The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

  I end this discussion of the plurality of impartial reasons by making one final observation. The understanding of obligations related to what is now called the human rights approach, but which has been pursued for a long time under different names (going back at least to Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century), has always had a strong element of social reasoning, linked with the responsibility of effective power, as will be discussed in Chapter 17

  (‘Human Rights and Global Imperatives’).7 Arguments that do not draw on the perspective of mutual benefit but concentrate instead on unilateral obligations because of asymmetry of power are not only plentifully used in contemporary human rights activism, but they can 206

  p l u r a l i t y o f i m p a r t i a l r e a s o n s also be seen in the early attempts to recognize the implications of valuing the freedoms – and correspondingly human rights – of all. For example, both Tom Paine’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings on what Wollstonecraft called ‘vindication’ of the rights of women and men drew a great deal on this type of motivation, derived from reasoning about the obligation of effective power to help advance the freedoms of all. That line of thinking does, of course, receive strong support, as was mentioned earlier, from Adam Smith’s analysis of

  ‘moral reasons’, including the invoking of the device of the impartial spectator in enlightening people about moral concerns and obligations.

  Mutual benefit, based on symmetry and reciprocity, is not the only foundation for thinking about reasonable behaviour towards others.

  Having effective power and the obligations that can follow unidirec-tionally from it can also be an important basis for impartial reasoning, going well beyond the motivation of mutual benefits.

  207

  10

  Realizations, Consequences

  and Agency

  An interesting conversation that occurs in the ancient Sanskrit epic Mahabharata was discussed in the Introduction. The dialogue is between Arjuna, the great warrior hero of the epic, and Krishna, his friend and adviser, on the eve of the massive battle at Kurukshetra, a place not far from the city of Delhi. The conversation is about the duties of human beings in general and of Arjuna in particular, and Arjuna and Krishna bring radically divergent perspectives to the debate. I begin this chapter with a fuller examination of the issues involved in the argument between Arjuna and Krishna.

  The battle in Kurukshetra is between the Pandavas, the virtuous royal family presided over by Yudhisthira (Arjuna’s eldest brother and the legitimate heir to the throne), on one side, and the Kauravas, their cousins, on the other, who have wrongly usurped the kingdom.

  Most of the royal families in different kingdoms in the north, west and east of India have joined one side or the other in this epic battle, and the two confronting armies include a considerable proportion of the able-bodied men in the land. Arjuna is the great and invincible warrior on the just side, the Pandavas. Krishna is Arjuna’s charioteer, but he is also meant to be an incarnation of God in human form.

  The force of the Arjuna–Krishna debate enriches the tale of the epic, but over the centuries it has also generated much moral and political deliberation. The part of the epic in which this conversation occurs is called the Bhagavadgita, or Gita for short, and it has attracted extraordinary religious and philosophical attention in addition to captivating lay readers by the exciting nature of the argument itself.

  Arjuna and Krishna see the armies on the two sides and reflect on 208

  r e a l i z a t i o n s , c o n s e q u e n c e s a n d a g e n c y

  the gigantic battle that is about to begin. Arjuna then expresses his profound doubts about whether fighting is the right thing for him to do. He does not doubt that theirs is the right cause, and that this is a just war, and also that his side will definitely win the battle, given its strength (not least because of Arjuna’s own remarkable skills as a warrior and as an extraordinary general). But there would be so much death, Arjuna observes, in the battle. He is also bothered by the fact that he will have to kill a great many people himself, and that most of the people who will be fighting and may well be killed have done nothing that is particularly reprehensible other than agreeing (often out of kinship loyalties or other ties) to back one side or the other. If part of Arjuna’s anxiety comes from the tragedy that is about to overwhelm much of the land, which can be evaluated as a disaster without taking any particular note of his own role in the carnage to come, another part certainly comes from his own responsibility for the killing that he will be doing, including the killing of those with close ties to him, towards many of whom he has affection. There are, thus, both positional and transpositional features in Arjuna’s argument for not wanting to fight.*

  Arjuna tells Krishna that he really should not fight and kill, and perhaps they should simply let the unjust Kauravas rule the kingdom they have usurped, as this may be the lesser of the two evils. Krishna speaks against this, and his response concentrates on the priority of doing one’s duty irrespective of consequences, which has been invoked again and again in Indian discussions in religious and moral philosophy. Indeed, with Krishna’s gradual transformation from a noble but partisan patron of the Pandavas to an incarnation of God, the Gita has also become a document of great theological importance.

  Krishna argues that Arjuna must do his duty, come what may, and in this case he has a duty to fight, no matter what results from it. It is a just cause, and as a warrior and a general on whom his side must rely, he cannot waver from his obligations. Krishna’s high deontology, including his duty-centred and consequence-independent reasoning, has been deeply influential in moral debates in subsequent millennia.

  * The distinction connected with positionality was discussed in Chapter 7, ‘Position, Relevance and Illusion’.

