The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

  † Gender bias is, clearly, not as central a concern in assessing inequality and poverty in Europe or North America, but the presumption – often implicitly made – that the issue of gender inequality does not apply to ‘Western’ countries can be quite misleading. For example, Italy had one of the highest ratios of ‘unrecognized’ labour by women (mostly unglamorous family work) among all the countries of the world included in the standard national accounts in the mid-1990s, according to UNDP’s Human Development Report 1995 (New York: United Nations, 1995). The accounting of effort and time expended, and its implications for the personal freedom of women, have some bearing for Europe and North America as well. There is also in many cases considerable gender bias in the richest countries in terms of opportunities for advanced education, or for the prospects of being selected for top levels of employment.

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  The relevance of disability in the understanding of deprivation in the world is often underestimated, and this can be one of the most important arguments for paying attention to the capability perspective.

  People with physical or mental disability are not only among the most deprived human beings in the world, they are also, frequently enough, the most neglected.

  The magnitude of the global problem of disability in the world is truly gigantic. More than 600 million people – about one in ten of all human beings – live with some form of significant disability.5 More than 400 million of them live in developing countries. Furthermore, in the developing world, the disabled are quite often the poorest of the poor in terms of income, but in addition their need for income is greater than that of able-bodied people, since they require money and assistance to try to live normal lives and to attempt to alleviate their handicaps. The impairment of income-earning ability, which can be called ‘the earning handicap’, tends to be reinforced and much magnified in its effect by ‘the conversion handicap’: the difficulty in converting incomes and resources into good living, precisely because of disability.

  The importance of the ‘conversion handicap’ from disability can be illustrated with some empirical results from a pioneering study of poverty in the United Kingdom undertaken by Wiebke Kuklys, in a remarkable thesis completed at Cambridge University shortly before her untimely death from cancer: the work was later published as a book.6 Kuklys found that 17.9 per cent of individuals lived in families with income below the poverty line. If attention is shifted to individuals in families with a disabled member, the percentage of such individuals living below the poverty line is 23.1. This gap of about 5 percentage point largely reflects the income handicap associated with disability and the care of the disabled. If the conversion handicap is now introduced, and note is taken of the need for more income to ameliorate the disadvantages of disability, the proportion of individuals in families with disabled members jumps up to 47.4 per cent, 258

  c a p a b i l i t i e s a n d r e s o u r c e s a gap of nearly 20 percentage points over the share of individuals below the poverty line (17.9 per cent) for the population as a whole.

  To look at the comparative picture in another way, of the 20 extra percentage points for poverty disadvantage for individuals living in families with a disabled member, about a quarter can be attributed to income handicap and three-quarters to conversion handicap (the central issue that distinguishes the capability perspective from the perspective of incomes and resources).

  An understanding of the moral and political demands of disability is important not only because it is such a widespread and impairing feature of humanity, but also because many of the tragic consequences of disability can actually be substantially overcome with determined societal help and imaginative intervention. Policies to deal with disability can have a large domain, including the amelioration of the effects of handicap, on the one hand, and programmes to prevent the development of disabilities, on the other. It is extremely important to understand that many disabilities are preventable, and much can be done not only to diminish the penalty of disability but also to reduce its incidence.

  Indeed, only a fairly moderate proportion of the 600 million people living with disabilities were doomed to these conditions at conception, or even at birth. For example, maternal malnutrition and childhood undernourishment can make children prone to illnesses and handicaps of health. Blindness can result from diseases linked to infection and lack of clean water. Other disabilities can originate through the effects of polio, measles or AIDS, as well as road accidents and injuries at work. A further issue is that of landmines which are scattered across the troubled territories of the world, and maim as well as kill people, especially children. Social intervention against disability has to include prevention as well as management and alleviation. If the demands of justice have to give priority to the removal of manifest injustice (as I have been arguing throughout this work), rather than concentrating on the long-distance search for the perfectly just society, then the prevention and alleviation of disability cannot but be fairly central in the enterprise of advancing justice.

  Given what can be achieved through intelligent and humane intervention, it is amazing how inactive and smug most societies are about 259

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e the prevalence of the unshared burden of disability. In feeding this inaction, conceptual conservatism plays a significant role. In particular, the concentration on income distribution as the principal guide to distributional fairness prevents an understanding of the predicament of disability and its moral and political implications for social analysis.

  Even the constant use of income-based views of poverty (such as the repeated invoking of the numbers of people who live below $1 or $2 of income per day – a popular activity by international organizations) can distract attention from the full rigour of social deprivation, which combines conversion handicap with earning handicap. The 600 million handicapped people in the world are not plagued just by low income.

