by Amartya Sen
The real issue concerns the adequacy of the reasons for having such a contract in the first place, and then for sticking to it. Of course, no-nonsense maximization of pleasure or desire-fulfilment (ignoring the principle of minding one’s own business) could provide some reason for seeking or accepting such a contract. But this would also give both Prude and Lewd good reasons for reneging on the contract if signed (since their simple desire orderings indicate that), and in considering the contract, both Lewd and Prude would have to take note of this fact. More importantly, even for desire-based choice, we must distinguish between a desire that someone should act in a particular way (for example, Lewd’s desire that Prude should read the book), and a desire for a contract enforcing that this person must act in that way (for example, Lewd’s wanting Prude to sign a contract binding him to read the book which he would not otherwise read). If 313
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e outcomes are seen in ‘comprehensive’ terms, the two objects of desire are not at all the same.* Indeed, Lewd’s general desire that Prude should read the book need not at all entail a desire to have a contract that would enforce Prude’s reading the book. The introduction of a contract brings in issues that cannot be escaped by just referring to simple desires regarding individual actions without any contracts.
The impossibility of the Paretian liberal, like the much grander impossibility theorem of Arrow, is best seen as a contribution to public discussion, by bringing into focus questions that may not have been raised otherwise. That, as I have argued earlier (in Chapter 4
‘Voice and Social Choice’), is one of the major uses of social choice theory in trying to clarify the issues involved and in attempting to encourage public discussion on those issues. Such engagement is central to the approach to justice presented in this work.
s o c i a l c h o i c e v e r s u s g a m e f o r m s Over thirty years ago, Robert Nozick raised a question of importance both about the impossibility of the Paretian liberal and about the formulation of liberty in social choice theory.
The trouble stems from treating an individual’s rights to choose among alternatives as the right to determine the relative ordering of these alternatives within a social ordering . . . A more appropriate view of individual rights is as follows. Individual rights are co-possible; each person may exercise his rights as he chooses. The exercise of these rights fixes some features of the world. Within the constraints of these fixed features, a choice may be made by a social choice mechanism based upon a social ordering; if there are any choices left to make! Rights do not determine a social ordering but instead set the constraints within which a social choice is to be made, by excluding certain alternatives, fixing others, and so on . . . If any patterning is legitimate, it falls within the domain of social choice, and hence is constrained by people’s rights. How else can we cope with Sen’s result?20
* The distinction between ‘comprehensive’ and ‘culmination’ perspectives, which has been discussed earlier in this book (in the Introduction, but particularly in Chapter 7), is relevant here.
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e q u a l i t y a n d l i b e r t y Nozick thus characterizes rights to liberty in terms of giving the individual control over certain personal decisions, and ‘each person may exercise his right as he chooses’. But there is no guarantee of any outcome – it is only a right to the choice of action.
This entirely process-oriented view of liberty is, in fact, an alternative way of thinking about rights. That line of reasoning generated many echoes and developments in the literature that followed. One source of complexity relates to the problem of interdependence: a person’s right to do something may be seen as conditional on some other things happening or not happening. If my right to join others when they sing is to be distinguished from my right to sing no matter what else happens (for example, whether others are singing, praying, eating or lecturing), then the permissible strategies for me must be defined in relation to (in the context of) the strategy choices of others.
Social choice formulations can deal with such interdependence easily enough since the rights are characterized with explicit reference to outcomes (linked to the combinations of strategies). To have similar sensitivity, the process-oriented understanding of liberty has tended to incorporate the game-theoretic idea of ‘game forms’ (abandoning Nozick’s attempt at seeing liberty in terms of each person’s rights, defined in isolation from each other).21
In the game-form formulation, each person has a set of permissible acts or strategies, from which each can choose one. The outcome depends on the choices of acts, or strategies, by everyone. The requirements of liberty are specified in terms of restrictions on permissible choices of acts or strategies (what we can do), but not in terms of acceptable outcomes (what we get). Is this structure robust enough for an adequate specification of liberty? It certainly catches one way in which our liberty to act is often understood. However, liberty and freedom are not concerned only with the respective actions, but also with what emanates from those choices taken together.*
The question of interdependence in characterizing liberty is particularly important for taking note of what may be called ‘invasive actions’. Consider a non-smoker’s right not to have smoke blown in
* The importance of ‘social realizations’ has already been discussed earlier, particularly in the contrast between nyaya and niti (Chapters 1–6 and 9).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e her face. This is, of course, a right to an outcome, and no understanding of liberty can be adequate if it remains entirely detached from the outcomes that emerge. The game-form formulations have to be worked ‘backwards’ by moving from acceptable outcomes to the combinations of strategies that would yield one of those outcomes.
