The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

  And, for the same reason, there is no mystery in understanding that a person’s advantage as an agent may, quite possibly, go against the same person’s advantage from the line of vision of well-being. When, for example, Mohandas Gandhi was released by the authorities in British India from being restrained at home and from not being allowed to take part in political activities, his agency freedom (and typically his agency achievements as well) expanded, but at the same time the hardship he chose to undergo and the pains that he accepted as a part of his non-violent agitation for India’s independence clearly had some negative effects on his own personal well-being, which he 289

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e was ready to accept for his cause. Indeed, even Gandhi’s decision to fast for long periods for political reasons was clearly a reflection of his broad priority for agency over his own well-being.

  Having more capability in terms of agency freedom is an advantage, but only in that specific perspective, and particularly not – at least not necessarily – in the perspective of well-being. Those who are unable to find any meaning in the idea of advantage, except in line with self-interest (there are schools of thought that go in that direction, as discussed in Chapter 8, ‘Rationality and Other People’), would have difficulty in seeing why agency freedom can be seen as an advantage to the person involved. But one does not have to be a Gandhi (or a Martin Luther King, or a Nelson Mandela, or Aung San Suu Kyi) to understand that one’s objectives and priorities could stretch well beyond the narrow limits of one’s own personal well-being.

  290

  14

  Equality and Liberty

  Equality was not only among the foremost revolutionary demands in eighteenth-century Europe and America, there has also been an extraordinary consensus on its importance in the post-Enlightenment world. In an earlier book, Inequality Reexamined, I commented on the fact that every normative theory of social justice that has received support and advocacy in recent times seems to demand equality of something – something that is regarded as particularly important in that theory.1 The theories can be entirely diverse (focusing on, say, equal liberty or equal income or equal treatment of everyone’s rights or utilities), and they may be in combat with each other, but they still have the common characteristic of wanting equality of something (some feature of significance in the respective approach).

  It is not surprising that equality figures prominently in the contributions of political philosophers who would usually be seen as ‘egalitarian’, and in American usage as ‘liberal’, for example, John Rawls, James Meade, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel or Thomas Scanlon, to name a few. What is perhaps more significant is that equality is demanded in some basic form even by those who are typically seen as having disputed the ‘case for equality’ and expressed scepticism about the central importance of ‘distributive justice’. For example, Robert Nozick may not lean towards equality of utility (as James Meade does), or towards equality of holdings of primary goods (as John Rawls does), and yet Nozick does demand equality of libertarian rights – that no one person should have any more right to liberty than anyone else. James Buchanan, the pioneering founder of ‘public choice theory’ (in some ways a conservative rival to social choice theory), which appears to be quite sceptical of the claims of equality, does, in 291

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e fact, build equal legal and political treatment of people (and equal respect to the objection of anyone opposed to any proposed change) into his view of a good society.2 In each theory, equality is sought in some ‘space’ (that is, in terms of some variables related to respective persons), a space that is seen as having a central role in that theory.*

  Does this generalization apply to utilitarianism? That suggestion would be readily resisted, since utilitarians do not, in general, want the equality of the utilities enjoyed by different people – only the maximization of the sum-total of utilities, irrespective of distribution, which may not look particularly egalitarian. And yet there is an equality that utilitarians seek, to wit, equal treatment of human beings in attaching equal importance to the gains and losses of utilities by everyone, without exception. In the insistence on equal weights on everyone’s utility gains, the utilitarian objective does make use of a particular kind of egalitarianism incorporated in its accounting.

  Indeed, it is precisely this egalitarian feature that relates, it has been argued, to the foundational principle of utilitarianism of ‘giving equal weight to the equal interests of all the parties’ (to quote one great utilitarian of our time, Richard Hare), and to the utilitarian requirement for always assigning ‘the same weight to all individuals’ interests’

  (to quote another contemporary leader of utilitarian thought, John Harsanyi).3

  Is there any particular significance to be attached to this formal similarity in wanting equality of something – indeed, something that the particular normative theory takes to be very important? It is tempting to think that this must be a coincidence, since the similarities are entirely formal and not about the substance of ‘equality of what?’

  * G. A. Cohen’s criticism of John Rawls in Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) for allowing inequalities needed on grounds of incentives within his principles of justice, on which I commented earlier (in Chapter 2), can be seen as a critique of Rawls for not taking sufficiently seriously his own reasoning on the importance of equalizing primary goods in defining perfect justice.

  The relevance of behavioural and other constraints in practical policy-making is not denied by Cohen, and Cohen’s reproach to Rawls concerns only the transcendental characterization of the perfectly just society. As was discussed earlier, Rawls clearly has non-transcendental elements in his thoughts about justice, and this could be present here in his choice not to extend the behavioural demands in a post-contract world to assume incentive-free just behaviour.