  Their freedom to lead a good life is blighted in many different ways, which act individually and together, to place these people in jeopardy.

  r aw l s ’ s u s e o f p r i m a r y g o o d s Given the importance of the distance between capabilities and resources, for reasons already discussed, it is hard not to be sceptical of John Rawls’s difference principle which concentrates entirely on primary goods in judging distributional issues in his ‘principles of justice’ for the institutional basis of society. This divergence, important as it is, does not of course reflect Rawls’s lack of concern about the importance of substantive freedom – a point I have already made earlier on in this work. Even though Rawls’s principles of justice concentrate on primary goods, he pays attention elsewhere to the need for correcting this resource focus in order to have a better grip on people’s real freedom. Rawls’s pervasive sympathy for the disadvantaged is plentifully reflected in his writings.

  In fact, Rawls does recommend special correctives for ‘special needs’, such as disability and handicap, even though this is not a part of his principles of justice. These corrections come not in setting up

  ‘the basic institutional structure’ of the society at the ‘constitutional stage’, but as something that should emerge later on in the use of the institutions thus set up, particularly in the ‘legislative stage’. This makes the reach of Rawls’s motivation clear enough, and the question to be asked is whether this is adequate as a way of rectifying the 260

  c a p a b i l i t i e s a n d r e s o u r c e s partial blindness of the perspective of resources and primary goods in Rawlsian principles of justice.

  In the exalted place that Rawls gives to the metric of primary goods, there is some general downplaying of the fact that different people, for reasons of personal characteristics, or the influences of physical and social environments, or through relative deprivation (when a person’s absolute advantages depend on her relative standin
g compared with others), can have widely varying opportunities to convert general resources (like income and wealth) into capabilities – what they can or cannot actually do. The variations in conversion opportunities are not just matters of what can be seen as ‘special needs’, but reflect pervasive variations – large, small and medium – in the human condition and in relevant social circumstances.

  Rawls does indeed talk about the eventual emergence of special provisions for ‘special needs’ (for example, for the blind or for those who are otherwise clearly disabled), at a later phase in the unfolding of his multi-stage story of justice. The move indicates Rawls’s deep concern about disadvantage, but the way he deals with this pervasive problem has quite a limited reach. First, these corrections occur, to the extent they do, only after the basic institutional structure has been set up through the Rawlsian ‘principles of justice’ – the nature of these basic institutions are not at all influenced by such ‘special needs’

  (primary goods such as incomes and wealth rule supreme in setting up the institutional base dealing with distributional issues, through the role of the difference principle).

  Second, even at a later stage, when particular note is taken of

  ‘special needs’, there is no attempt to come to terms with the ubiquitous variations in conversion opportunities between different people.

  The prominent and easily identifiable handicaps (such as blindness) are, of course, important to pay attention to, but the variations in many different ways (linked, for example, with greater proneness to illness, more adverse epidemiological surroundings, various levels and types of physical and mental disabilities, etc.) make the informational focus on functionings and capabilities essential for thinking about social arrangements and social realizations, both in setting up the institutional structure and in making sure that they function well and with adequate use of humane and sympathetic reasoning.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e I believe Rawls is also motivated by his concern for fairness in the distribution of freedom and capabilities, but by founding his principles of justice on the informational perspective of primary goods in the difference principle, he leaves the determination of ‘just institutions’

  for distributional fairness exclusively on the slender shoulders of primary goods to provide the basic institutional guidance. This does not give his underlying concern for capabilities enough room for influence at the institutional phase with which his principles of justice are directly concerned.

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  Unlike in Rawls’s focus on transcendental institutionalism, the approach to justice explored in this work does not pursue a sequential and prioritized scenario of the unfolding of a perfectly just society. In focusing on the enhancement of justice through institutional and other changes, the approach here does not, therefore, relegate the issue of conversion and capabilities into something of second-category status, to be brought up and considered later. Understanding the nature and sources of capability deprivation and inequity is indeed central to removing manifest injustices that can be identified by public reasoning, with a good deal of partial accord.*

  The Rawlsian approach has also had extensive influences outside its own domain as specified by Rawls, since it has been such a dominant mode of reasoning on justice in contemporary moral and political

  * In investigating the limitations of focusing on the index of primary goods in the formulation of the principles of justice in the Rawlsian general approach, it is not, of course, my intention to suggest that all would be well in his transcendental institutionalist approach if concentration on primary goods were to be replaced by direct engagement with capabilities. The serious difficulties arising from Rawls’s transcendental rather than comparative orientation and from the purely institutional focus of his principles of justice, discussed earlier, would remain no matter what informational focus is used to assess distributional concerns. I am arguing here that in addition to the general problems of relying on a transcendental institutionalist approach, the Rawlsian theory is further impaired by its concentration on primary goods to deal with distributional issues in its principles of justice.

