by Amartya Sen
– terms. Social choice theory can play an important clarificatory role in this interactive process.
(7) Role of public reasoning in social choice Even though social choice theory was initiated by a number of mathematicians, the subject has had close association with the championing of public reason. The mathematical results can be inputs into public discussion, as Condorcet, himself a mathematician of distinction, wanted them to be. The impossibility results, including the voting paradox identified by Condorcet and the much more sweeping impossibility theorem established by Arrow, are partly designed to be contributions to a public discussion on how these problems can be addressed and which variations have to be contemplated and scrutinized.*
* A big contribution has been made in clarifying the role and importance of public reasoning in the works of James Buchanan, and the school of ‘Public Choice’ pioneered by him. See James Buchanan, ‘Social Choice, Democracy, and Free Markets’, and
‘Individual Choice in Voting and the Market’, both published in the Journal of Political Economy, 62 (1954). See also his Liberty, Market and the State (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986), and jointly with Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962).
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v o i c e a n d s o c i a l c h o i c e Consider another impossibility theorem in social choice theory (‘the impossibility of the Paretian liberal’), which shows the incompatibility of even a minimal insistence on the liberty of individuals over their respective personal lives, along with respect for unanimous preferences of all over any other choice.23 This result, which I presented in 1970, was followed by a large literature on the nature and causation of this impossibility result and of course on its implications.24 It leads, in particular, to critical scrutiny of the relevance of preference (making it clear that the reasoning behind a preference, even when unanimously held, can make a difference) as well as the right way of capturing the value of liberty and liberalism in social choice. (These issues will be further discussed in Chapter 14, ‘Equality and Liberty’.) It has also led to discussions about the need for people to respect each other’s rights over their own personal lives, since the impossibility result draws also on a condition that is called ‘universal domain’, which makes any set of individual preferences equally admissible. If it turns out, for example, that in order to safeguard the liberties of all, we have to cultivate tolerance of each other in our respective values, then that is a public reasoning justification for cultivating tolerance.25 What is, formally, a mere impossibility result can thus have implications for various kinds of public reasoning, including questioning the normative standing of preferences, the understanding of the demands of liberty, and the need for re-examination of the norms of reasoning and behaviour.26
m u t u a l d e p e n d e n c e o f
i n s t i t u t i o n a l r e f o r m a n d
b e h a v i o u r a l c h a n g e
As discussed earlier, there is a two-way relationship between the encouragement given to rethinking behaviour on grounds of social justice and the institutional need to advance the pursuit of social justice, given the behavioural parameters in a society. For example, Condorcet’s insistence on the importance of women’s education was linked, among other things, to his recognition of the need for women’s voices in public affairs as well as in family and social life. The role of 111
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e women’s voices can, in turn, take us to giving priority in public policy to women’s education as a part of the promotion of justice in society, both for its direct benefits and for its indirect consequences.
The role of education and enlightenment is central to Condorcet’s approach to society. Consider, for example, his nuanced views on the population problem, in contrast with Malthus’s single-minded worry about the failure of human rationality in stemming the tide. Condorcet preceded Malthus in pointing out the possibility of serious overpopu-lation in the world if the growth rate did not slow down – an observation from which Robert Malthus himself drew, as he acknowledged, when he developed his own alarmist theory of population catastrophe.
However, Condorcet also decided that a more educated society, with social enlightenment, public discussion, and more widespread women’s education, would reduce the population growth rate dramatically and could even halt or reverse it – a line of analysis that Malthus completely denied and about which he chastised Condorcet for his gullibility.* Today, as Europe struggles with the fear of population contraction rather than explosion, and all over the world evidence accumulates on the dramatic effects of education in general and women’s education in particular in reducing the growth rate of population, Condorcet’s appreciation of enlightenment and interactive understanding has received much more vindication than Malthus’s dire cynicism, which denied the role of uncoerced human reasoning in reducing family size.27 Condorcet’s emphasis on the role of individual and public reasoning on family decisions and social processes is well reflected in the theoretical underpinning of social choice theory as a general approach.
Indeed, the basic connection between public reasoning, on the one hand, and the demands of participatory social decisions, on the other,
* See Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (for later reprints of that volume, see Oeuvres de Condorcet, vol. 6 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1847); recently republished, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1968); Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculation of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J.
Johnson, 1798; in the Penguin Classics edition, edited by Anthony Flew, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982)).
