The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

  While Akbar himself remained a practising Muslim, he argued for the need for everyone to subject their inherited beliefs and priorities to critical scrutiny. Indeed, perhaps the most important point that Akbar made in his defence of a secular and a tolerant multicultural society concerned the role that he gave to reasoning in this entire 38

  r e a s o n a n d o b j e c t i v i t y enterprise. Akbar took reason to be supreme, since even in disputing reason we would have to give reasons for that disputation. Attacked by strong traditionalists within his own religious affiliation, who argued in favour of unquestioning and instinctive faith in the Islamic tradition, Akbar told his friend and trusted lieutenant, Abul Fazl (a formidable scholar in Sanskrit as well as Arabic and Persian): ‘The pursuit of reason and rejection of traditionalism are so brilliantly patent as to be above the need of argument.’16 He concluded that the

  ‘path of reason’ or ‘the rule of the intellect’ ( rahi aql) must be the basic determinant of good and just behaviour as well as of an acceptable framework of legal duties and entitlements.*

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  Akbar was right to point to the indispensability of reason. As will be presently argued, even the importance of emotions can be appreciated within the reach of reason. Indeed, the significant place of emotions for our deliberations can be illustrated by the reasons for taking them seriously (though not uncritically). If we are strongly moved by some particular emotion, there is good reason to ask what that tells us.

  Reason and emotion play complementary roles in human reflection, and the complex relationship between them will be considered more fully later on in this chapter.

  It is not hard to see that ethical judgements demand rahi aql – the use of reason. The question that remains, however, is this: why should we accept that reason has to be the ultimate arbitrator of ethical beliefs? Is there some special role for reasoning – perhaps reasoning of a particular kind – that must be seen as overarching and crucial for ethical judgements? Since reasoned support can hardly be in itself a value-giving quality, we have to ask: why, precisely, is reasoned

  * Akbar would have endorsed Thomas Scanlon’s diagnosis (in his illuminating study of the role of reason in determining ‘what we owe to each other’) that we should not

  ‘regard the idea of reason as mysterious, or one that needs, or can be given, a philosophical explanation in terms of some other, more basic notion’ ( What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 3).

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e support so critical? Can it be claimed that reasoned scrutiny provides some kind of a guarantee of reaching the truth? This would be hard to maintain, not only because the nature of truth in moral and political beliefs is such a difficult subject, but mainly because the most rigorous of searches, in ethics or in any other discipline, could still fail.

  Indeed, sometimes a very dubious procedure could end up, accidentally, yielding a more correct answer than extremely rigorous reasoning. This is obvious enough in epistemology: even though a scientific procedure may have a better probability of success among alternative procedures, even a crazy procedure could happen to produce the correct answer in a particular case (more correct, in such a case, than more reasoned procedures). For example, a person who relies on a stopped watch to check the time will get the time exactly right twice a day, and if he happened to be looking for the time precisely at one of those moments, his unmoving watch might beat all other moving clocks to which he had access. However, as a procedure to be chosen, relying on the motionless timepiece rather than on a clock that moves approximately close to the actual time does not have much to commend it, despite the fact that the moving clock would be beaten twice a day by the stationary timepiece.*

  It is plausible to think that a similar argument exists for choosing the best reasoned procedure, even though there is no guarantee that it would be invariably right, and not even any guarantee that it would be always more right than some other, less reasoned, procedure (even if we could judge the correctness of judgements with any degree of confidence). The case for reasoned scrutiny lies not in any sure-fire way of getting things exactly right (no such way may exist), but on being as objective as we reasonably can.† What lies behind the case for relying on reasoning in making ethical judgements are, I would

  * Leela Majumdar, the Bengali writer (and aunt of the great film director Satyajit Ray), recollected in a children’s story, that when she was a feisty college student in Calcutta, she had stopped and asked a passing stranger – just to annoy and confuse him – ‘Oh, hello, when did you come from Chittagong?’ The man replied, in sheer amazement, ‘Yesterday, how did you know?’

  † See Bernard Williams’s powerful discussion about seeing reasoned belief as ‘aiming at’ truth (‘Deciding to believe’, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). See also Peter Railton, Facts, Values and Norms: Essays Toward a Morality of Consequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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  r e a s o n a n d o b j e c t i v i t y argue, also the demands of objectivity, and they call for a particular discipline of reasoning. The important role given to reasoning in this work relates to the need for objective reasoning in thinking about issues of justice and injustice.

  Since objectivity is itself a rather difficult issue in moral and political philosophy, the subject demands some discussion here. Does the pursuit of ethical objectivity take the form of the search for some ethical objects? While a good deal of complex discussion on the objectivity of ethics has tended to proceed in terms of ontology (in particular, the metaphysics of ‘what ethical objects exist’), it is difficult to understand what these ethical objects might be like. Instead, I would go along with Hilary Putnam’s argument that this line of investigation is largely unhelpful and misguided.* When we debate the demands of ethical objectivity, we are not crossing swords on the nature and content of some alleged ethical ‘objects’.

