The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

  The possibility of plurality of sustainable reasons is not only important in giving rationality its due, it also distances the idea of rational choice from its putative role as a simple predictor of actual choice, as it has been widely used in mainstream economics. Even if every actual choice happens to be invariably rational in the sense of being sustainable by critical scrutiny, the plurality of rational choice makes it hard to obtain a unique prediction about a person’s actual choice from the idea of rationality alone.

  * See also George Akerlof, ‘Economics and Identity’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115 (2000); John Davis, Theory of the Individual in Economics: Identity and Value (London: Routledge, 2003); Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008).

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  In his classic book on economic theory, Mathematical Psychics, the remarkable economist Francis Edgeworth, perhaps the leading economic theorist at the end of the nineteenth century, talked about an interesting dichotomy between the assumption of human behaviour on which his economic analysis was based (in common with the tradition of ongoing economics), and his own belief about the actual nature of individual behaviour.12 Edgeworth noted that ‘the first principle of economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest’.

  He was not going to depart from that, at least in his formal theory, even though he did believe that the contemporary human being is ‘for the most part an impure egoist, a mixed utilitarian’. If we are a little bothered by the fact that so great an economist would spend so much of his life and analytical power in developing a line inquiry ‘the first principle’ of which he believed to be false, the experience of economic theory in the century to follow has made us rather more used to this particular dissonance between belief and assumption. The assumption of the completely egoistic human being has come to dominate much of mainstream economic theory, while many of the great practitioners of the discipline have also expressed their serious doubts about the veracity of that assumption.

  This dichotomy has not, however, always been present in economics. The early authors on economic matters, such as Aristotle, as well as medieval practitioners (including Aquinas, Ockham, Maimonides and others), took ethics as an important part of understanding human behaviour; they gave ethical principles important roles in behavioural relations in society.* This applied also to the economists

  * I am referring here to the Western traditions, but similar analysis can be made of other traditions; for example, Kautilya, the Indian political economist of 4th century b c

  (a contemporary of Aristotle), had discussed the role of ethical behaviour in economic and political success, even though he was fairly sceptical about the actual reach of moral sentiments (see Kautilya, The Arthasastra, translated and edited by L. N. Rangarajan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992)). See also Chapter 3,

  ‘Institutions and Persons’.

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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 of the early modern age (such as William Petty, Gregory King, Franc¸ois Quesnay and others), who were all much concerned, in various ways, with ethical analysis.

  The same holds – and in a much more articulate way – for the line of thinking on these issues by Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. Smith is often wrongly thought to be a proponent of the assumption of the exclusive pursuit of self-interest, in the form of the so-called ‘economic man’. In fact, Smith discussed fairly elaborately the limitations of the assumption of a universal pursuit of self-interest.

  He pointed to the fact that ‘self-love’, as he called the underlying impulse behind narrowly self-interested behaviour, might be just one of many motivations that human beings have. He distinguished clearly between different reasons for going against the dictates of self-love, including inter alia the following:

  sympathy (‘the most humane actions require no self-denial, no self-command, no great exertion of the sense of priority’, and ‘consist only in doing what this exquisite sympathy would of its own accord prompt us to do’); generosity (‘it is otherwise with generosity’, when ‘we sacrifice some great and important interest of our own to an equal interest of a friend or of a superior’);

  public spirit (‘when he compares those two objects with one another, he does not view them in the light in which they naturally appear to himself, but in that in which they appear to the nation he fights for’).13

  A person’s basic ‘sympathy’ can, in many cases, make him or her do spontaneously things that are good for others, with ‘no self-denial’

  involved, since the person enjoys helping others. In other cases, he may invoke the ‘impartial spectator’ (an idea that I have already discussed) to guide ‘the principles of his conduct’.14 This would permit consideration of ‘public spirit’ as well as ‘generosity’. Smith discussed extensively the need for non-self-interested behaviour, and went on to argue that while ‘prudence’ was ‘of all virtues that which is most helpful to the individual’, we have to recognize that ‘humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others’.15

  The interpretation of Smith has been a veritable battleground.

  Despite Smith’s frequent discussion of the importance of motivations other than self-interest, he has somehow developed the reputation for 185

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e being a champion of the unique pursuit of self-interest by all human beings. For example, in two well-known and forcefully argued papers, the famous Chicago economist George Stigler has presented his ‘self-interest theory’ (including the belief that ‘self-interest dominates the majority of men’) as being ‘on Smithian lines’.16 Stigler was not being idiosyncratic in that diagnosis: this is indeed the standard view of Smith that has been powerfully promoted by many writers who constantly invoke Smith to support their view of society.17 This bit of misinterpretation of Smith has even found a place in English literature through a limerick of Stephen Leacock (who was both a literary writer and an economist):

  Adam, Adam, Adam Smith

  Listen what I charge you with!