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v o i c e a n d s o c i a l c h o i c e is central not just to the practical challenge of making democracy more effective, but also to the conceptual problem of basing an adequately articulated idea of social justice on the demands of social choice and fairness. Both these exercises have an important place in the task in which this work is engaged.
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5
Impartiality and Objectivity
The great royal fortress and prison in Paris, the Bastille, was stormed on 14 July 1789. As the revolution gathered momentum, the French National Assembly adopted the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ in August, and in November forbade any of its members to accept office under Louis XVI. Did Edmund Burke, who spoke with such sympathy for the oppressed Indians under the rule of the East India Company (as was discussed in the Introduction) and who spoke up for the subjugated Americans in their own revolution in 1776, immediately welcome the French Revolution? Was he sympathetic to the Revolutionary Society which, in their famous meeting in London in November 1789, congratulated the French National Assembly for its radical commitment? The answer is no. Burke was thoroughly opposed to the French Revolution and unequivocally denounced it in Parliament in London in a speech in February 1790.
Burke was a Whig, but his position on the French Revolution was clearly conservative. Indeed, his assessment of that revolution led to his formulation of one of the foundation statements of modern conservative philosophy, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. There is, however, no conflict in this with Burke’s radical position on India, which was, at a basic level, conservative as well, since Burke was lamenting, among other things, the destruction of the old Indian social order and functioning society. Consistently with his conservative inclination, Burke was against the upheaval caused by the new British rule in India, and also against the upheaval occurring in France. In today’s classificatory thinking, the former (Burke on British rule in India) may appear to be on the ‘left’, while the latter (Burke on the French Revolution) would be placed on the ‘right’, but 114
i m p a r t i a l i t y a n d o b j e c t i v i t y they fit together perfectly well in terms of
Burke’s own principles and cohere nicely.
But what about the American War of Independence? There Burke was surely not conservative, supporting the upheaval in America, and in favour of big change. How does that fit? It is, I think, a mistake to try to interpret the different decisions that a person takes on a variety of disparate subjects in terms of just one classificatory idea – in this case conservatism. This applies particularly to Burke who had a far-reaching intellect and was involved with many distinct concerns, and who could draw attention to a number of separate features. But it also applies to a cluster of different reasons for justice that bear on any individual event. It would be absurd to try to explain Burke’s attitudes to different events across his eighteenth-century world in terms of one inclination – conservative, radical or whatever.
And yet even in the case of the American Revolution, there was a strongly conservative element in the vision for the United States that Burke supported. Mary Wollstonecraft, the British radical activist and early feminist thinker, put some searching questions to Burke, not long after his speech in Parliament denouncing the French Revolution.
Her critique came in a book in the form of a long letter: it included a criticism of Burke’s position, not just on the French Revolution, but also on the American Revolution, which he supported. In an apparently puzzling remark, Wollstonecraft wrote: ‘on what principle Mr Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive’.*
What could the radical Mary Wollstonecraft be talking about in criticizing Burke for his support for the American Revolution?
Wollstonecraft was talking, in fact, about the inadequacy of a defence of liberty when it separates out some people whose liberty and independence should be cherished and protected, leaving the
* This was in the first of Wollstonecraft’s two books on what we would now call
‘human rights’: the first one was entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, completed in 1790, to be followed two years later by her second book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Both the monographs are included in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e plight of the others unaddressed. Wollstonecraft’s opposition was to Burke’s silence on the rights of American slaves while defending the freedom of the non-slave people clamouring for independence. This is what she said:
the whole tenor of his [Burke’s] plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation. Allowing his servile reverence for antiquity, and prudent attention to self-interest, to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished; and because our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom, and term an atrocious insult to humanity the love of our country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured.1
Slavery would be abolished in the USA much later than its abolition in the British Empire: that would happen only after the Civil War in the 1860s. Wollstonecraft’s criticism of Burke’s view on the American Revolution can be seen, in hindsight, as going well beyond issues of theoretical consistency. Indeed, the United States took its time in coming to terms with the anomaly that seriously compromised America’s commitment to freedom for all, thanks to the treatment of slaves. Indeed, even President Abraham Lincoln had not initially demanded political and social rights for the slaves – only some minimal rights, concerning life, liberty and fruits of labour – and this was seventy years after Mary Wollstonecraft’s unequivocal pointer to the contradictions in the rhetoric of liberty in the United States.
