by Amartya Sen
A long-standing influence on my workon justice, particularly related to freedom and capability, has come from Martha Nussbaum.
Her work, combined with her strong commitment to the development of the ‘capability perspective’, has deeply influenced many of its recent advances, including the exploration of its linkage with the classical xxiii
a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s Aristotelian ideas on ‘capacity’ and ‘flourishing’, and also with works on human development, gender studies and human rights.
The relevance and use of the capability perspective has been powerfully explored in recent years by the research of a group of remarkable scholars. Even though their writings have greatly influenced my thinking, a full list would be far too long to include here. I must, however, mention the influence coming from the works of Sabina Alkire, Bina Agarwal, Tania Burchardt, Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, Flavio Comim, David Crocker, Se´verine Deneulin, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Reiko Gotoh, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Ingrid Robeyns and Polly Vizard. There is also a close connection between the capability perspective and the new area of human development, which was pioneered by my late friend Mahbub ul Haq, and also bears the impact of the influence of Paul Streeten, Frances Stewart, Keith Griffin, Gustav Ranis, Richard Jolly, Meghnad Desai, Sudhir Anand, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Selim Jahan, among others. The Journal of Human Development and Capabilities has a strong involvement with workon the capability perspective, but the journal Feminist Economics has also taken a special interest in this area, and it has always been stimulating for me to have conversations with its editor, Diana Strassman, on the relation between the feminist perspective and the capability approach.
At Trinity I have had the excellent company of philosophers, legal thinkers and others interested in problems of justice, and had the opportunity of interacting with Garry Runciman, NickDenyer, Gisela Striker, Simon Blackburn, Catharine Barnard, Joanna Miles, Ananya Kabir, Eric Nelson, and occasionally with Ian Hacking (who sometimes came backto his old college where we had first met and talked as fellow students in the 1950s). I have also had the marvellous possibility of conversing with outstanding mathematicians, natural scientists, historians, social scientists, legal theorists and scholars in humanities.
I have benefited substantially also from my conversations with several other philosophers, including (in addition to those I have already mentioned) Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Christian Barry, Charles Beitz, the late Isaiah Berlin, Akeel Bilgrami, Hilary Bok, Sissela Bok, Susan Brison, John Broome, Ian Carter, Nancy Cartwright, Deen Chatterjee, Drucilla Cornell, Norman xxiv
a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s Daniels, the late Donald Davidson, John Davis, Jon Elster, Barbara Fried, Allan Gibbard, Jonathan Glover, James Griffin, Amy Gutmann, Moshe Halbertal, the late Richard Hare, Daniel Hausman, Ted Honderich, the late Susan Hurley, Susan James, Frances Kamm, the late Stig Kanger, Erin Kelly, Isaac Levi, Christian List, Sebastiano Maffetone, Avishai Margalit, David Miller, the late Sidney Morgenbesser, Thomas Nagel, Sari Nusseibeh, the late Susan Moller Okin, Charles Parsons, Herlinde Pauer-Struder, Fabienne Peter, Philip Pettit, Thomas Pogge, Henry Richardson, Alan Ryan, Carol Rovane, Debra Satz, John Searle, the late Judith Shklar, Quentin Skinner, Hillel Steiner, Dennis Thompson, Charles Taylor and Judith Thomson.