  292

  e q u a l i t y a n d l i b e r t y And yet the need for some egalitarian formula in defending a theory indicates the significance widely attached to non-discrimination, which can be seen as being motivated by the idea that in the absence of such a requirement a normative theory would be arbitrary and biased. There seems to be a recognition here of the need for impartiality in some form for the viability of a theory.* In terms of Thomas Scanlon’s criterion of the need for principles that no one involved can

  ‘reasonably reject’, there may well be a strong connection between general acceptability and non-discrimination, demanding that, at some basic level, people must be seen as equal, whose rejections would respectively matter.†

  e q u a l i t y , i m p a r t i a l i t y

  a n d

  s u b s t a n c e

  The capability approach, with which a number of the previous chapters have been concerned, draws on the understanding, discussed above, that the really critical question is ‘equality of what?’ rather than whether we need equality at all in any space whatsoever.‡ To say this is not to claim that the latter question is a negligible one. Nor does the fact that there is so much agreement in demanding equality in some space or other establish that this presumption is right. It is certainly possible to take the position that all those theories are mistaken. What gives the shared characteristic such plausibility? This is a grand question to which we can hardly do justice here, but it is worth considering the direction to which we must look to seek a plausible answer.

  The demand for seeing people as equals (in some important perspective) relates, I would argue, to the normative demand for impartiality,

  * This recognition can be linked to the arguments examined in Chapter 5, ‘Impartiality and Objectivity’.

  † Scanlon’s criterion has been discussed earlier, particularly in Chapters 5–9.

  ‡ The importance of that question and the place of capability in answering it was presented in my 1979 Tanner Lecture at Stanford University, ‘Equality of What?’, published under that title in S. McMurrin (ed.), Tanner Lectures in Hum
an Values, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  293

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e and the related claims of objectivity. This cannot, of course, be seen as a freestanding answer, complete in itself, since acceptable justifications for impartiality and objectivity also have to be scrutinized (some ideas in that direction were considered in Chapter 5). But that is the kind of scrutiny that would be ultimately involved in understanding why each of the pre-eminent theories of justice tends to involve some way of treating persons as equal at some basic level (basic, that is, for the respective theory).

  Being an egalitarian is not, in any obvious sense, a ‘uniting’ feature, given the disagreements on ways of answering the question: ‘equality of what?’. Indeed, it is precisely because there are such substantive differences between the endorsement of different spaces in which equality is recommended by various authors that the fact that there is a basic egalitarian similarity in the respective approaches of these very diverse authors has tended to escape widespread attention. The similarity, however, is of some importance.

  To illustrate this point, let me refer to the collection of interesting and important essays edited by William Letwin, called Against Equality.4 In one of the powerfully argued articles in Letwin’s collection, Harry Frankfurt argues against ‘equality as a moral ideal’ by cogently disputing the claims of what he calls economic egalitarianism in the form of ‘the doctrine that it is desirable for everyone to have the same amounts of income and wealth (for short, ‘‘money’’)’.5

  Although in the language chosen to express this rejection Frankfurt interprets his disputation as an argument against ‘equality as a moral ideal’, this is primarily because he uses that general term to refer specifically to a particular version of ‘economic egalitarianism’: ‘This version of economic egalitarianism (for short, simply ‘‘egalitarianism’’) might also be formulated as the doctrine that there should be no inequalities in the distribution of money.’ Frankfurt’s arguments can be seen as disputing the specific demand for a common interpretation of economic egalitarianism by (1) disputing that such an equality is of any intrinsic interest, and (2) showing that it leads to the violation of intrinsically important values – values that link closely to the need for paying equal attention to all in some other, more relevant, way.

  The choice of space for equality is thus critically important in the development of Frankfurt’s well-argued thesis.6

  294

  e q u a l i t y a n d l i b e r t y All this fits into the general pattern of arguing against equality in some space, on the grounds that it violates the more important requirement of equality in some other space. Seen in this way, the battles on distributional issues tend to be not about ‘why equality?’, but about ‘equality of what?’. Since some areas of concentration (identifying corresponding spaces on which equality is sought) are traditionally associated with claims of equality in political or economic or social philosophy, it is equality in those spaces (for example, income, wealth, utilities) that tends to go under the heading of ‘egalitarianism’, whereas equality in other spaces (for example, rights, liberties or what are seen as just deserts of people) looks like anti-egalitarian claims. But we should not be too trapped by the conventions of characterization, and must also note the basic similarity among all these theories in arguing for equality in some space, and insisting on egalitarian priority there, while disputing – explicitly or by implication – the conflicting demands of equality in other (in their view, less relevant) spaces.

  c a p a b i l i t y , e q u a l i t y a n d

  o t h e r

  c o n c e r n s

  If equality is important, and capability is indeed a central feature of human life (as I have tried to argue earlier on in this book), would it not be right to presume that we should demand equality of capability?