  There are, of course, ethical statements that presume the existence of some identifiable objects that can be observed (this would be a part of the exercise, for example, in looking for observable evidence to decide whether a person is courageous or compassionate), whereas the subject matter of other ethical statements may not have that association (for example, a judgement that a person is altogether immoral or unjust). But despite some overlap between description and evaluation, ethics cannot be simply a matter of truthful description of specific objects. Rather, as Putnam argues, ‘real ethical questions are a species of practical question, and practical questions don’t only involve valuings, they involve a complex mixture of philosophical beliefs, religious beliefs, and factual beliefs as well’.17 The actual procedures used in pursuit of objectivity may not be always clear, nor

  * Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Putnam is concerned not only with the unhelpfulness of the ontological approach to the objectivity of ethics but also with the mistake it makes in looking for something that is far removed from the nature of the subject. ‘I see the attempt to provide an ontological explanation of the objectivity of mathematics as, in effect, an attempt to provide reasons which are not part of mathematics for the truth of mathematical statements and the attempt to provide an ontological explanation of the objectivity of ethics as a similar attempt to provide reasons which are not part of ethics for the truth of ethical statements, and I see both attempts as deeply misguided’ (p. 3).

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e spelt out, but as Putnam argues, this can be done with clarity if the underlying issues are adequately scrutinized.*

  The reasoning that is sought in analysing the requirements of justice will incorporate some basic demands of impartiality, which are integral parts of the idea of justice and injustice. At this point there is some merit in summoning the ideas of John Rawls and his analysis of m
oral and political objectivity, which he presented in his defence of the objectivity of ‘justice as fairness’ (a subject to which the next chapter will be devoted).† Rawls argues: ‘The first essential is that a conception of objectivity must establish a public framework of thought sufficient for the concept of judgement to apply and for conclusions to be reached on the basis of reasons and evidence after discussion and due reflection.’ He goes on to argue: ‘To say that a political conviction is objective is to say that there are reasons, specified by a reasonable and mutually recognizable political conception (satisfying those essentials), sufficient to convince all reasonable persons that it is reasonable.’18

  There can be an interesting discussion as to whether this criterion of objectivity, which has some clearly normative elements (particularly in the identification of ‘reasonable persons’), would tend to coincide

  * In my book Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), I abstained from any serious discussion of ethical methodology, and based the claim of acceptability of some general developmental priorities on rather commonsense grounds. Hilary Putnam has analysed, with clarity and definitiveness, the underlying methodology of that work in development economics, and has discussed how the particular methodology of that work fits, happily for me, into his general approach to objectivity; see his The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also Vivian Walsh, ‘Sen after Putnam’, Review of Political Economy, 15 (2003).

  † I should emphasize here that there exist substantial differences between the way in which Putnam sees the problem of objectivity, which makes room for his scepticism about ‘universal principles’ ( Ethics without Ontology, ‘few real problems can be solved by treating them as mere instances of a universal generalization’, p. 4), and the way Rawls gets at the problem, with his use of universal principles along with investigation of the specificities of particular ethical problems ( Political Liberalism, pp. 110–18). Neither Rawls nor Putnam, however, is tempted to see objectivity of ethics in terms of ontology, or in terms of a search for some actual objects. In this work I draw on both Putnam’s and Rawls’s analyses, but do not explore further the specific issues on which their differences rest.

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  r e a s o n a n d o b j e c t i v i t y with what is likely to survive open and informed public discussion. In contrast with Rawls, Ju¨rgen Habermas has focused on the latter, largely procedural, route, rather than relying on some procedure-independent identification of what would convince people who are

  ‘reasonable’ persons and who would find some political conviction to be ‘reasonable’ as well.19 I see the force of Habermas’s point and the correctness of the categorical distinction he makes, even though I am not fully persuaded that Rawls’s and Habermas’s approaches are, in fact, radically different in terms of the respective strategies of reasoning.