In legal thinking I have much benefited from discussions with (in addition to those already cited) Bruce Ackerman, Justice Stephen Breyer, Owen Fiss, the late Herbert Hart, Tony Honore´, Anthony Lewis, FrankMichelman, Martha Minow, Robert Nelson, Justice Kate O’Regan, Joseph Raz, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Stephen Sedley, Cass Sunstein and Jeremy Waldron. Even though my workfor this bookeffectively began with my John Dewey Lectures (on ‘Well-being, Agency and Freedom’) to the Philosophy Department of Columbia University in 1984, and came largely to an end with another set of philosophy lectures at Stanford University (on ‘Justice’) in 2008, I also tried out my arguments about theories of justice at various law schools. In addition to several lectures and seminars at the Law Schools of Harvard, Yale and Washington University, I also gave the Storrs Lectures (on ‘Objectivity’) at the Yale Law School in September 1990, the Rosenthal Lectures (on ‘The Domain of Justice’) at the Northwestern University Law School in September 1998, and a special lecture (on ‘Human Rights and the Limits of Law’) in the Cardozo Law School in September 2005.*
In economics, which is my original field of concentration, and which has considerable relevance to the idea of justice, I have benefited greatly from regular discussions over many decades with (in addition to the names already mentioned) George Akerlof, Amiya Bagchi,
* The Dewey lectures were arranged primarily by Isaac Levi, the Storrs Lectures by Guido Calabresi, the Rosenthal Lectures by Ronald Allen, and the Cardozo School lecture by David Rudenstine. I benefited greatly from discussions with them and their colleagues.
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a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s Jasodhara Bagchi, the late DipakBanerjee, Nirmala Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, AlokBhargava, Christopher Bliss, Samuel Bowles, Samuel Brittan, Robert Cassen, the late Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Partha Dasgupta, Mrinal Datta-Chaudhuri, Angus Deaton, Meghnad Desai, Jean Drèze, Bhaskar Dutta, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Nancy Folbre, Albert Hirschman, Devaki Jain, Tapas Majumdar, Mukul Majumdar, Stephen Marglin, DipakMazumdar, Luigi Pasinetti, the late I. G.
Patel, Edmund Phelps, K. N. Raj, V. K. Ramachandran, Jeffrey Sachs, Arjun Sengupta, Rehman Sobhan, Barbara Solow, Robert Solow, Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Stefano Zamagni.
I have also had very useful conversations with Isher Ahluwalia, MontekAhluwalia, Paul Anand, the late Peter Bauer, Abhijit Banerjee, Lourdes Beneria, Timothy Besley, Ken Binmore, Nancy Birdsall, Walter Bossert, Franc¸ois Bourguignon, Satya Chakravarty, Kanchan Chopra, Vincent Crawford, Asim Dasgupta, Claude d’Aspremont, Peter Diamond, Avinash Dixit, David Donaldson, Esther Duflo, Franklin Fisher, Marc Fleurbaey, Robert Frank, Benjamin Friedman, Pierangelo Garegnani, the late Louis Gevers, the late W. M. Gorman, Jan Graaff, Jean-Michel Grandmont, Jerry Green, Ted Groves, Frank Hahn, Wahidul Haque, Christopher Harris, Barbara Harris White, the late John Harsanyi, James Heckman, Judith Heyer, the late John Hicks, Jane Humphries, Nurul Islam, Rizwanul Islam, Dale Jorgenson, Daniel Kahneman, Azizur Rahman Khan, Alan Kirman, Serge Kolm, Janos Kornai, Michael Kramer, the late Jean-Jacques Laffont, Richard Layard, Michel Le Breton, Ian Little, Anuradha Luther, the late James Meade, John Muellbauer, Philippe Mongin, Dilip Mookerjee, Anjan Mukherji, Khaleq Naqvi, Deepak Nayyar, Rohini Nayyar, Thomas Piketty, Robert Pollak, Anisur Rahman, Debraj Ray, Martin Ravallion, Alvin Roth, Christian Seidl, Michael Spence, T. N.
Srinivasan, David Starrett, S. Subramanian, Kotaro Suzumura, Madhura Swaminathan, Judith Tendler, Jean Tirole, Alain Trannoy, John Vickers, the late William Vickrey, Jorgen Weibull, Glen Weyl and Menahem Yaari.
