by Amartya Sen
The Demands of Justice
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1
Reason and Objectivity
Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the great philosophers of our time, wrote in the Preface to his first major book in philosophy, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921: ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.’*
Wittgenstein would re-examine his views on speech and clarity in his later work, but it is a relief that, even as he was writing the Tractatus, the great philosopher did not always follow his own exacting commandment. In a letter to Paul Engelmann, written in 1917, Wittgenstein made the wonderfully enigmatic remark: ‘I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.’1 Really? One and the same thing – being a smarter human being and a better person?
I am, of course, aware that modern transatlantic usage has drowned the distinction between ‘being good’ as a moral quality and ‘being well’ as a comment on a person’s health (no aches and pains, fine blood pressure, and so on), and I have long ceased worrying about the manifest immodesty of those of my friends who, when asked how they are, reply with apparent self-praise, ‘I am very good.’ But Wittgenstein was not an American, and 1917 was well before the conquest of the world by vibrant American usage. When Wittgenstein
* It is interesting to note that Edmund Burke also talked about the difficulty of speaking in some circumstances (see Introduction, where I cited Burke on this issue), but Burke proceeded to speak on the subject nevertheless, since it was, he argued,
‘impossible to be silent’ on a grave matter of the kind he was dealing with (the case for impeaching Warren Hastings). Wittgenstein’s counsel for silence when we cannot speak clearly enough would appear to be, in many ways, the opposite of Burke’s approach.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e said that being ‘better’ and being ‘smarter’ were ‘one and the same thing’, he must have been making a substantial assertion.
Underlying the point may be the recognition, in some form, that many acts of nastiness are committed by people who are deluded, in one way or another, about the subject. Lack of smartness can certainly be one source of moral failing in good behaviour. Reflecting on what would really be a smart thing to do can sometimes help one act better towards others. That this can easily be the case has been brought out very clearly by modern game theory.2 Among the prudential reasons for good behaviour may well be one’s own gain from such behaviour.
Indeed, there could be great gain for all members of a group by following rules of good behaviour which can help everyone. It is not particularly smart for a group of people to act in a way that ruins them all.3
But maybe that is not what Wittgenstein meant. Being smarter can also give us the ability to think more clearly about our goals, objectives and values. If self-interest is, ultimately, a primitive thought (despite the complexities just mentioned), clarity about the more sophisticated priorities and obligations that we would want to cherish and pursue would tend to depend on our power of reasoning. A person may have well-thought-out reasons other than the promotion of personal gain for acting in a socially decent way.
Being smarter may help the understanding not only of one’s self-interest, but also how the lives of others can be strongly affected by one’s own actions. Proponents of so-called ‘Rational Choice Theory’
(first proposed in economics and then enthusiastically adopted by a number of political and legal thinkers) have tried hard to make us accept the peculiar understanding that rational choice consists only in clever promotion of self-interest (which is how, oddly enough,
‘rational choice’ is defined by the proponents of brand-named ‘rational choice theory’). Nevertheless, our heads have not all been colonized by that remarkably alienating belief. There is considerable resistance to the idea that it must be patently irrational – and stupid – to try to do anything for others except to the extent that doing good to others would enhance one’s own well-being.4
‘What we owe to each other’ is an important subject for intelligent reflection.5 That reflection can take us beyond the pursuit of a very 32
r e a s o n a n d o b j e c t i v i t y narrow view of self-interest, and we can even find that our own well-reflected goals demand that we cross the narrow boundaries of exclusive self-seeking altogether. There can also be cases in which we have reason to restrain the exclusive pursuit of our own goals (whether or not these goals are themselves exclusively self-interested), because of following rules of decent behaviour that allow room for the pursuit of goals (whether or not self-interested) by other people who share the world with us.*
Since there were precursors to brand-named ‘rational choice theory’
even in Wittgenstein’s days, perhaps his point was that being smarter helps us to think more clearly about our social concerns and responsibilities. It has been argued that some children carry out acts of brutality on other children, or animals, precisely because of their inability to appreciate adequately the nature and intensity of the pains of others, and that this appreciation generally accompanies the intellectual development of maturity.
We cannot, of course, really be sure about what Wittgenstein meant.† But there is certainly much evidence that he himself devoted a great deal of his time and intellect to thinking about his own responsibilities and commitments. The result was not invariably very intelligent or wise. Wittgenstein was absolutely determined to go to Vienna in 1938, just as Hitler was holding his triumphant procession through the city, despite his own Jewishness and his inability to be silent and diplomatic; he had to be restrained from going there by his colleagues in his Cambridge college.‡ There is, however, much
* Some commentators find it puzzling that we can reasonably allow the compromising of a single-minded pursuit of our own goals through making room for others to pursue their goals (some even see in this some kind of a ‘proof’ that what we took to be our goals were not in fact the actual goals we had), but there is no puzzle here when the reach of practical reasoning is adequately appreciated. These issues will be discussed in Chapters 8 ‘Rationality and Other People’ and 9, ‘Plurality of Impartial Reasons’.