  In order to get the kind of political society that he tends to concentrate on, Habermas also imposes many exacting demands on public deliberation. If people are capable of being reasonable in taking note of other people’s points of view and in welcoming information, which must be among the essential demands of open-minded public dialogue, then the gap between the two approaches would tend to be not necessarily momentous.*

  I will not make a big distinction between those whom Rawls categorizes as ‘reasonable persons’ and other human beings, despite Rawls’s frequent reference to – and the evident use of – the category of

  ‘reasonable persons’. I have tried to argue elsewhere that, by and large, all of us are capable of being reasonable through being open-minded about welcoming information and through reflecting on arguments coming from different quarters, along with undertaking interactive deliberations and debates on how the underlying issues should be seen.20 I do not see this presumption to be fundamentally different from Rawls’s own idea of ‘free and equal persons’ who all

  * Habermas also argues that the kind of agreement that would emerge in the system he describes will be substantively different from Rawls’s more ‘liberal’ rules and priorities (‘Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism’, The Journal of Philosophy (1995)). What has to be determined is whether those differences between Habermasian and Rawlsian conclusions in substantive outcomes are really the result of the two distinct procedures used respectively by Habermas and Rawls, rather than resulting from their respective beliefs about how open and interactive deliberations could be expected to proceed in free democratic exchanges. See also Ju¨rgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, translated by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e have ‘moral powers’.* Rawls’s analysis seems, in fact, to focus more on the characterization of deliberating human beings rather than on the categorization of some ‘reasonable persons’ while excluding others.† The role of unrestricted public reasoning is quite central to democratic politics in general and to the pursuit of social justice in particular.‡

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  Public reasoning is clearly an essential feature of objectivity in political and ethical beliefs. If Rawls presents one way of thinking about objectivity in the assessment of justice, Adam Smith’s invoking of the impartial spectator provides another. This ‘ancient’ approach (as I write these lines it is almost exactly 250 years since the first publication of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759) has a very long reach. It also has both procedural and substantive contents. In seeking resolution by public reasoning, there is clearly a strong case for not leaving out the perspectives and reasonings presented by anyone whose assessments are relevant, either because their interests are involved, or because their ways of thinking about these issues throw light on particular judgements – a light that might be missed in the absence of giving those perspectives an opportunity to be aired.

  While Rawls’s primary focus seems to be on variations of personal

  * Rawls refers in particular to ‘two moral powers’, viz. ‘the capacity for a sense of justice’, and ‘a capacity for a conception of the good’ ( Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, edited by Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 18–19).

  † Indeed, we do not hear much from Rawls about how those who could be seen as

  ‘unreasonable persons’ come to terms with ideas of justice, and how they would be integrated into the social order.

  ‡ See Joshua Cohen, ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’, in Alan Hamlin and Phillip Pettit (eds), The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), and Politics, Power and Public Relations, Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, 2007. See also Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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  r e a s o n a n d o b j e c t i v i t y interests and personal priorities, Adam Smith was also concerned with the need to broaden the discussion to avoid local parochialism of values, which might have the effect of ignoring some pertinent arguments, unfamiliar in a particular culture. Since the invoking of public discussion can take a counter-factual form (‘what would an impartial spectator from a distance say about that?’), one of Smith’s major methodological concerns is the need to invoke a wide variety of viewpoints and outlooks based on diverse experiences from far and near, rather than remaining contented with encounters – actual or coun-terfactual – with others living in the same cultural and social milieu, and with the same kind of experiences, prejudices and convictions about what is reasonable and what is not, and even beliefs about what is feasible and what is not. Adam Smith’s insistence that we must inter alia view our sentiments from ‘a certain distance from us’ is motivated by the object of scrutinizing not only the influence of vested interest, but al
so the impact of entrenched tradition and custom.*

  Despite the differences between the distinct types of arguments presented by Smith, Habermas and Rawls, there is an essential similarity in their respective approaches to objectivity to the extent that objectivity is linked, directly or indirectly, by each of them to the ability to survive challenges from informed scrutiny coming from diverse quarters. In this work too, I will take reasoned scrutiny from different perspectives to be an essential part of the demands of objectivity for ethical and political convictions.

  However, I must add here – indeed, assert here – that the principles that survive such scrutiny need not be a unique set (for reasons that were already presented in the Introduction). This is, in fact, a larger departure from John Rawls than from Hilary Putnam.† Indeed, any approach to justice, like Rawls’s, that proposes to follow up the choice of principles of justice by the rigidity of a unique institutional structure

  * See also Simon Blackburn’s discussion of the role of ‘the common point of view’, and in particular the contributions of Adam Smith and David Hume in developing that perspective ( Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), especially Chapter 7).

  † It is not a departure at all from Bernard Williams, see Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985) Chapter 8. See also John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (London: Polity Press, 2000).

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e (this is part of transcendental institutionalism discussed in the Introduction), and which proceeds to tell us, step by step, an as if history of the unfolding of justice, cannot easily accommodate the co-survival of competing principles that do not speak in one voice. As discussed in the Introduction, I am arguing for the possibility that there may remain contrary positions that simultaneously survive and which cannot be subjected to some radical surgery that reduces them all into one tidy box of complete and well-fitted demands, which, in Rawls’s theory, take us to some unique institutional route to fulfil these requirements (to be implemented by a sovereign state).