by Amartya Sen
There are vast entanglements of facts and values here but, as Vivian Walsh has perceptively observed, ‘while the phrase ‘‘entanglement of fact and value’’ is a convenient shorthand, what we are typically dealing with (as [Hilary] Putnam makes clear) is a triple entanglement: of fact, convention and value’.5 The role that an understanding of conventions plays in making sense of our social and ethical inquiries is particularly worth emphasizing here.
Indeed, as Antonio Gramsci, perhaps the most innovative Marxist philosopher of the twentieth century, put it, nearly eighty years ago, in his Letters from Prison, while incarcerated in a fascist jail in Turi:
‘In acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man.’6
There is a case for what may look like a bit of a digression here, to wit, Gramsci’s focus on entanglements and the use of rules of language, which has far-reaching relevance for the development of contemporary philosophy. Gramsci’s line of thinking had, I have tried to argue elsewhere,7 a distant but important role in the substantial transition of Ludwig Wittgenstein, significantly influenced by Piero Sraffa, away from his largely doomed search for a full account of what is sometimes called, a little deceptively, ‘the picture theory of meaning’, broadly reflected in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). That putative understanding sees a sentence as representing a state of affairs by being a kind of a picture of it, so that a proposition and what it describes are meant to have, in some sense, the same logical form.
Wittgenstein’s doubts about the soundness of this approach developed and matured after his return to Cambridge in January 1929
(he had been a student there earlier, working with Bertrand Russell).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e In this transformation a major part was played by Piero Sraffa, an economist in Cambridge (located also, like Wittgenstein, at Trinity College) who was much influenced by, and closely collaborated with, Antonio Gramsci (among other places, in the intellectually active world of L’Ordine Nuovo, a journal founded by Gramsci and later banned by the fascist government of Mussolini). Wittgenstein would later describe to Henrik von Wright, the distinguished Finnish philosopher, that these conversations made him feel ‘like a tree from which all branches have been cut’. It is conventional to divide Wittgenstein’s work between the ‘early Wittgenstein’ and the ‘later Wittgenstein’, and the year 1929 was clearly the dividing line that separated the two phases. In the Preface to his momentous book Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein noted his debt to the criticism that ‘a teacher of this university, Mr P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts’, adding that he was ‘indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book’.8
Wittgenstein also told a friend (Rush Rhees, another Cambridge philosopher) that the most important thing that Sraffa taught him was an ‘anthropological way’ of seeing philosophical problems.9 While the Tractatus tries to see language in isolation from the social circumstances in which it is used, the Philosophical Investigations emphasizes the conventions and rules that give the utterances particular meaning.
And this is, of course, a part of what Vivian Walsh calls the ‘triple entanglement’, which greatly interested both Gramsci and Sraffa. The connection of this perspective with what came to be known as ‘ordinary language philosophy’, which became such a big discipline in Anglo-American philosophy, to a great extent under the influence of the ‘later Wittgenstein’, is easy to see.*
* Perhaps I should comment briefly here, if only in the interest of gossip, on an often-repeated anecdote about what is supposed to have been a pivotal moment in moving Wittgenstein from the world of the Tractatus to that of Philosophical Investigations. According to this story, when Wittgenstein told Sraffa that the way to understand the meaning of a statement is to look at its logical form, Sraffa responded by brushing his chin with his fingertips, which apparently is readily understood as a Neapolitan gesture of scepticism, and then asked, ‘What is the logical form of this?’
Piero Sraffa (whom, later on, I had the privilege of knowing well, first as a student and then as a colleague, at Trinity College, Cambridge) insisted that this account, if not entirely apocryphal (‘I can’t remember such a specific occasion’), was more of a 120
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 Gramsci put much emphasis on bringing out the role of ordinary language in philosophy, and he linked the importance of this epistemological issue with his social and political concerns. In an essay on ‘the study of philosophy’, Gramsci discusses ‘some preliminary points of reference’, which include the bold claim that ‘it is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers’.
Rather, argued Gramsci, ‘it must first be shown that all men are
‘‘philosophers’’, by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘‘spontaneous philosophy’’ which is proper to everybody’. And what is part of this ‘spontaneous philosophy’? The first item that Gramsci lists under this heading is ‘language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content’. The relevance of this to seeing language and communication in ‘the anthropological way’, which Sraffa championed to Wittgenstein, would be hard to miss, and it is indeed one of the important preoccupations of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.