† Tibor Machan has illuminatingly pursued this interpretational issue in ‘A Better and Smarter Person: A Wittgensteinian Idea of Human Excellence’, presented at the 5th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 1980.
‡ Piero Sraffa, the economist, who had a significant influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein in his re-examination of his earlier philosophical position in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (thereby helping to pave the way towards Wittgenstein’s later works, including Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953)), played a leading role in dissuading Wittgenstein from going to Vienna and delivering a severe lecture 33
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e evidence from what we know from Wittgenstein’s conversations that he did think that his intellectual capacity should definitely be used to make the world a better place.*
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If that is indeed what Wittgenstein meant, then he was, in an important sense, within the powerful tradition of European Enlightenment, which saw clear-headed reasoning as a major ally in the desire to make societies better. Social improvement through systematic reasoning was a prominent strand in the arguments that were integral to the intellectual animation of the European Enlightenment, especially in the eighteenth century.
It is, however, difficult to generalize about any overwhelming dominance of reason in the thinking prevalent in what is seen as the Enlightenment period. As Isaiah Berlin has shown, there were also different kinds of counter-rational strands during the ‘Age of Enlightenment’.6 But certainly a strong – and somewhat self-conscious –
reliance on reason was one of the major departures of Enlightenment thought from the traditions prevailing
earlier. And it has become quite common in contemporary political discussions to argue that the Enlightenment oversold the reach of reason. Indeed, it has also been argued that the over-reliance on reason, which the Enlightenment tradition helped to instil in modern thinking, has contributed to the propensity towards atrocities in the post-Enlightenment world.
Jonathan Glover, the distinguished philosopher, adds his voice, in his powerfully argued ‘Moral History of the Twentieth Century’, to this to the triumphant Hitler. Their intellectual and personal relationships are reviewed in my essay, ‘Sraffa, Wittgenstein and Gramsci’, Journal of Economic Literature, 41
(December 2003). Sraffa and Wittgenstein were close friends and also colleagues, as Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. See Chapter 5, ‘Impartiality and Objectivity’, for a discussion of Sraffa’s intellectual engagement with, first, Antonio Gramsci, and then, Wittgenstein, and the relevance of the contents of these tripartite exchanges for some of the themes of this work.
* This commitment relates to what his biographer Ray Monk calls ‘the duty of genius’
( Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London: Vintage, 1991).
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r e a s o n a n d o b j e c t i v i t y line of reproach, arguing that ‘the Enlightenment view of human psychology’ has increasingly looked ‘thin and mechanical’, and ‘Enlightenment hopes of social progress through the spread of humanitarianism and the scientific outlook’ now appear rather ‘naive’.7 He goes on to link modern tyranny with that perspective (as have other critics of the Enlightenment), arguing that not only were ‘Stalin and his heirs’
altogether ‘in thrall to the Enlightenment’, but also that Pol Pot ‘was indirectly influenced by it’.8 But since Glover does not wish to seek his solution through the authority of religion or of tradition (he notes that, in this respect, ‘we cannot escape the Enlightenment’), he concentrates his fire on forcefully held beliefs, to which overconfident use of reasoning substantially contributes. ‘The crudity of Stalinism’, he argues, ‘had its origin in the beliefs.’9
It would be hard to dispute Glover’s pointer to the power of strong beliefs and terrible convictions, or indeed to challenge his thesis of
‘the role of ideology in Stalinism’. The question to be asked here does not relate to the nasty power of bad ideas, but rather to the diagnosis that this is somehow a criticism of the reach of reason in general and the Enlightenment perspective in particular.10 Is it really right to place the blame for the propensity towards premature certainties and the unquestioned beliefs of gruesome political leaders on the Enlightenment tradition, given the pre-eminent importance that so many Enlightenment authors attached to the role of reasoning in making choices, particularly against reliance on blind belief? Surely, ‘the crudity of Stalinism’ could be opposed, as indeed it was by dissidents through a reasoned demonstration of the huge gap between promise and practice, and by showing the brutality of the regime despite its pretensions – a brutality that the authorities had to conceal from scrutiny through censorship and expurgation.
Indeed, one of the main points in favour of reason is that it helps us to scrutinize ideology and blind belief.* Reason was not, in fact,
* It is, of course, true that many crude beliefs originate in some kinds of reason –
possibly of rather primitive kinds (for example, racist and sexist prejudices survive often enough on the basis of the perceived ‘reason’ that non-whites or women are biologically or intellectually inferior). The case for reliance on reason does not involve any denial of the easily recognized fact that people do give reasons of some kind or other in defence of their beliefs (no matter how crude). The point of reasoning as a 35
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e Pol Pot’s main ally. Frenzy and unreasoned conviction played that role, with no room for reasoned scrutiny. The interesting and important issues that Glover’s critique of the Enlightenment tradition forcefully raises include the question: where is the remedy to bad reasoning to be found? There is also the related question: what is the relationship between reason and emotions, including compassion and sympathy?
