bagehot’s phrase as
“government by discussion” – a process of collective reasoning that
injects more information, more perspectives and more voices into
debate. For Sen, democracy, like justice, is best understood not as an
institutional or indeed even as a state or governmental form. Rather,
it is the possibility of voicing continuous assessments about how a
society and its members, or even how we as a species, are doing.
===
Book review: The Idea of Justice
Review by Sunil Khilnani
Published: July 25 2009 01:37 | Last updated: July 25 2009 01:37
The Idea of Justice
By Amartya Sen
Allen Lane £25, 304 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20
The quest for justice – political, social, economic – has fired political imaginations ever since the great American and French revolutions at the end of the 18th century. Nearly a quarter of a millennium later, in most places justice is still a fugitive ideal, seen off in part by the claims of custom and tradition, the presence of inequalities and the weight of sheer power. But the pursuit of justice has also foundered because, for all its imaginative potency, the idea seems discretionary. Apparently lacking any objective basis, it seems something we can choose to concern ourselves about – or not bother with. The modern idea of the market – “blind” in its distributions – was proposed precisely as a cure for the vexations of distributive justice.
Reality’s seeming disdain for justice has not stopped academic philosophising about it. For more than 50 years now – ever since Harvard philosopher John Rawls began publishing the articles that came to be celebrated as the 20th century’s most important work of political philosophy, The Theory of Justice – the concept of justice has been scrutinised in seminar rooms, dissected and rebuilt into a perfect, icy ideal.
Yet what has half a century’s strenuous pondering over the idea done for its practical extension across the world? Amartya Sen, Rawls’s long-time Harvard colleague and interlocutor, is too polite to pose this question. But his book does in fact provide an answer – and an alternative.
In The Idea of Justice, Sen places Rawls within one of two divergent strands of modern western thought about justice. Stretching from Hobbes to Rousseau and Kant, political philosophers have taken the model of a social contract as the way to secure agreement over the allocation of freedoms, obligations and goods among individuals. Sen calls this “transcendental institutionalism”, focused as it is on identifying a singular institutional model, derived from abstract principles.
This, for Sen, is a mistaken way to think about justice. First, we are unlikely ever to agree on what is a “just society”. The idea of justice is necessarily multi-faceted, not smooth-cut. To illustrate the “pervasive plurality” of the idea of justice, Sen gives us an example. Imagine three children quarrelling over a musical instrument, let’s say a flute. The first claims the flute is hers because only she knows how to play it; the second demands it because he, the poorest of the group, lacks toys of his own, and this will give him something to play with; the third notes that she has laboured for months in making the flute, and it would therefore be unjust for her not to have it. The claims of justice collide here: and no singular meaning of justice will help us.
Second, in comparing what furthers justice, or lessens injustice, Sen argues that we do not need an institutional blueprint of the just society to guide us. We don’t need to know the height of Mount Everest to decide whether K2 or Kanchenjunga is the higher peak.
Rejecting Rawls and his intellectual lineage, Sen favours a more motley thought-line: Adam Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marx, John Stuart Mill. Each, according to Sen, thought about justice in comparative rather than absolutist terms. Instead of asking what is a perfectly just society, their ideas were incited by particular injustices. Sen also takes inspiration from Indian philosophy. Sanskrit has two distinct words to refer to justice: niti, which denotes the rules and behavioural norms of justice; and nyaya, the actual social “realisations” of justice – the lives people can lead, regardless of whether or not the institutional architecture and laws have been perfectly rendered. From the perspective of nyaya, the prevention of blatant injustice can be more important than the pursuit of perfect justice.
Our perceptions of injustice are, of course, always coloured by the values, interests and customs we happen to have. Yet, Sen insists, by using our powers of critical reasoning, we can move beyond their grip towards agreement about certain injustices. He adopts Adam Smith’s device of the “impartial spectator”: no omniscient viewpoint, but a comparing eye. Smith’s is an estranging device, encouraging us to step outside our given values and prejudices in order to reason about them – and to work towards altering those that don’t stand up to such reasoning.
In the second, more worldly half of the book, Sen asks what is it that the pursuit of justice should actually advance? Can we agree on a measure by which to judge when a society, in its quest for justice, is getting closer or drawing further away from it? The possible categories he considers include liberty, “primary goods” and resources, happiness and well-being.
Sen’s own preferred category is that of “capabilities”. By this he means not just the resources to live certain kinds of life that we have reason to value, but the capability of an individual to choose to use – or not use – the resources at hand to achieve what he has reason to value. Sen is interested in outcomes. But unlike utilitarians, who are interested in little else, he is also interested in how those outcomes are brought about – especially the extent to which they are brought about through the free choices of individuals.
The point of such an approach is not to arrive at a singular idea of “perfect justice” – that icy ideal. Justice is a plural and evolving idea – if it must reckon with age-old injustices, it must also be responsive to the astonishing human ingenuity for inventing new ones.
The advancement of justice therefore relies, Sen concludes, on democracy, understood in Bagehot’s phrase as “government by discussion” – a process of collective reasoning that injects more information, more perspectives and more voices into debate. For Sen, democracy, like justice, is best understood not as an institutional or indeed even as a state or governmental form. Rather, it is the possibility of voicing continuous assessments about how a society and its members, or even how we as a species, are doing.
In this intricate, endlessly thought-provoking book, Sen brings the full force of his formidable mind and his moral sense to show how specific questions – of chronic malnourishment, ill-health, demographic gender imbalance – must be analysed in terms of justice. Doing something about them is not a discretionary matter – it is a requirement of being human. Sen is the most sophisticated intellectual campaigner of our times – his arguments have shaped not just academic disciplines but the policies of governments and of global institutions like the World Bank. Not enough, he would say – but he has done much to bring a measure of justice back into the world.
Sunil Khilnani is the author of ‘The Idea of India’ (Penguin)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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