by Amartya Sen
First, we must give some recognition to the fact that procedural parochialism is not universally taken to be a problem at all. In some approaches to social judgements there is no particular interest in avoiding group leanings – indeed, sometimes quite the contrary. To illustrate, some versions of communitarianism may even celebrate the
‘local’ nature of such priorities. The same may apply to other forms of local justice.
To consider an extreme case, when the Taliban rulers of Afghani-
* The complexity would have been even greater if it were necessary that these judgements must take the form of complete orderings, but, as has been already discussed, this is not needed for a useful public framework of thought, nor for the making of public choices based on ‘maximality’ (on which see also my ‘Maximization and the Act of Choice’, Econometrica, 65, 1997).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e stan insisted, before the military intervention, that Osama bin Laden should be tried only by a group of Islamic clerics, all committed to the Shariah, the need for some kind of impartiality (against offering personal favours or partial treatment to bin Laden) was not denied, at least not in principle.* Rather, what was being proposed was that the impartial judgements should come from a closed group of people who all accepted a particular religious and ethical code. There is therefore no internal tension in such cases between closed impartiality and the underlying affiliative norms. The broader tensions, related to the acceptability of confining attention only to locally sequestered reasoning, do of course remain. And those difficulties and limitations are the ones that came under Smith’s scrutiny.
Indeed, when we leave the world of locally confined ethics, and try to combine a procedure of closed impartiality with otherwise universalist intentions, procedural parochialism must be seen as a serious difficulty.
This is certainly the case with Rawlsian ‘justice as fairness’. Despite the thoroughly non-parochial intentions of the general Rawlsian approach, the use of closed impartiality involved in the ‘original position’ (with its programme of impartial assessment confined only to members of the focal group under a ‘veil of ignorance’ regarding individual interests and goals) does not, in fact, include any procedural guarantee against being swayed only by local group prejudices.
Second, we have to pay particular attention to the procedure of the original position, and not only to the intentions that may try to prevail over the recommended procedures. Despite his general universalist inclinations, the formal procedure of the original position proposed by Rawls seems to be geared to allowing little exposure to fresh wind from outside. Indeed, Rawls insists that the closed nature of the original position must be, at least in principle, strongly fortified ( Political Liberalism, p. 12):
I assume that the basic structure is that of a closed society: that is, we are to regard it as self-contained and as having no relations with other societies . . .
That a society is closed is a considerable abstraction, justified only because it enables us to focus on certain main questions free from distracting details.
* The reference here is, of course, only to the principles of justice that the Taliban rulers were invoking, not to their practice.
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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 question that is begged here is whether considering ideas and experiences from elsewhere are matters of ‘distracting details’ that are somehow to be shunned for the purity of the exercise of fairness.
Third, despite these strong grounds for open impartiality, it might be thought that a serious difficulty can arise from the limitation of the human mind and our ability to go beyond our local world. Can comprehension and normative reflection cross geographical borders?
While some are evidently tempted by the belief that we cannot follow each other beyond the borders of a given community or a particular country, or beyond the limits of a specific culture (a temptation that has been fuelled particularly by the popularity of some versions of communitarian separatism), there is no particular reason to presume that interactive communication and public engagement can be sought only within such boundaries (or within the confines of those who can be seen as ‘one people’).
Adam Smith argued strongly for the possibility that the impartial spectator could draw on the understanding of people who are far as well as those who are near. This was indeed a significant theme in the intellectual concerns of Enlightenment writers. The possibility of communication and cognizance across the borders should be no more absurd today than it was in Smith’s eighteenth-century world. Even though we do not have a global state or a global democracy, Smith’s emphasis on the use of the impartial spectator has immediate implications for the role of global public discussion in the contemporary world.
In today’s world, global dialogue, which is vitally important for global justice, comes not only through institutions like the United Nations or the WTO, but much more broadly through the media, through political agitation, through the committed work of citizens’
organizations and many NGOs, and through social work that draws not only on national identities but also on other commonalities, like trade union movements, cooperative operations, human rights cam-paigns or feminist activities. The cause of open impartiality is not entirely neglected in the contemporary world.
Moreover, just at this time when the world is engaged in discussions of ways and means of stopping terrorism across borders (and in debates about the roots of global terrorism), and also about how the 151
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e global economic crises that are plaguing the lives of billions of people across the world can be overcome, it is hard to accept that we simply cannot understand each other across the borders of our polity.*
Rather, it is the firmly ‘open’ outlook, which Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ invokes, that may be in some need of reassertion today. It can make a substantial difference to our understanding of the demands of impartiality in moral and political philosophy in the interconnected world in which we live.