  Didn’t you say

  In a class one day

  That selfishness was bound to pay?

  Of all doctrines that was the Pith.

  Wasn’t it, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, Smith?18

  While some men are born small and some achieve smallness, it is clear that Adam Smith has had much smallness thrust upon him.19

  One reason for this confusion is the tendency of many economists to concentrate on a different issue, that is, Smith’s elaboration of the point that to explain the motivation for economic exchange in the market we do not have to invoke any objective other than the pursuit of self-interest. In his most famous and widely quoted passage from the Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love . . .’.20 The butcher, the brewer and the baker want to get our money by giving us the meat, the beer and the bread they make, and we – the consumers – want their meat, beer and bread and are ready to pay for them with our money. The exchange benefits us all, and we do not have to be raving altruists for such exchanges to go through.

  In some schools of economics, the readers of Smith do not seem to go beyond those few lines, even though that discussion is addressed 186

  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 only to one very specific issue, namely exchange (rather than distribution or production), and in particular, the motivation underlying exchange (rather than what makes normal exchanges sustainable, such as trust). In the rest of Smith’s writings there are extensive discussions of the role of other motivations that influence human action and behaviour. />
  Smith also made the point that sometimes our moral behaviour tends to take the form of simply following established conventions.

  While he noted that ‘men of reflection and speculation’ can see the force of some of these moral arguments more easily than ‘the bulk of mankind’,21 there is no suggestion in Smith’s writings that people in general systematically fail to be influenced by moral considerations in choosing their behaviour. What is important to note, however, is Smith’s recognition that even when we are moved by the implications of moral arguments, we may not see them in that explicit form and may perceive our choices in terms of acting according to well-established practice in our society. As he put in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: ‘Many men behave very decently, and through the whole of their lives avoid any considerable degree of blame, who yet, perhaps, never felt the sentiment upon the propriety of which we found our approbation of their conduct, but acted merely from a regard to what they saw were the established rules of behaviour.’22 This focus on the power of ‘established rules of behaviour’ plays a very important part in the Smithian analysis of human behaviour and its social implications. The established rules are not confined to following the dictates of self-love.

  However, while Smith was perfectly clear on the importance of a variety of motivations that, directly or indirectly, move human beings (as was noted at the beginning of this chapter), a very large part of modern economics has increasingly fallen for the simplicity of ignoring all motivations other than the pursuit of self-interest, and brand-named ‘rational choice theory’ has even elevated this falsely alleged uniformity in human behaviour into the basic principle of rationality.

  To that connection I now turn.

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  Even though so-called ‘rational choice theory’ takes the rationality of choice to be characterized by intelligent pursuit of self-interest, it need not rule out the possibility that a person may have sympathy or antipathy towards others. In a more restricted version of RCT

  (increasingly out of fashion now), it has sometimes been assumed that rational persons must not only be self-seeking, but they must also be detached from others, so that they are completely unaffected by the well-being or achievements of others. But taking an interest in others need not make people any less self-seeking (or involve ‘no self-denial’, as Smith put it), if they end up promoting their own welfare, taking note of their own enjoyment – or suffering – from the welfare of others. There is a significant difference between, first, taking note of how one’s own welfare is affected by the circumstances of others and then exclusively pursuing one’s own welfare (including what comes from reaction to the lives of other people), and second, departing from the single-minded pursuit of one’s own welfare altogether. The former is still a part of the broader story of self-interested behaviour and can be accommodated within the approach of RCT.

  More than thirty years ago, I tried in a paper entitled ‘Rational Fools’ (it was my Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford) to explore the distinction between ‘sympathy’ and ‘commitment’ as possible foundations for other-regarding behaviour.* Sympathy (including antipathy when it is negative) refers to ‘one person’s welfare being affected by the position of others’ (for example, a person can feel depressed at the sight of misery of others), whereas ‘commitment’ is ‘concerned

  * Amartya Sen, ‘Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (1977), reprinted in Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), and also in Jane J. Mansbridge (ed.), Beyond Self-Interest (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). This two-fold distinction between sympathy and commitment, while much less articulate than Adam Smith’s multi-category differentiation between a variety of distinct motivations, which go against the dominance of a narrow pursuit of self-interest, is, as should be obvious, much inspired by Smith’s analysis.