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  c a p a b i l i t i e s a n d r e s o u r c e s philosophy. For example, those who have tried to retain the Rawlsian contractarian foundation in a new – and more ambitious – theory of justice encompassing the whole world (such a ‘cosmopolitan theory of justice’ has a much larger domain than Rawls’s country-by-country approach) have continued to look for a complete ordering for distributional judgements, needed for transcendental institutional justice for the entire globe.7 Not surprisingly, these theorists are not placated by the partially incomplete ordering based on capabilities and, as Thomas Pogge puts it, there is a demand for much more than ‘merely a partial ordinal ranking’ needed to work out ‘how an institutional order ought to be designed’.8 I would like to wish good luck to the builders of a transcendentally just set of institutions for the whole world, but for those who are ready to concentrate, at least for the moment, on reducing manifest injustices that so severely plague the world, the relevance of a ‘merely’ partial ranking for a theory of justice can actually be rather momentous.*

  The central issue, I would submit, is not whether a certain approach has a total reach in being able to compare any two alternatives, but whether the comparisons it can make are appropriately directed and reasoned. Comparisons of freedoms and capabilities place us in the right territory, and we should not be moved to relocate ourselves to a different territory through being tempted by the attractions of a complete ordering (seen independently of what it completely orders).

  The advantage of the capability perspective over the resource perspective lies in its relevance and substantive importance, and not in any promise of yielding a total ordering. Indeed, as Elizabeth Anderson has persuasively discussed, the capability metric is ‘superior to a resource metric because it focuses on ends rather than on means, can better handle discrimination against the disabled, is properly sensitive to individual variations in functioning that have democratic import, and is well suited to guide the just delivery of public services, especially in health and education’.9

  * This issue was discussed in the Introduction and in Chapters 1–4.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e d w o r k i n ’ s e q u a l i t y o f r e s o u r c e s While Rawls uses the perspective of resources in his principles of justice through the index of primary goods, effectively ignoring the conversion variations between resources and capabilities, Ronald Dworkin’s use of the resource perspective is to make room explicitly for taking note of these variations through artful market-oriented thinking, in particular by the use of an imagined primordial market for insurance against conversion handicaps. In this thought-experiment it is assumed that people, under a Rawls-like veil of ignorance of an original position, enter this hypothetical market, which sells insurance against having these respective handicaps. While no one, in this imagined situation, knows who is going to have which handicap, if any, they all buy this insurance against possible adversities, and (‘later on’, as it were) the ones that actually end up having the handicaps can claim their compensation as determined by the insurance markets, thereby obtaining more resources of other kinds in compensation.

  That is, argues Dworkin, as fair as you can get, based on what he sees as effective ‘equality of resources’.

  This is certainly an interesting and highly ingenious proposal (having taught a class jointly with Ronald Dworkin for ten years at Oxford and knowing the astonishing reach of his mind, I could not, of course, have expected anything less). But after that brilliantly imagined contribution about a possible hypothetical market, Dworkin seems to go straight into something of a ‘beat that!’ programme, addressed particularly to those afflicted by the capability-based approach.* He claims either that equality of capability amounts re
ally to equality of welfare, in which case (Dworkin argues) it is a mistaken view of equity, or that it amounts actually to the same solution as his own equality of resources, in which case there is no real difference between us (and no advantage in pursuing the capability approach).

  * I suppose I should feel honoured to be taken seriously enough to be identified as the main protagonist of what he sees as the less than satisfactory approach of capabilities.

  See Dworkin’s Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 65–119. See also his ‘Sovereign Virtue Revisited’, Ethics, 113 (2002).

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  c a p a b i l i t i e s a n d r e s o u r c e s Despite my immense admiration for Ronald Dworkin’s work, I have to say I am somewhat at a loss in deciding where to begin in analysing what is wrong with this argument against a capability-based approach. First (to begin with a very minor point, only to get it out of the way), even if equality of capability were to amount to equality of the capability for welfare, that would not be the same thing as equality of welfare.* (The distinction between capability and achievement was discussed in the last chapter.) However, more importantly, it should have been clear from what I had said about the capability perspective from its first presentation that I am arguing neither for equality of welfare nor for equality of capability to achieve welfare.†

  Second, if equality of resources were no different from equality of capability and substantive freedom, why is it more interesting normatively to think about the former rather than the latter, since resources are only instrumentally important as means to other ends?