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Conformism is clearly needed in some form to enable understanding in any field, including ethical pronouncements, but then there is the further issue of acceptance of, or disagreement with, a claim that has been understood. As a political radical, Gramsci wanted to change people’s thinking and priorities, but this also required an engagement with the shared mode of thinking and acting, since for our communication we have to be, as Gramsci was quoted earlier as saying, ‘conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or tale with a moral than an actual event (‘I argued with Wittgenstein so often and so much that my fingertips did not need to do much talking’). But the story does illustrate rather graphically that the scepticism that is conveyed by the Neapolitan brushing of chin with fingertips (even when done by a Tuscan boy from Pisa, born in Turin) can be interpreted in terms of – and only in terms of – established rules and conventions (indeed, the ‘stream of life’ as Gramsci’s circle used to call it) in the Neapolitan world.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e collective man’. This is a kind of a dual task, using language and imagery that communicate efficiently and well through the use of conformist rules, while trying to make this language express non-conformist proposals. The object was to formulate and discuss ideas that are significantly new but which would nevertheless be readily understood in terms of old rules of expression.
The relevance of this dual task is easy to see when pursuing established ideas of justice and at the same time proposing additional ideas that a theory of justice needs to take into account. Since public reasoning and debates are central to the pursuit of justice (for reasons already discussed), the role of this dual engagement is quite central to the project of this book. What is particularly under scrutiny here in examining the correctness of an ethical proposal is the reasoning on which that claim is based and the acceptability of that way of reasoning. As was argued earlier (in Chapter 1), the issue of objectivity is centrally involved in this exercise. The demands of ethical objectivity, it was argued, relate closely to the ability to stand up to open public reasoning, and this, in turn, has close connections with the impartial nature of the proposed positions and the arguments in their s
upport.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s critique of Burke involves, first, establishing that Burke is really supporting the settlement of slavery on, as it were, ‘an everlasting foundation’ through his defence of the American demand for independence without any qualification. That expository exercise, then, takes Wollstonecraft to the denunciation of Burke’s general position because of its exclusionary character, which goes against impartiality and objectivity. It would fall foul, for example, of Rawls’s requirement for ‘a political conviction [to be] objective’, 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’.10 The need of objectivity for communication and for the language of public reasoning is followed by the more specific requirements of objectivity in ethical evaluation, incorporating demands of impartiality. Objectivity in each sense has a role in this exercise in public reasoning, and the roles are interrelated but not exactly the same.
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The place of impartiality in the evaluation of social justice and societal arrangements is central to the understanding of justice, seen from this perspective. There is, however, a basic distinction between two quite different ways of invoking impartiality, and that contrast needs more investigation. I shall call them respectively ‘open’ and ‘closed’ impartiality. With ‘closed impartiality’, the procedure of making impartial judgements invokes only the members of a given society or nation (or what John Rawls calls a given ‘people’) for whom the judgements are being made. Rawls’s method of ‘justice as fairness’ uses the device of an original position, and a social contract based on that, among the citizens of a given political community. No outsider is involved in, or a party to, such a contractarian procedure.
In contrast, in the case of ‘open impartiality’, the procedure of making impartial assessments can (and in some cases, must) invoke judgements, among others, from outside the focal group, to avoid parochial bias. In Adam Smith’s famous use of the device of the
‘impartial spectator’, the requirement of impartiality requires, as he explains in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the invoking of disinterested judgements of ‘any fair and impartial spectator’, not necessarily (indeed sometimes ideally not) belonging to the focal group.11
Impartial views may come from far or from within a community, or a nation, or a culture. Smith argued that there is room for – and need for – both.
This distinction, which is important for the theory of justice, is the subject matter of the next chapter.
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6
Closed and Open Impartiality
Adam Smith’s thought-experiment on impartiality invokes the device of the ‘impartial spectator’, and this differs substantially from the closed impartiality of ‘justice as fairness’. The basic idea is pithily put by Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as the requirement, when judging one’s own conduct, to ‘examine it as we imagine an impartial spectator would examine it’, or as he elaborated in a later edition of the same book: ‘to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it’.1
The insistence on impartiality in contemporary moral and political philosophy reflects, to a great extent, a strong Kantian influence. Even though Smith’s exposition of this idea is less remembered, there are substantial points of similarity between the Kantian and Smithian approaches. In fact, Smith’s analysis of the ‘impartial spectator’ has some claim to being the pioneering idea in the enterprise of interpreting impartiality and formulating the demands of fairness which so engaged the world of the European Enlightenment. Smith’s ideas were not only influential among Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet who wrote on Smith. Immanuel Kant too knew The Theory of Moral Sentiments (originally published in 1759), and commented on it in a letter to Markus Herz in 1771 (even though, alas, Herz referred to the proud Scotsman as ‘the Englishman Smith’).2 This was somewhat earlier than Kant’s classic works, Groundwork (1785) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and it seems quite likely that Kant was influenced by Smith.
