by Amartya Sen
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e The reach of public reasoning may be limited in practice by the way people read the world in which they live. And if the powerful influence of positionality has an obscuring role in that social understanding, then that is indeed a subject that calls for special attention in appreciat-ing the challenging difficulties that have to be faced in the assessment of justice and injustice.
While positionality of observation and construction plays an important part in the process of advancing scientific knowledge, it is more broadly significant in belief formation in general: in social comprehension as well as in the pursuit of the natural sciences. Indeed, the role of positionality may be particularly crucial in interpreting systematic and persistent illusions that can significantly influence – and distort –
social understanding and the assessment of public affairs.
Let me return to the simple example involving the relative size of the sun vis-à-vis the moon, as seen from the earth. Consider a person who belongs to a community that does not have familiarity with distance-dependent projections, nor with any other source of information about the sun and the moon. Lacking the relevant conceptual frameworks and ancillary knowledge, that person may decide, on the basis of positional observations, that the sun and the moon are indeed of the same size, even in the sense that it would take much the same time to go around them respectively (moving at the same speed). This would, of course, be a very peculiar judgement if the person knew about distances, projections and such, but not if he knew none of those things. His belief that the sun and the moon are really of the same size (in particular, that it would take the same time to go around each) is, of course, a mistake (an illusion), but his belief cannot, under the circumstances, be seen as purely subjective, given the totality of his positional features. Indeed, anyone in exactly his position (in particular sharing the same ignorance of relevant concepts and related information) can understandably take much the same view, prior to critical scrutiny, for much the same reasons.*
* Philosophers of the Nyaya school in India, which achieved prominence in the first few centuries ad, had argued that not only knowledge but also illusions depend on pre-existing concepts. When a person mistakes a rope for a snake in dark light (a classic example that was discussed earlier), this illusion occurs precisely because of the prior understanding – the genuine understanding – of the ‘snake-concept’. A person 168
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 Illusions that are associated with some positional objectivity can be very hard to dislodge, even when the positionality involved misleads and misinforms rather than illuminates.* Given the misperceptions, it may be a difficult task to overcome received gender inequalities, and indeed even to identify them clearly as inequalities that demand attention.5 Since gender inequalities within the family tend to survive by making allies out of the deprived, the opaqueness of the positional perspectives plays a major part in the prevalence and persistence of these inequalities.
o v e r c o m i n g p o s i t i o n a l
l i m i t a t i o n s
In the pursuit of justice, positional illusions can impose serious barriers that have to be overcome through broadening the informational basis of evaluations, which is one of the reasons why Adam Smith demanded that perspectives from elsewhere, including from far away, have to be systematically invoked (see Chapter 6). Though much can be done through the deliberate use of open impartiality, the hope of proceeding smoothly from positional views to an ultimate ‘view from nowhere’
cannot hope to succeed fully.
Our entire understanding of the world, it can be argued, is thoroughly dependent on the perceptions we can have and the who has no idea of what a snake looks like and who cannot tell between the ‘snake-concept’ and, say, the ‘pig-concept’, would not be inclined to mistake a rope for a snake. On the implications of this (and related) connections between concepts and reality, as explored in the Nyaya and rival schools in that period, see Bimal Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Chapter 6.
* As was mentioned earlier, a theory of justice may also make room for relational concerns, in which positional perspectives may be important and have to be taken into account. This applies to such issues as agent-relative duties and priorities (in which an agent responsible for an action may be seen as having special accountability) as well as to particular obligations associated with specific human relations, such as parental responsibilities. The real relevance of positional perspectives (when that can be justified) is quite different from what is being considered here in the context of non-relational ethics and politics. The former will be taken up in Chapter 10,
‘Realizations, Consequences and Agency’.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e thoughts we can generate, given the kind of creatures we are. Our thoughts as well as our perceptions are integrally dependent on our sense organs, and our brains, and other human bodily capacities. Even the very idea of what we call a ‘view’ – no matter from where – is parasitic on our understanding of vision with our own eyes, which is a bodily activity in the physical form in which human beings have evolved.
In our speculative thoughts we can, of course, consider going beyond the anchors that seem to fix us to the world in which we live and the bodily activities that govern our discernment and cogitation.
We can even try to think about a world in which we are able to accommodate perceptions other than those of light, sound, heat, smell, taste, touch and other signals that we do receive (as we are in fact constituted), but it is hard going to make any concrete sense of what the world would ‘look’ like in that different sensory universe. The same limitation applies to the range of our thinking process and to the broadening of our capacity to contemplate. Our very understanding of the external world is so moored in our experiences and thinking that the possibility of going entirely beyond them may be rather limited.