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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 with breaking the tight link between individual welfare (with or without sympathy) and the choice of action (for example, being committed to help remove some misery even though one personally does not suffer from it)’.23 Sympathy is combinable with self-interested behaviour, and is indeed compatible even with what Adam Smith called self-love. If one tries to remove the misery of others only because

  – and only to the extent that – it affects one’s own welfare, this does not signify a departure from self-love as the only accepted reason for action.* But if one is committed, say, to doing what can be done to remove the misery of others – whether or not one’s own welfare is affected by it, and not merely to the extent to which one’s own welfare is so influenced – then that is a clear departure from self-interested behaviour.

  One of the leading architects of contemporary rational choice theory, Professor Gary Becker, has provided an illuminating exposition of RCT in its broader form, by making systematic room for sympathy for others as part of human sentiment, while still sticking to the exclusive pursuit of self-interest. Indeed, people need not be self-centred to be self-interested, and may take note of others’ interests within their own utility. But Becker’s new analysis in Accounting for Tastes (1996), while breaking much fresh ground, does not depart fundamentally at all from the basic beliefs presented earlier by him in his classic and much-cited work, Economic Approaches to Human Behavior (1976): ‘All human behavior can be viewed as involving participants who (1) maximize their utility (2) form a stable set of preferences and (3) accumulate an optimal amount of information and other inputs in a variety of markets.’24

  What is really central to the approach of RCT, without any unnecessary restriction, is that the maximand for one’s choice of

  * Thomas Nagel also made another important distinction in his pioneering critique of the exclusive reliance on self-interested behaviour ( The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970)), between a case in which a person may benefit from altruistic action but does not undertake altruistic action for that reason, and a person who undertakes that action precisely because he expects to benefit personally from it.

  Even though in terms only of observed choices, without any motivational scrutiny, the two cases may look much the same, it is nevertheless important to note that the latter fits into the general approach of self-interest-based RCT in a way that the former case would not.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e behaviour is nothing other than one’s own interest or well-being, and this central assumption is compatible with recognizing that various influences on one’s own interest and well-being may come from the lives and well-being of other people. Thus the Beckerian ‘utility function’ that the person is seen as maximizing stands for both the person’s maximand in reasoned choice, and as a representation of the person’s own self-interest. That congruence is extremely important for many of the economic and social analyses that Becker undertakes.

  For RCT, then, with its focus on the pursuit of self-interest as the only rational basis of choice, we can easily accommodate sympathy, but must avoid commitment: thus far and no further. Becker’s is certainly a welcome broadening of RCT from the unnecessarily restrictive version championed earlier, but we must also note what RCT in this Beckerian form still leaves out. It does not, in particular, make room for any reason that may lead one to pursue a different goal from one’s own welfare (for example, ‘no matter what happens to me, I must help her’, or ‘I am ready to sacrifice a lot for fighting for the independence of my country’), or – going further – even depart from the exclusive pursuit of one’s own goal (for example, ‘this is indeed my goal, but I must not promote my own goal single-mindedly since I should be fair to others as well’). Perhaps the most important issue to clarify here, in the context of the present discuss
ion of reason and rationality, is that not only does RCT, even in its broader form, presume that people do not actually have different goals from the pursuit of their own welfare, but it also assumes that they would be violating the demands of rationality if they were to accommodate any goal or any motivation other than the single-minded pursuit of their own welfare, after taking note of whatever external factors influence it.*

  * See also the important paper of Christine Jolls, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler,

  ‘A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics’, Stanford Law Review, 50 (May 1998). Jolls, Sunstein and Thaler go much further along the path of reducing the self-centred characterization of self-interest, and the extensions they suggest have empirical plausibility and explanatory value. But they are not any more hostile, in this paper, to the basic congruence of (1) one’s own welfare (with all sympathies and antipathies taken into account), and (2) the maximand one uses for reasoned choice.

  The critique that these authors present is thus an important contribution to the debate

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  It is easy to see that there is nothing particularly unusual, or especially contrary to reason, for a person to choose to pursue a goal that is not exclusively confined to his or her own self-interest. As Adam Smith noted, we do have many different motivations, taking us well beyond the single-minded pursuit of our interest. There is nothing contrary to reason in our willingness to do things that are not entirely self-serving.