* In the literature on the difficulties of cross-cultural communication, lack of agreement is sometimes confused with the absence of understanding. They are, of course, quite distinct phenomena. A genuine disagreement presupposes an understanding of what is being disputed. On the constructive role of understanding in confronting violence in the contemporary world, see the report of the Commonwealth Commission for Respect and Understanding, which I was privileged to chair: Civil Paths to Peace (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2007).
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p a r t ii
Forms of Reasoning
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7
Position, Relevance and Illusion
When King Lear told the blind Gloucester, ‘A man may see how this world goes with no eyes,’ he also told Gloucester how to ‘look with thine ears’.
see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?
Thou has seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?1
Changing places has been one way to ‘see’ hidden things in the world, which is the general point that Lear makes here, in addition of course to drawing Gloucester’s attention, in a politically subversive statement, to the remarkable fact that in the farmer’s dog he ‘mightst behold the great image of authority’.
The need to transcend the limitations of our positional perspectives is important in moral and political philosophy, and in jurisprudence.
Liberation from positional sequestering may not always be easy, but it is a challenge that ethical, political and legal thinking has to take on board. We have to go beyond ‘yond justice’ that freely rails upon
‘yond simple thief’.
p o s i t i o n a l i t y o f o b s e r va t i o n a n d k n o w l e d g e
Trying to go beyond positional confinement is also central to epistemology. There is, however, a problem with observability and often a barrier
to comprehension of what is going on from the limited perspective of what we observe. What we can see is not independent of where 155
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e we stand in relation to what we are trying to see. And this in turn can influence our beliefs, understanding and decisions. Positionally dependent observations, beliefs and choices can be important for the enterprise of knowledge as well as for practical reason. Indeed, epistemology, decision theory and ethics all have to take note of the dependence of observations and inferences on the position of the observer. Not all objectivity is, of course, about objects, as was discussed earlier,* but to the extent that observations and observational understandings are involved in the nature of the objectivity being sought, the positionality of observations has to be taken into account.
The point about positional variation of observations is elementary enough. It can be illustrated with a very straightforward physical example. Consider the claim: ‘ The sun and the moon look similar in size.’ The observation made is, obviously, not position independent, and the two bodies could look very dissimilar in size from elsewhere, say from the moon. But that is no reason for taking the cited claim as non-objective, or purely as a mental phenomenon special to a particular person. Another person observing the sun and the moon from the same place (the earth), should be able to confirm the claim that they look to be of the same size.
Even though the positional reference is not explicitly invoked in the statement, it is clearly a positional claim, which can be spelled out as:
‘ From here on earth, the sun and the moon look similar in size.’
Observers can, of course, also make a claim about how things would appear from a position different from the one they currently occupy, which would not be in any necessary tension with the second statement. Standing on the earth, we can still say: ‘ From the moon, the sun and the moon would not look similar in size.’
Positional objectivity requires interpersonal invariance when the observational position is fixed, and that requirement is entirely compatible with variations of what is seen from different positions.†
* See Chapter 5, ‘Impartiality and Objectivity’. The possibility of ‘objectivity without objects’, for example in mathematics and in ethics, is illuminatingly discussed by Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
† I tried to explore the idea of positional objectivity first in my Storrs Lectures (1990) at the Yale Law School, and later in my Lindley Lecture, Objectivity and Position (Kansas City: University of Kansas, 1992). See ‘Positional Objectivity’, Philosophy 156
p o s i t i o n , r e l e va n c e a n d i l l u s i o n Different persons can occupy the same position and confirm the same observation; and the same person can occupy different positions and make dissimilar observations.
t h e i l l u m i n a t i o n a n d i l l u s i o n o f p o s i t i o n a l i t y
Positional dependence of observational results can both illuminate (in this case, answering the question: how large does an object look from here?) and possibly mislead (in answering other questions standardly associated with size, such as how large in fact is this object in terms of body mass?). The two aspects of positional variability answer very different questions, but neither is entirely subjective. This point may call for a little elaboration, especially since the characterization of objectivity as a position-dependent phenomenon is not the typical understanding of the idea of objectivity.
In his far-reaching book The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel characterizes objectivity in the following way: ‘A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual’s makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.’2 This way of seeing objectivity has some clear merit: it focuses on an important aspect of the classical conception of objectivity – position independence. To come to the conclusion that the sun and the moon are equally large in terms of, say, mass, on grounds that they look to be of the same size from here on earth would be a gross violation of position-independent objectivity. Positional observations can, in this sense, mislead if we do not take adequate note of positional variability of observations and try to make appropriate corrections.