So the game-form formulations have to get at this problem indirectly.
Rather than rejecting a possibility in which the outcome is that smoke is blown in my face, the procedural requirement takes the form of restrictions on strategy choice. We can try out the effectiveness, respectively, of:
● prohibiting smoking if others object,
● banning smoking in the presence of others, or
● forbidding smoking in public places no matter whether others are present or not (so that others do not have to stay away).
We move increasingly to more and more exacting demands on smokers if the less restrictive constraints do not bring about the outcome needed for the realization of the liberty to avoid passive smoking (as has indeed happened in the legislative history of some countries). We do, of course, choose between different ‘game forms’ here, but the choice of game forms is guided by its effectiveness in bringing about the social realization that is aimed at for the sake of liberty.
There is no doubt that game forms can be characterized in a way that they can take note of interdependence and protect from the invasive actions of others. The characterization of permissible game forms has to be worked out – directly or indirectly – in the light of the outcomes emerging from the combination of different people’s strategies. If the driving force behind the choice of game forms is the judgement that smoking is inadmissible if it leads to ‘passive smoking’
of unwilling victims, or their having to move away in order to avoid passive smoking, then the game-form choices are indeed parasitic on the focus of attention of social choice theory, namely the nature of the social realizations (or comprehensive outcomes) that emerge. We have to consider both the freedom of action and the nature of the consequences and outcomes to have an adequate understanding of liberty.
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e q u a l i t y a n d l i b e r t y The upshot of this discussion is that both equality and liberty must be seen as having several dimensions within their spacious contents.
We have reason to avoid the adoption of some narrow and unifocal view of equality or of liberty, ignoring all other concerns that these broad values demand. This plurality has to be a part of a theory of justice, which must be alive to several differen
t considerations that each of these grand ideas – liberty and equality – invokes.
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p a r t iv
Public Reasoning
and Democracy
.
15
Democracy as Public Reason
In Aldous Huxley’s novel, Point Counter Point, the lead character, Sidney Quarles, goes frequently to London from his country home in Essex, ostensibly to work at the British Museum on democracy in ancient India. ‘It’s about local government in Maurya times,’ he explains to his wife Rachel, referring to the Indian imperial dynasty that ruled the country in the fourth and the third centuries bc. Rachel does not, however, have much difficulty in figuring out that this is an elaborate ploy by Sidney to cheat on her, since his real reason for going to London, she surmises, is to spend time with a new mistress.
Aldous Huxley tells us how Rachel Quarles assesses what is going on.
[Sidney’s] visits to London had become frequent and prolonged. After the second visit Mrs. Quarles had wondered, sadly, whether Sidney had found another woman. And when, on his return from a third journey and, a few days later, on the eve of a fourth, he began to groan ostentatiously over the vast complexity of the history of democracy among the Ancient Indians, Rachel felt convinced that the woman had been found. She knew Sidney well enough to be certain that, if he had really been reading about the Ancient Indians, he would never have troubled to talk about them over the dinner-table – not at such length, in any case, nor so insistently. Sidney talked for the same reason as the hunted sepia squirts ink, to conceal his movements.
Behind the ink-cloud of the Ancient Indians [Sidney] hoped to go jaunting up to town unobserved.1
It turns out in Huxley’s novel that Rachel Quarles was right. Sidney was squirting ink for exactly the reason she suspected.