All this does not, however, indicate that positionality cannot be partly or wholly overcome in ways that take us to a less confined view. Here too (as in choosing the focus of a theory of justice), we may reasonably search for comparatives, and not for the utopian objective of transcendence. Comparative broadening is part of the persistent interest in innovative epistemological, ethical and political work, and it has yielded a great many rewards in the intellectual history of the world. The ‘nirvana’ of complete independence from personal features is not the only issue in which we have reason to take an interest.
w h o i s o u r n e i g h b o u r ?
There is a long history of attempts to go beyond the positional confinement of our moral concerns to the proximate ‘neighbourhood’, resisting the relational vision that something is owed to one’s neighbours that is not, in any way, owed to people outside the neighbour-170
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 hood. The question of one’s duty to one’s neighbours has a huge place in the history of ethical ideas in the world. Indeed, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer includes the following unambiguous answer to the question, ‘What dost thou chiefly learn by these Commandments?’:
‘I learn two things: my duty towards God, and my duty to my Neighbour.’
If this understanding of our obligations is right and the claims of our neighbours are incomparably stronger than those of others, is it not possible to think that this would do something to smooth the roughness of ‘justice in one country’ (an approach that I have been arguing against)? But the ethical basis for giving such a hugely unharmonious priority to thinking only about our neighbours is itself in need of some justification. No less importantly, there is a deep fragility in the intellectual basis of thinking of people in terms of fixed communities of neighbours.
The last point is made with compelling clarity by Jesus of Nazareth in his recounting of the story of ‘the good Samaritan’ in the Gospel of Luke.* Jesus’s questioning of f
ixed neighbourhoods has sometimes been ignored in seeing the good Samaritan story as a moral for universal concern, which is also fair enough, but the main point of the story as told by Jesus is a reasoned rejection of the idea of a fixed neighbourhood.
At this point in Luke, Jesus is arguing with a local lawyer about his limited conception of those to whom we owe some duty (only our physical neighbours). Jesus tells the lawyer the story of the wounded man lying on one side of the street who was helped eventually by the good Samaritan, an event that was preceded by the refusal of a priest and a Levite to do anything for him. Indeed, instead of helping, the priest and the Levite just crossed and walked on the other side of the street, without facing the wounded man.†
* On this, see also Jeremy Waldron’s excellent analysis, with a slightly different focus, in ‘Who Is My Neighbor? Humanity and Proximity’, The Monist, 86 (July 2003).
† My late colleague, the redoubtable John Sparrow, the former head of All Souls College at Oxford, enjoyed arguing that we owe nothing to others if we had not harmed them, and he liked posing the question whether the priest and the Levite who crossed to the other side of the street rather than helping ‘acted wrongly’, as is commonly supposed. To this, John Sparrow’s own emphatic answer was, ‘Of course, 171
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e Jesus does not, on this occasion, directly discuss the duty to help others – all others – in need, neighbours or not, but rather raises a classificatory question regarding the definition of one’s neighbour. He asks the lawyer with whom he is arguing: ‘Who was the wounded man’s neighbour?’ The lawyer cannot avoid answering, ‘The man who helped him’. And that was, of course, Jesus’s point exactly. The duty to neighbours is not confined only to those who live next door.
In order to understand the force of Jesus’s argument, we have to remember that Samaritans did not only live some distance away, but also were typically disliked or despised by the Israelites.*
The Samaritan is linked to the wounded Israelite through the event itself: he found the stricken man, saw the need to help, provided that help and was now in a relationship with the injured person. It does not matter whether the Samaritan was moved by charity, or by a
‘sense of justice’, or by some deeper ‘sense of fairness in treating others as equals’. Once he finds himself in this situation, he is in a new
‘neighbourhood’.
The neighbourhood that is constructed by our relations with distant people is something that has pervasive relevance to the understanding of justice in general, particularly so in the contemporary world. We are linked with each other through trade, commerce, literature, language, music, arts, entertainment, religion, medicine, healthcare, politics, yes.’ He greatly relished spelling out, to a largely shocked audience (that was, of course, the point), that the Levite and the priest behaved wrongly, not because they should have helped (not at all), but because they should not have had to cross the street with an evident sense of guilt, rather than face the wounded man. They should have had the moral courage to go right past the wounded man on the same side of the street, walking straight on, without helping, and without any sense of needless shame or unnecessary embarrassment. To get some insight into this no-nonsense view of
‘what we owe to each other’ (more specifically, ‘what we do not owe to each other’), see John Sparrow, Too Much of a Good Thing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
* When recollecting this story from the Gospels and its remarkable reach and effectiveness, I remember being reminded of what Ludwig Wittgenstein said about the Gospels, in contrast with the more formidable Epistles of St Paul: ‘In the Gospels – as it seems to me – everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There you find huts; in Paul a church. There all men are equal and God himself is a man; in Paul there is already something of a hierarchy; honours and official positions’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, edited by G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 30).