In contrast, what can be called ‘positional objectivity’ is about the objectivity of what can be observed from a specified position. We are concerned here with person-invariant but position-relative observations and observability, illustrated by what we are able to see from a and Public Affairs, 22 (1993); reprinted in Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e given position. The subject matter of an objective assessment in the positional sense is something that can be ascertained by any normal person occupying a given observational position. As exemplified by the statements about the relative sizes of the sun and the moon, what is observed can vary from position to position, but different people can conduct their respective observations from the same position and make much the same observations.
The subject matter in this case is the way an object looks from a specified position of observation, and it would so look to anyone with the same positional features.* The positional variations in observations can hardly be attributed to ‘subjectivity’, as some might be tempted to do. In terms of two standard criteria of subjectivity, there is no particular reason here to see the statement ‘the sun and the moon look similar in size’ as ‘having its source in the mind’, or as
‘pertaining or peculiar to an individual subject or his mental operations’ (to go by definitions of subjectivity in the Oxford English Dictionary).
An observational statement is not necessarily a statement about the special working of a person’s mind. It identifies a phenomenon that has physical qualities as well, independently of anyone’s mind; for example, it is precisely because the sun and the moon have the same visible size from the earth that a complete solar eclipse can occur, with the small mass of the moon obscuring the large mass of the sun in the special perspective of the earth, and a solar eclipse can hardly be seen as having ‘its source in the mind’. If predicting eclipses is the job in which we are involved, then what is particularly relevant in talking about the relative sizes of the sun and the moon is the congruence of their positional projections from the earth, and not – that is, not directly – their respective body masses.
Aryabhata, the mathematician and astronomer in early fifth-century India, had gone into the size of projections in explaining the eclipses:
* The positional features need not, of course, be only locational (or related only to spatial placing), and can include any general, particularly non-mental, condition that may both influence observation, and that can systematically apply to different observers and observations. The positional features may sometimes be linked to a person’s special non-mental characteristics, for example being blind. Different persons can share the same type of blindness and have the same observational correspondences.
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p o s i t i o n , r e l e va n c e a n d i l l u s i o n this was one of his many astronomical contributions.* Aryabhata was, not unexpectedly, attacked for departing so radically from religious orthodoxy, and the critics included his brilliant disciple Brahmagupta, another great mathematician, who made pro-orthodoxy statements, but used Aryabhata’s innovations, and indeed extended them. Several hundred years later, in the early eleventh century, when the distinguished Iranian mathematician and astronomer, Alberuni, came to Aryabhata’s defence, he emphasized the fact that the practical predictions of eclipses, including those by Brahmagupta, followed Aryabhata’s method of projections, rather than reflecting Brahmagupta’s own compromise with Hindu orthodoxy. In a remarkable intellectual defence a thousand years ago, Alberuni addressed the following critique to Brahmagupta:
we shall not argue with him [Brahmagupta], but only whisper into his ear:
. . . Why do you
, after having spoken such [harsh] words [against Aryabhata and his followers], then begin to calculate the diameter of the moon in order to explain the eclipsing of the sun, and the diameter of the shadow of the earth in order to explain its eclipsing the moon? Why do you compute both eclipses in agreement with the theory of those heretics, and not according to the views of those with whom you think it is proper to agree?3
Positional objectivity can indeed be the appropriate understanding of objectivity, depending on the exercise in which we are involved.
Different types of examples of positional parameters that are not quirks of mental attitudes or psychology, and which can be shared by different individuals, include: knowing or not knowing a specific language; being able or not being able to count; or being colour blind rather than having normal eyesight (among a great many similar parametric variations). It does not violate positional objectivity to make a statement on how the world would look to a person with certain specified ‘positional’ attributes.
The claim here, it is important to note, is not that anything that can be ‘explained’ in causal terms is positionally objective. Much would
* Aryabhata’s original contributions included his disputation of an orbiting sun around the earth, and his pointer to the existence of a gravitational force in explaining why objects are not thrown away from the earth despite its diurnal rotating motion.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e depend on the nature of the variability involved. To take a classic example much discussed in early Indian epistemology, to mistake a rope for a snake because of one’s special nervousness, or one’s morbid fear of snakes, does not make that clearly subjective diagnosis positionally objective. The idea of positional objectivity may, however, be legitimately invoked in a case in which a rope is taken to be a snake because that is exactly the way that piece of rope looks to everyone, for example the way the prominent snake-like features of a rope may appear to those observing it in a dim light.