  209

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e It is, I suppose, a tribute to the power of pure theory that even the great apostle of non-violence, Mohandas Gandhi, felt deeply inspired by Krishna’s words on doing one’s duty irrespective of consequences (and quoted Krishna from the Gita quite frequently), even though the duty in this case was for Arjuna to fight a violent war and not to shrink from killing others, a cause to which Gandhi would not normally be expected to warm.

  Krishna’s moral position has also received eloquent endorsement from many philosophical and literary commentators across the world; and admiration for the Gita, and for Krishna’s arguments in particular, has been a lasting phenomenon in parts of European intellectual culture.* Christopher Isherwood translated the Bhagavadgita into English,1 and T. S. Eliot explicated Krishna’s reasoning and encapsu-lated his main message in poetry in the form of an admonishment:

  ‘And do not think of the fruit of action./ Fare forward. Not fare well,/

  But fare forward, voyagers.’2

  a r j u n a ’ s a r g u m e n t s

  As the debate proceeds, both Arjuna and Krishna present reasonings on their respective sides, which can be seen as a classic debate between consequence-independent deontology and consequence-sensitive assessment. Arjuna ultimately concedes defeat, but not before Krishna backs up the intellectual force of his argument with some supernatural demonstration of his divinity.

  But was Arjuna really mistaken? Why should we want only to ‘fare forward’ and not also ‘fare well’? Can a belief in a consequence-independent duty to fight for a just cause convincingly override one’s reasons for not wanting to kill people, including those for whom one has affection? The point here is not so much to argue that Arjuna

  * Gita was spectacularly praised already in early nineteenth century by Wilhelm von Humboldt as ‘the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue’. Jawaharlal Nehru, who quotes Humboldt, does however point out that ‘every school of thought and philosophy . . . interprets [the Gita] in its own way’ ( The Discovery of India (Calcutta: The Signet Press, 1946; republished, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 108–9).

  210 />
  r e a l i z a t i o n s , c o n s e q u e n c e s a n d a g e n c y

  would have been definitely right to refuse to fight (there were many arguments against Arjuna’s withdrawal from battle other than the ones on which Krishna concentrated), but that there is much to weigh and balance and that Arjuna’s human-life-centred perspective is not dismissable by the mere invoking of some apparent duty to fight, irrespective of consequences.

  Indeed, this is a dichotomy with two substantial positions, each of which can be defended in different ways. The battle of Kurukshetra would change the lives of people in the land, as we see in the epic itself, and decisions about what should be done must call for a capacious and critical evaluation rather than a simple answer based on the dismissal of all concerns other than the identification of Arjuna’s supposed duty to fight – come what may – arrived at in a consequence-independent way. Even though as a religious document, Gita is interpreted to be firmly on Krishna’s side, the epic Mahabharata in which the conversation occurs as a part of a much larger story gives both sides much room to develop their respective arguments. Indeed, the epic Mahabharata ends largely as a tragedy, with a lamentation about death and carnage, and there is anguish and grief accompanying the victory and triumph of the ‘just’ cause. It is hard not to see in this something of a vindication of Arjuna’s profound doubts.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the American team that developed the atom bomb during the Second World War, was moved to quote Krishna’s words from Gita (‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’) as he watched, on 16 July 1945, the amazing force of the first nuclear explosion devised by man.3 Just like the advice that Arjuna, the ‘warrior’, had received from Krishna about his duty to fight for a just cause, Oppenheimer, the ‘physicist’, found justification, at that time, in his technical commitment to develop a bomb for what was clearly the right side. Later on, deeply questioning his own contribution to the development of the bomb, Oppenheimer would reconsider the situation with hindsight: ‘When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.’*

  * See In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: USAEC Transcript of the Hearing before Personnel Security Board (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 211

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e Despite that compulsion to ‘fare forward’, there was reason enough for Oppenheimer also to reflect on Arjuna’s concerns (not just to be thrilled by Krishna’s words): how can good come from killing so many people? And why should I only do my duty as a physicist, ignoring all other results including the miseries and deaths that would follow from my own actions?*

  As we proceed from here to the relevance of all this to the understanding of the demands of justice, it is useful to distinguish between three rather different, though interlinked, elements in Arjuna’s reasoning. They are often merged together in the large literature that has been generated by the Gita, but they are distinct points, each of which demands attention.

  First, central to Arjuna’s reasoning is his general belief that what happens to the world must matter and be significant in our moral and political thinking. One cannot close one’s eyes to what actually happens, and stick to one’s consequence-independent niti, ignoring altogether the state of affairs that will emerge. This part of Arjuna’s claim, which can be called ‘the relevance of the actual world’, is complemented by the identification of a specific part of the actual world that particularly engages him: the life and death of the people 1954). See also the play, based on these hearings, by Heinar Kipphardt, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, translated by Ruth Speirs (London: Methuen, 1967). I should emphasize here that even though Oppenheimer quotes Krishna, and even though his belief in the justness of the cause for which he was working is similar to Krishna’s view of Arjuna’s cause, the positions taken by Krishna and Oppenheimer are not exactly the same. Krishna invokes Arjuna’s ‘duty’ to fight as a warrior in pursuit of a just cause, whereas Oppenheimer uses the more ambiguous justification of doing something ‘technically sweet’. It is possible that the technical sweetness is connected with success in doing one’s duty as a scientist, but there are ambiguities here compared with Krishna’s more straightforward admonition to Arjuna. I am grateful to Eric Kelly for an illuminating discussion on this.