I have also benefited a great deal from conversations over the years on a variety of other subjects closely related to justice with Alaka Basu, Dilip Basu, Seyla Benhabib, Sugata Bose, Myra Buvinic, Lincoln Chen, Martha Chen, David Crocker, Barun De, John Dunn, Julio xxvi
a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s Frenk, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Ramachandra Guha, Geeta Rao Gupta, Geoffrey Hawthorn, Eric Hobsbawm, Jennifer Hochschild, Stanley Hoffmann, Alisha Holland, Richard Horton, Ayesha Jalal, Felicia Knaul, Melissa Lane, Mary Kaldor, Jane Mansbridge, Michael Marmot, Barry Mazur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Uday Mehta, the late Ralph Miliband, Christopher Murray, Elinor Ostrom, Carol Richards, David Richards, Jonathan Riley, Mary Robinson, Elaine Scarry, Gareth Stedman Jones, Irene Tinker, Megan Vaughan, Dorothy Wedderburn, Leon Wieseltier and James Wolfensohn. The part of the bookthat deals with democracy in its relation to justice (Chapters 15–17) draws on my three lectures on ‘Democracy’ at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University at their campus in Washington DC in 2005. Those lectures were the result of an initiative of Sunil Khilnani, endorsed by Francis Fukuyama, from both of whom I received very useful suggestions.
The lectures themselves yielded other
discussions in these SAIS
meetings that were also very useful for me.
The new Harvard ‘Program on Justice, Welfare and Economics’, which I directed for five years from January 2004 to December 2008, also gave me a wonderful opportunity to interact with students and colleagues interested in similar problems from different fields. The new Director, Walter Johnson, is continuing – and enlarging – these interactions with great leadership, and I tookthe liberty of presenting the main thrust of this bookin my farewell presentation to the group, receiving many excellent questions and comments.
Erin Kelly and Thomas Scanlon have been immensely helpful in reading through much of the manuscript and have made a number of critically important suggestions. I am most grateful to them both.
The expenses of research, including assistance, have been partly met by a five-year project on democracy at the Centre for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge, jointly supported by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, during 2003 to 2008, and subsequently from a new project supported by the Ford Foundation on ‘India in the Global World’
with a particular focus on the relevance of Indian intellectual history to contemporary issues. I am very grateful for this support, and also appreciative of the wonderful workof coordination of these projects xxvii
a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s by Inga Huld Markan. I have also had the good fortune of having extremely able and imaginative research assistants, who have taken a deep interest in the bookand made a number of very productive comments that have helped me to improve my arguments and presentation. For this I am much beholden to Pedro Ramos Pintos, who worked with me for over a year and left his lasting influence on this book, and currently to Kirsty Walker and Afsan Bhadelia for their outstanding help and intellectual input.
The bookis being published both by Penguin, and for North America by Harvard University Press. My Harvard editor, Michael Aronson, has made a number of excellent general suggestions. The two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript gave me remarkably helpful comments, and since my detective workhas revealed that they were FrankLovett and Bill Talbott, I can even thankthem by name.
The production and copy-editing at Penguin Books have been carried through excellently, under huge pressure of time, by the swift and tireless workof Richard Duguid (the managing editor), Jane Robertson (the copy-editor) and Phillip Birch (assistant editor). To them all I am most grateful.
It is impossible for me to express adequately my gratitude to the editor of this work, Stuart Proffitt of Penguin Books, who has made invaluable comments and suggestions on every chapter (indeed, almost on every page of every chapter) and has led me to rewrite many sections of the manuscript to make it clearer and more accessible.
His advice on the general organization of the bookhas also been indispensable. I can well imagine the relief that he will experience when this book, at long last, leaves his hands.
Amartya Sen
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Introduction
An Approach to Justice
About two and a half months before the storming of the Bastille in Paris, which was effectively the beginning of the French Revolution, the political philosopher and orator, Edmund Burke, said in Parliament in London: ‘An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.’ This was on 5 May 1789.
Burke’s speech had nothing much to do with the developing storm in France. The occasion, rather, was the impeachment of Warren Hastings, who was then commanding the British East India Company, which was setting up British rule in India, beginning with the Company’s victory in the Battle of Plassey (on 23 June 1757).
In impeaching Warren Hastings, Burke invoked the ‘eternal laws of justice’ which, Burke claimed, Hastings had ‘violated’. The impossibility of remaining silent on a subject is an observation that can be made about many cases of patent injustice that move us to rage in a way that is hard for our language to capture. And yet any analysis of injustice would also demand clear articulation and reasoned scrutiny.