The principal point that Mary Wollstonecraft is making here, as she does elsewhere, is that it is unsustainable to have a defence of the freedom of human beings that separates some people whose liberties matter from others not to be included in that favoured category.*
Two years after Wollstonecraft’s letter to Burke, she published the second of her two treatises on human rights, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.2 One of the themes running through this second
* Wollstonecraft’s argument has a huge reach, applying, for example, to the status of untouchables in India (untouchability was tolerated in imperial days and would be abolished only after Indian independence in 1947), to the position of non-whites in apartheid-based South Africa (changed only after the fall of that regime), and to less clear-cut cases of exclusion based on class, or religion, or ethnicity.
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i m p a r t i a l i t y a n d o b j e c t i v i t y volume is that we cannot defend being in favour of the rights of men without taking a similar interest in the rights of women. One of her central points here, as elsewhere, is that justice, by its very nature, has to have a universal reach, rather than being applicable to the problems and predicaments of some people but not of others.
i m p a r t i a l i t y , u n d e r s t a n d i n g a n d
o b j e c t i v i t y
Can there be a satisfactory understanding of ethics in general and of justice in particular that confines its attention to some people and not others, presuming – if only implicitly – that some people are relevant while others simply are not? Contemporary moral and political philosophy has by and large gone in Mary Wollstonecraft’s direction, in denying that possibility and demanding that everyone be seen as morally and politically relevant.* Even if, for one reason or another, we end up concentrating on the freedoms of a particular group of people – for example, members of a nation, or a community, or a family – there has to be some kind of pointer that locates such narrow exercises within a broader and capacious framework that can take everyone into account. Selective inclusion on an arbitrary basis in a favoured category – among those whose interests matter or voices count – would be an expression of bias. The universality of inclusion of the kind that Wollstonecraft demands is, in fact, an integral part of impartiality, the place of which in ethics in general and in the theory of justice in particular was discussed earlier (in Chapter 1 in particular).
No one perhaps did as much as Immanuel Kant to make that universalist demand understood, including principles of the kind that are captured in the often-repeated Kantian formulation: ‘Act always on such a maxim as thou canst at the same time will to be a universal
* A good collection of essays by a number of leading philosophers on how this battle for inclusion has been engaged – and largely won at the level of theory – can be found in the volume dedicated to the memory of Susan Moller Okin, Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin, edited by Debra Satz and Rob Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e law.’3 When Henry Sidgwick, the great utilitarian economist and philosopher, enunciated his own demand for universal coverage, he attributed his understanding to Kant, despite the distance between utilitarianism and Kantian philosophy. Sidgwick put it this way in the Preface to his classic book, The Methods of Ethics: ‘That whatever is right for me must be right for all persons in similar circumstances –
which was the form in which I accepted the Kantian maxim – seemed to me to be certainly fundamental, certainly true, and not without practical importance.’4 In describing Kant’s maxim to be ‘certainly true’, Sidgwick makes use of language that some like to confine only to issues of science and epistemology, rather than being applicable in ethics.
Earlier I discussed how the impartiality of evaluation can provide an understandable and plausible idea of objectivity in moral and political philosophy. What may, in terms of the conventional separation of science and values, appear to be just mistaken speech, can reflect a discipline that the language itself has come to absorb. Indeed, when Sidgwick
describes Kant’s claim to be ‘certainly true’, the point that Sidgwick is making is clear enough, without our having to enter into an extensive debate on the sense in which ethical claims can be objective or true. The language of justice and injustice reflects a good deal of shared understanding and communication of the content of statements and claims of this kind, even when the substantive nature of the claims may be disputed after it is understood.
There are really two different issues of non-subjectivity here: one of comprehension and communication on an objective basis (so that each person’s beliefs and utterances are not inescapably confined to some personal subjectivity that others may not be able to penetrate), and the other of objective acceptability (so that people can engage in debates about the correctness of the claims made by different persons).
Wollstonecraft’s claim about the essential correctness of including all persons in moral and political accounting, or Sidgwick’s assertion of the truth of universality and unbiasedness, involve issues both of interpersonal comprehension, and of general verity. Both relate to the idea of objectivity in distinct ways. The literature on ethical objectivity has gone into each of these questions, and while they are interrelated, they are not exactly the same.
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i m p a r t i a l i t y a n d o b j e c t i v i t y e n t a n g l e m e n t s , l a n g u a g e
a n d
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I begin with the first subject – that of communication and interpersonal comprehension, which are central to public reasoning. Our language reflects the variety of concerns on which our ethical assessments draw.