And beyond that, it must also be asked: what is the ultimate justification for reliance on reason? Is reason cherished as a good tool, and if so, a tool for pursuing what? Or is reason its own justification, and if so, how does it differ from blind and unquestioning belief? These issues have been discussed over the ages, but there is a special need to face them here, given the focus on reasoning in the exploration of the idea of justice in this work.
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W. B. Yeats wrote on the margin of his copy of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, ‘But why does Nietzsche think the night has no stars, nothing but bats and owls and the insane moon?’11 Nietzsche’s scepticism about humanity and his chilling vision of the future were presented just before the beginning of the twentieth century (he died in 1900). The events of the century that followed, including world wars, holocausts, genocides and other atrocities, give us reason enough to worry whether Nietzsche’s scepticism about humankind might not have been just right.* Indeed, in investigating Nietzsche’s concerns at the end of the twentieth century, Jonathan Glover concludes that we
‘need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us’, and consider ways and means of ‘caging and taming them’.12
discipline is to subject the prevailing beliefs and alleged reasons to critical examination.
These issues will be further discussed in Chapters 8, ‘Rationality and Other People’, and 9, ‘Plurality of Impartial Reasons’.
* As Javed Akhtar, the Urdu poet, puts it in a ghazal: ‘Religion or war, caste or race, these things it does not know/ Before our savagery how do we judge the wild beast’
(Javad Akhtar, Quiver: Poems and Ghazals, translated by David Matthews (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 47).
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r e a s o n a n d o b j e c t i v i t y Occasions such as the turn of a century have appeared to many people to be appropriate moments to engage in critical examinations of what is happening and what needs to be done. The reflections are not always as pessimistic and sceptical of human nature and the possibility of reasoned change as those of Nietzsche (or of Glover).
An interesting contrast can be seen in the much earlier deliberations of the Mughal emperor, Akbar, in India, at a point of even ‘millennial’, rather than merely centurial, interest. As the first millennium of the Muslim Hijri calendar came to an end in 1591–2 (it was a thousand lunar years after Muhammad’s epic journey from Mecca to Medina in ad 622),* Akbar engaged in a far-reaching scrutiny of social and political values and legal and cultural practice. He paid particular attention to the challenges of inter-community relations and the abiding need for communal peace and fruitful collaboration in the already multicultural India of the sixteenth century. We have to recognize how unusual Akbar’s policies were for the time. The Inquisitions were in full swing and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600 even as Akbar was making his pronouncements on religious tolerance in India. Not only did Akbar insist that the duty of the state included making sure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of his religion, and any one was to be allowed to go over to any religion he pleased’,13 he also arranged systematic dialogues in his capital city of Agra between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsees, Jews and others, even including agnostics and atheists.
Taking note of the religious diversity of his people, Akbar laid the foundations of secularism and religious neutrality of the state in a variety of ways; the secular constitution that India adopted in 1949, after independence from British rule, has many features already championed by Akbar in the 1590s. The shared elements include interpreting secularism as the requirement that the state be equidistant from different religions and must not treat any religion with special favour.
Underlying Akbar’s general approach to the assessment o
f social
* A lunar year has a mean length of 354 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes, and thus moves ahead significantly faster than a solar year.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e custom and public policy was his overarching thesis that ‘the pursuit of reason’ (rather than what he called ‘the marshy land of tradition’) is the way to address difficult problems of good behaviour and the challenges of constructing a just society.14 The question of secularism is only one of a great many cases in which Akbar insisted that we should be free to examine whether reason does or does not support any existing custom, or provides justification for ongoing policy; for example, he abolished all special taxes on non-Muslims on the ground that they were discriminatory since they did not treat all citizens as equal. In 1582 he resolved to release ‘all the Imperial slaves’, since ‘it is beyond the realm of justice and good conduct’ to benefit from
‘force’.15
Illustrations of Akbar’s criticisms of prevailing social practice are also easy to find in the arguments he presented. He was, for example, opposed to child marriage, which was then quite conventional (and alas, not even fully eradicated now in the subcontinent), since, he argued, ‘the object that is intended’ in marriage ‘is still remote, and there is immediate possibility of injury’. He also criticized the Hindu practice of not allowing the remarriage of widows (a practice that would be reformed only several centuries later) and added that
‘in a religion that forbids the remarriage of the widow’, the hardship of permitting child marriage ‘is much greater’. On the inheritance of property, Akbar noted that ‘in the Muslim religion, a smaller share of inheritance is allowed to the daughter, though owing to her weakness, she deserves to be given a larger share’. A very different kind of example of reasoning can be seen in his allowing religious rituals of which he himself took a very sceptical view. When his second son, Murad, who knew that Akbar was opposed to all religious rituals, asked him whether these rituals should be banned, Akbar immediately opposed that, on the ground that ‘preventing that insensitive simple-ton, who considers body exercise to be divine worship, would amount to preventing him from remembering God [at all]’.