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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 news reports, media communication and other ties. While commenting on the importance of increased contact in expanding the reach of our sense of justice, David Hume noted, nearly a quarter of a millennium ago:
again suppose that several distinct societies maintain a kind of intercourse for mutual convenience and advantage, the boundaries of justice still grow larger, in proportion to the largeness of men’s views, and the force of their mutual connexions.6
It is ‘the largeness of men’s views’ on which the pursuit of open impartiality draws. And it is the growing ‘force of their mutual connexions’ that make ‘the boundaries of justice still grow larger’.*
We may debate the extent to which our concerns should extend in a theory of justice that can have any plausibility today, and we may not expect any unanimity on the appropriate domain of our coverage.
But no theory of justice today can ignore the whole world except our own country, and fail to take into account our pervasive neighbourhood in the world today, even if there are attempts to persuade us that it is only to our local neighbours we owe any help to overcome injustice.† We are increasingly linked not only by our mutual economic, social and political relations, but also by vaguely shared but far-reaching concerns about injustice and inhumanity that challenge our world, and the violence and terrorism that threaten it. Even our shared frustrations and shared thoughts on global helplessness can unite rather than divide. There are few non-neighbours left in the world today.
* The recent transformation of the world into a much smaller place, thanks to innovations in communication and transport, and the ongoing development of global media and transnational organizations, have made it hard not to take note of our extensive connections across the world, which have profound implications not only for the form and contents of a theory of justice (with which I am primarily concerned here), but also for global politics – and indeed survival. On related subjects, see also Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-first Century (London: Allen Lane, 2008).
† Our broader global concerns sometimes find organized outlets in demonstrations and loud protests, and at other times seek quieter expression in political commentary, media articulation or just in personal conversations. I will return to this issue in Chapters 15–17.
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8
Rationality and Other People
In 1638 Pierre de Fermat, the great mathematician, sent to Rene´
Descartes a communication dealing with maximization and minimization. The manuscript had been circulating in Paris for a few years before it was sent to Descartes, who was not particularly impressed when it eventually reached him. And yet what Fermat said was momentous in firmly establishing the mathematical discipline of maximization and minimization.* The discipline is important for mathematics and philosophy, but it is also extensively used in the sciences, including in the social sciences and in particular in economics.
Maximization is mainly invoked in economics and in the social sciences as a behavioural characteristic (on which more presently), but it is interesting to note that Fermat’s ‘principle of least time’ in optics (dealing with the quickest way for light to go from one spot to another), which was a fine minimization exercise, was not at all a case of conscious behaviour, since no volition is involved in the light’s
‘choice’ of a minimum time path from one point to another. Indeed, in physics and the natural sciences, maximization typically occurs without a deliberate ‘maximizer’. The absence of decisional choice also applies generally to the early analytical uses of maximization and minimization, including those in geometry, going back all the way to the search for ‘the shortest arc’ by Greek mathematicians, and other such exercises considered by the ‘great geometers’ in the ancient world, such as Apollonius of Perga.
* The analytical features of maximization and minimization are not essentially different from each other, since both seek ‘extremal’ values. Indeed, a ma
ximization exercise can be readily turned into one of minimization simply by reversing the sign of the variable in question (and vice versa).
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r a t i o n a l i t y a n d o t h e r p e o p l e In contrast, the maximization process in economics is seen mainly as the result of conscious choice (even though ‘ habitual maximizing behaviour’ is sometimes given a role), and the exercise of rational choice is typically interpreted as the deliberate maximization of what a person has the best reason to promote. As Jon Elster puts it in his short, concise and elegant book, Reason and Rationality, ‘The rational actor is one who acts for sufficient reasons.’1 It is indeed difficult to avoid the thought that rationality of choice must have a strong connection with reasoning. And it is because of the belief, often implicit rather than explicit, that reasoning is likely to favour the maximization of what we want to advance or pursue (not by any means an outrageous idea) that maximization is taken to be central to rational behaviour. The discipline of economics uses the approach of ‘extremal’ search very extensively to predict what choices can be expected to emerge, including utility maximization by consumers, cost minimization by producers, profit maximization by firms, and so on.
This way of thinking about the rationality of choice can take us, in turn, to the common presumption in contemporary economics that people’s actual choices can be best interpreted as being based on some appropriate kind of maximization. The nature of what would be reasonable for people to maximize must, therefore, occupy a central position in the present inquiry into the nature of rational choice and the determination of actual choice.
There is, however, a fairly basic methodological question about the use of maximization in economics that demands some attention first.
This concerns the double use of maximizing behaviour in economics both as a predictive device (trying to guess what is likely to happen), and as a criterion of rationality (assessing what norms must be followed for choice to be seen as rational). The identification of two rather different issues (namely, rational choice and actual choice), which is now a fairly standard practice in a large part of contemporary economics, raises a major question about whether rational choice (no matter how it might be properly characterized) would, in fact, be a good predictor of what is actually chosen. There is obviously something to discuss and scrutinize here.