  * As I have mentioned in an earlier book, The Argumentative Indian (London and Delhi: Penguin, 2005), as a high school student I had asked my Sanskrit teacher whether it would be permissible to say that the divine Krishna got away with an incomplete and unconvincing argument against Arjuna. My teacher said in reply:

  ‘Maybe you could say that, but you must say it with adequate respect.’ Many years later, I took the liberty of defending Arjuna’s original position, arguing – I hope with adequate respect – why consequence-independent deontology in the form championed by Krishna was really quite unconvincing: ‘Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason’, Journal of Philosophy, 97 (September 2000).

  212

  r e a l i z a t i o n s , c o n s e q u e n c e s a n d a g e n c y

  involved. There is a general argument here on the importance of our lives, no matter how our attention might be diverted by other types of advocacy, based, for example, on strictures on correct conduct, or the promotion of the glory of a dynasty or a kingdom (or, as it might have appeared in Europe during the blood-soaked First World War, the victory of ‘the nation’).

  In terms of the classical distinction between nyaya and niti, discussed in the Introduction, Arjuna’s arguments definitely lean towards the side of nyaya, rather than merely the niti of fighting a just war by giving priority to one’s duty as a military leader. What we have been calling ‘social realization’ is critically important in this argument.*

  And within that general framework, one particular argument that is extensively present in Arjuna’s reasoning is that we cannot ignore what happens to human lives in particular in an ethical or political evaluation of this kind. This part of Arjuna’s understanding I shall call ‘the significance of human lives’.

  The second issue concerns personal responsibility. Arjuna argues that a person whose decisions bring about some serious consequences must take personal responsibility for what results from his own choices. The issue of responsibility is central to the debate between Arjuna and Krishna, though the two present quite different interpretations of how Arjuna’s responsibilities should be seen. Arjuna argues that the results of one’s choices and actions must matter in deciding what one should do, whereas Krishna insists that one must do one’s duty no matter what happens, and that the nature of one’s duty can be determined, as in this case, without having to examine the consequences of the chosen actions.

  There is an extensive literature in political and moral philosophy on the respective claims of consequential evaluation and duty-based

  * In the debate in the Gita, Krishna’s focus is primarily on the basic niti of doing one’s duty, whereas Arjuna both questions the niti (why should I kill so many people even if that appears to be my duty?) and asks about the nyaya of the society that would result from the war (can a just world be built through extensive killing?). The point I want to emphasize here is that aside from the discussion about duties and consequences (and related to them, the debate between deontology and consequentialism), which is the issue on which most attention is typically devoted in pursuing the arguments in the Gita, there are also other important issues that figure, directly or indirectly, in that rich intellectual debate, which must not be ignored.

  213

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e reasoning, and this is certainly one point of difference between Krishna’s extreme form of deontology and Arjuna’s consequence-sensitive reasoning. A point to note here, which is sometimes missed, is that Arjuna is not denying that the idea of personal responsibility is important – he is concerned not only about good consequences but also about who does what and in particular what he
will himself have to do, which in this case involves killing people. So his own agency and his consequent responsibilities are momentous in Arjuna’s argument, in addition to the concern he has for the significance of human lives. Arjuna is not arguing, it is important to note, for a kind of agent-independent consequentialism.

  Third, Arjuna also identifies the people who would be killed, and he is particularly bothered by having to kill people for whom he has affection, including his own relatives. Even though killing in general greatly bothers him, especially given the scale of that war, he still separates out the feature of having to kill people who are particularly important to him in one way or another. Underlying this concern is Arjuna’s inclination to take note of personal relations with others involved in a particular act. This is a distinctly positional concern, and belongs broadly to the kind of idea that makes a person acknowledge a special responsibility towards others, such as one’s children, or children one has brought up. (This issue was considered in Chapter 7,

  ‘Position, Relevance and Illusion’.) Relational obligations linked with family connections and personal affection as well as agency-related concerns may be rightly excluded in some ethical contexts, for example in the making of social policy by public officials, but they call for accommodation within the broader reach of moral and political philosophy, including that of the theory of justice, when personal responsibilities are considered and given their rightful place.

  Arjuna is not, of course, portrayed in the epic as a philosopher, and it would be wrong to expect any kind of elaborate defence of his particular concerns in the argument he presents in the Gita. But what is striking, nevertheless, is the way these distinct concerns all find clear articulation in Arjuna’s elaboration of his conclusion, defending his view that it might be right for him to withdraw from the battle. In pursuing the content of the nyaya in this case, all these three points, in addition to Arjuna’s basic human sympathies, have clear relevance.