Burke did not, in fact, give much evidence of being lost for words: he spoke eloquently not on one misdeed of Hastings but on a great many, and proceeded from there to present simultaneously a number of separate and quite distinct reasons for the need to indict Warren Hastings and the nature of the emerging British rule in India: I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanours.
I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed.
I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonoured.
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I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted; whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.
I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.
I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life.1
No argument is separated out here as the reason for impeaching Warren Hastings – as an isolated knock-out punch. Instead, Burke presents a collection of distinct reasons for impeaching him.* Later on in this work, I will examine the procedure of what can be called
‘plural grounding’, that is, of using a number of different lines of condemnation, without seeking an agreement on their relative merits.
The underlying issue is whether we have to agree on one specific line of censure for a reasoned consensus on the diagnosis of an injustice that calls for urgent rectification. What is important to note here, as central to the idea of justice, is that we can have a strong sense of injustice on many different grounds, and yet not agree on one particular ground as being the dominant reason for the diagnosis of injustice.
Perhaps a more immediate, and more contemporary, illustration of this general point about congruent implications can be given by considering a recent event, involving the decision of the US government to launch a military invasion of Iraq in 2003. There are diverse ways of judging decisions of this kind, but the point to be considered here is that it is possible that a number of distinct and divergent
* I am not commenting here on the factual veracity of Burke’s claims, but only on his general approach of presenting plural grounds for indictment. Burke’s particular thesis about Hastings’s personal perfidy was actually rather unfair to Hastings. Oddly enough, Burke had earlier defended the wily Robert Clive, who was a great deal more responsible for lawless plunder of India under the Company’s dominance – something that Hastings did try to stem through a greater emphasis on law and order (as well as through bringing in a measure of humanity in the Company’s administration which was badly missing earlier). I have discussed these historical events in a Commemorative Speech at the London City Hall, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Plassey (‘The Significance of Plassey’), in June 2007. The lecture was published, in an extended version, as ‘Imperial Illusions: India, Britain and the wrong lessons’, The New Republic, December 2007.
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arguments can still lead to the same conclusion – in this case, that the policy chosen by the US-led coalition in starting the war in Iraq in 2003 was mistaken.
Consider the different arguments that have been presented, each with considerable plausibility, as critiques of the decision to go to war in Iraq.* First, the conclusion that the invasion was a mistake can be based on the necessity for more global agreement, particularly through the United Nations, before one country could justifiably land its army on another country. A second argument can focus on the importance of being well informed, for example on the facts regarding the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction in pre-invasion Iraq, before taking s
uch military decisions, which would inevitably place a great many people in danger of being slaughtered or mutilated or displaced.
A third argument may be concerned with democracy as ‘government by discussion’ (to use that old phrase often linked with John Stuart Mill, but which was used earlier by Walter Bagehot), and concentrate instead on the political significance of informational distortion in what is presented to the people of the country, including cultivated fiction (such as the imaginary links of Saddam Hussein with the events on 9/11 or with al-Qaeda), making it harder for the citizens of America to assess the executive proposal to go to war. A fourth argument could see the principal issue to be none of the above, but instead the actual consequences of the intervention: would it bring peace and order in the country invaded, or in the Middle East, or in the world, and could it have been expected to reduce the dangers of global violence and terrorism, rather than intensifying them?
These are all serious considerations and they involve very different evaluative concerns, none of which could be readily ruled out as being irrelevant or unimportant for an appraisal of actions of this kind. And in general, they may not yield the same conclusion. But if it is shown, as in this specific example, that all of the sustainable criteria lead to the same diagnosis of a huge mistake, then that specific conclusion
* Arguments were of course also presented in favour of intervention. One was the belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorism on 9/11, and another that he was hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda. Neither accusation proved to be correct. It is true that Hussein was a brutal dictator, but then there were – and are – many others across the world with the same qualification.