There is something of a sharp dichotomy between the Smithian approach of the ‘impartial spectator’, and the contractarian approach, of which Rawlsian ‘justice as fairness’ is a pre-eminent application.
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c l o s e d a n d o p e n i m p a r t i a l i t y The need to invoke how things would look to ‘any other fair and impartial spectator’ is a requirement that can bring in judgements that would be made by disinterested people from other societies as well –
far as well as near. In contrast, the institutionally constructive character of the Rawlsian system restricts the extent to which the perspectives of the ‘outsiders’ can be accommodated within the exercise of impartial assessment. Even though Smith often refers to the impartial spectator as ‘the man within the breast’, one of the main motivations of Smith’s intellectual strategy was to broaden our understanding and to widen the reach of our ethical inquiry.* Smith puts the issue thus ( The Theory of Moral Sentiments, III.3.38, pp. 153–4): In solitude, we are apt to feel too strongly whatever relates to ourselves . . .
The conversation of a friend brings us to a better, that of a stranger to a still better temper. The man within the breast, the abstract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct, requires often to be awakened and put in mind of his duty, by the presence of the real spectator: and it is always from that spectator, from whom we can expect the least sympathy and indulgence, that we are likely to learn the most complete lesson of self-command.
Smith invoked the reflective device of the impartial spectator to go beyond reasoning that may – perhaps imperceptibly – be constrained by local conventions of thought, and to examine deliberately, as a procedure, what the accepted conventions would look like from the perspective of a ‘spectator’ at a distance. Smith’s justification of such a procedure of open impartiality is spelt out thus: We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them.3
* In his fine exposition of the importance of ‘the common point of view’ in moral philosophy, Simon Blackburn interprets Smith’s use of the impartial spectator in that perspective ( Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)). There is certainly that particular use of the impartial spectator in Smith’s work. But Smith also uses that thought-experiment as a dialectical device to question and dispute commonly agreed beliefs. This is certainly an important use even if no common point of view, the relevance of which Blackburn rightly stresses, were to emerge.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e Smithian reasoning thus not only admits but requires consideration of the views of others who are far as well as near. This procedure of achieving impartiality is, in this sense, open rather than closed and confined to the perspectives and understandings of the local community only.
t h e o r i g i n a l p o s i t i o n a n d t h e l i m i t s o f c o n t r a c t a r i a n i s m Even as the Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’ addresses effectively the need to remove the influence of the vested interests and personal slants of the diverse individuals within the focal group, it abstains from invoking the scrutiny of (in Smith’s language) ‘the eyes of the rest of mankind’. Something more than an ‘identity blackout’ within the confines of the local focal group would be needed to address this problem. In this respect, the procedural device of closed impartiality in ‘justice as fairness’ can be seen as being ‘parochial’ in construction.
In order to avoid a misu
nderstanding, let me explain that in pointing to the limited reach of Rawls’s way of arriving at his ‘principles of justice’ (and through that, the determination of ‘just institutions’), I am not accusing Rawls of parochialism (that would, of course, be preposterous). The questioning relates only to the particular strategy that Rawls uses in getting to ‘justice as fairness’ through the original position, which is only one part of his large corpus of work on political philosophy; for example, Rawls’s analysis of the need for ‘reflective equilibrium’ in the determination of our personal preferences, priorities and sense of justice does not have any such restriction. Many of the points that Adam Smith made about the need for openness in being interested in what would be seen by ‘the eyes of the rest of mankind’ would have been, it is quite clear, endorsed rather than rejected by Rawls. Rawls’s generally ecumenical interest as a political philosopher in arguments coming from different quarters is not in any doubt.* In the part of Rawlsian analysis that relates to the importance
* In response to some points I raised with Rawls in 1991, based on my first reading of the manuscript of his initial paper on ‘Law of Peoples’, which was later extended 126
c l o s e d a n d o p e n i m p a r t i a l i t y of a ‘public framework of thought’, and the need to ‘look at our society and our place in it objectively’,4 there is, in fact, much in common with Smithian reasoning.*
And yet the procedure of segregated ‘original positions’, operating in devised isolation, is not conducive to guaranteeing an adequately objective scrutiny of social conventions and parochial sentiments, which may influence which rules are chosen in the original position.
When Rawls says that ‘our moral principles and convictions are objective to the extent that they have been arrived at and tested by assuming
[a] general standpoint’, he is attempting to unlock the door for an open scrutiny, and yet, later on in the same sentence, the door is partially bolted by the procedural form of requiring conformity with the territorially isolated original position: ‘and by assessing the arguments for them by the restrictions expressed by the conception of the original position’.5