  I have to argue that the answer is, no. This is so for several distinct reasons. We may, of course, attach significance to equality of capability, but that does not imply that we must demand equality of capability even if it conflicts with other important considerations.

  Significant as it is, equality of capability does not necessarily ‘trump’

  all other weighty considerations (including other significant aspects of equality), with which it might be in conflict.

  First, capability is, as I have tried to emphasize, only one aspect of freedom, related to substantive opportunities, and it cannot pay adequate attention to fairness and equity involved in procedures that have relevance to the idea of justice. While the idea of capability has considerable merit in the assessment of the opportunity aspect of 295

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e freedom, it cannot possibly deal adequately with the process aspect of freedom. Capabilities are characteristics of individual advantages, and while they may incorporate some features of the processes involved (as was discussed in Chapter 11), they fall short of telling us enough about the fairness or equity of the processes involved, or about the freedom of citizens to invoke and utilize procedures that are equitable.

  Let me illustrate the point with what may appear to be a fairly harsh example. It is now fairly well established that, given symmetric care, women tend to live longer than men, with lower mortality rates in each age group. If one were concerned exclusively with capabilities (and nothing else), and in particular with equality of the capability to live long, it would be possible to construct an argument for giving men relatively more medical attention than women to counteract the natural masculine handicap. But giving women less medical attention than men for the same health problems would flagrantly violate a significant requirement of process equity (in particular, treating different persons similarly in matters of life and death), and it is not unreasonable to claim that, in cases of this kind, demands of equity in the process aspect of freedom could sensibly override any single-minded concentration on the opportunity aspect of freedom, including prioritizing equality in life expectancy.

  While the capability perspective may be very important in judging people’s substantive opportunities (and may do better, as I have claimed, in assessing equity in the distribution of opportunities than the alternative approaches that focus on incomes, primary goods or resources), that point does not in any way go against the need to pay fuller attention to the process aspect of freedom in the assessment of justice.* A theory of justice – or more generally an adequate theory of normative social choice – has to be alive to both the fairness of the processes involved and to the equity and efficiency of the substantive opportunities that people can enjoy.

  Capability is, in fact, no more than a perspective in terms of which

  * A similar point can be made about the content of human rights, as the idea is generally understood, and will be discussed in Chapter 17, ‘Human Rights and Global Imperatives’.

  296

  e q u a l i t y a n d l i b e r t y the advantages and disadvantages of a person can be reasonably assessed. That perspective is of significance on its own, and it is also critically important for theories of justice and of moral and political evaluation. But neither justice, nor political or moral evaluation, can be concerned only with the overall opportunities and advantages of individuals in a society.* The subject of fair process and a fair deal goes beyond individuals’ overall advantages into other – especially procedural – concerns, and these concerns cannot be adequately addressed through concentrating only on capabilities.

  The central issue here concerns the multiple dimensions in which equality matters, which is not reducible to equality in one space only, be that economic advantage, resources, utilities, achieved quality of life or capabilities. My scepticism about a unifocal understanding of the demands of equality (in this case, applied to the capability perspective) is part of a larger critique of a unifocal view of equality.

  Second, even though I have argued for the importance of freedom in judging personal advantages, and thus in assessing equality, there can be other demands o
n distributional judgements, which may not be best seen as demands for equal overall freedom for different people, in any clear sense. Indeed, as the example about the dispute among the three children quarrelling over a flute, discussed in the Introduction, brings out, the argument of one of the children to have just recognition of the fact that he has made the flute on his own, could not be readily dismissed. The line of reasoning that gives an important status to efforts and the rewards that should be associated with labour, which also yields such normative ideas as exploitation, can suggest grounds for pausing before going single-mindedly for equality of capability.7 The literature on the exploitation of sweated labour and the unjust rewards received by those who do the ‘real work’ has a strong connection with this perspective.

  Third, capability does not speak in one voice, since it can be defined in different ways, which include the distinction between well-being freedom and agency freedom (discussed in Chapter 13, ‘Happiness,

  * Indeed, even in terms of the Rawlsian characterization of distinct problems of justice, capability is a rival only to the use of primary goods in judging relative advantages in the Difference Principle, and that leaves out other issues, including the place of personal liberties and the need for fair procedures.

  297

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e Well-being and Capabilities’). Further, as has already been discussed, the ranking of capabilities, even with a specific focus (such as agency or well-being) need not generate a complete ordering, particularly because of the reasonable variations (or inescapable ambiguities) in the choice of relative weights to be attached to different types of capabilities, or different types of functionings. While a partial ordering may be adequate enough to judge inequalities in some cases, especially in identifying some situations of blatant inequality, it need not yield clear inequality judgements in other instances. All this does not indicate that it is useless to pay attention to reducing inequality of capabilities. That surely is a big concern, but it is important to see the limits of the reach of capability equality as one part of the demands of justice.