The confusion of ‘ink-clouds’ has an important bearing on the subject of this book. Are we misleading ourselves – perhaps not in 321
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e quite the same way in which Sidney Quarles wanted to mislead Rachel
– in assuming that the experience of democracy is not confined to the West and can be found elsewhere, for example, in ancient India? The belief that democracy has not flourished anywhere in the world other than in the West is widely held and often expressed. And it is also used to explain contemporary events; for example, the blame for the immense difficulties and problems faced in post-intervention Iraq is sometimes put not so much on the peculiar nature of the under-informed and badly reasoned military intervention of 2003, but attributed instead to some imagined difficulty that sees democracy and public reasoning as being unsuitable for the cultures and traditions of non-Western countries like Iraq.
The subject of democracy has become severely muddled because of the way the rhetoric surrounding it has been used in recent years.
There is, increasingly, an oddly confused dichotomy between those who want to ‘impose’ democracy on countries in the non-Western world (in these countries’ ‘own interest’, of course) and those who are opposed to such ‘imposition’ (because of the respect for the countries’
‘own ways’). But the entire language of ‘imposition’, used by both sides, is extraordinarily inappropriate since it makes the implicit assumption that democracy belongs exclusively to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially ‘Western’ idea which has originated and flourished only in the West.
But that thesis and the pessimism it generates about the possibility of democratic practice in the world would be extremely hard to justify.
As it happens, even ‘the ink-cloud of the Ancient Indians’, as Rachel called them, is not entirely imaginary, since there were, in fact, several experiments in local democracy in ancient India (more on those presently). Indeed, in understanding the roots of democracy in the world, we have to take an interest in the history of people’s participation and public reasoning in different parts of the world. We have to look beyond thinking of democracy only in terms of European and American evolution. We would fail to understand the pervasive demands for participatory living, on which Aristotle spoke with far-reaching insight, if we take democracy to be a kind of a specialized cultural product of the West.
It cannot, of course, be doubted that the institutional structure 322
d e m o c r a c y a s p u b l i c r e a s o n of the contemporary practice of democracy is largely the product of European and American experience over the last few centuries.*
This is extremely important to recognize since these developments in institutional formats were immensely innovative and ultimately effective. There can be little doubt that there is a major ‘Western’
achievement here.
And yet, as Alexis de Tocqueville, the great historian of American democracy, noted in the early nineteenth century, while the ‘great democratic revolution’ occurring then in Europe and America was ‘a new thing’, it was also an expression of ‘the most continuous, ancient, and permanent tendency known to history’.† Even though Tocqueville’s own elucidation of this radical claim did not go beyond Europe, or further back than the twelfth century, the general point he was making has a much wider relevance. In assessing the pros and cons of democracy, we have to give an adequate recognition to the attraction of participatory governance that has surfaced and resurfaced with some consistency in different parts of the world. It has not been, to be sure, an irresistible force, but it has persistently challenged the unscrutinized belief that authoritarianism is an immovable object in most parts of the world. Democracy in its elaborate institutional form may be quite new in the world – its practice is hardly more than a couple of centuries old – and yet, as Tocqueville remarked, it gives expression to a tendency in social living that has a much longer and more widespread history. The critics of democracy – no matter how vigorous they may be in their rejection – must find some way of addressing the deep attraction of participatory governance, which is of continuing relevance today, and is hard to eradicate.
* As John Dunn points out in his illuminating book on the institutional history of democracy ( Democracy: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), p. 180): You can track the progress of representative democracy as a form of government from the 1780s until today, sticking pins into the map to record its advance, and noting not merely the growing homogenization of its institutional formats as the decades go by, but also the cumulative discrediting of the rich variety of other state forms which have competed against it throughout, often with very considerable initial assurance. The state form which advances across this time span was pioneered by Europeans; and it has spread in a world in which first Europe and then the United States wielded quite disproportionate military and economic power.
† Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated into English by George Lawrence (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990), p. 1.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e t h e c o n t e n t o f d e m o c r a c y
From earlier chapters of this book, it should be clear how central the role of public reasoning is for the understanding of justice. This recognition takes us to a connection between the idea of justice and the practice of democracy, since in contemporary political philosophy the view that democracy is best seen as ‘government by discussion’
has gained widespread support. That phrase, as was mentioned in the Introduction, was probably first coined by Walter Bagehot, but it is John Stuart Mill’s work that has played a big part in making that perspective better understood and well defended.*
There is, of course, the older – and more formal – view of democracy which characterizes it mainly in terms of elections and ballots, rather than in the broader perspective of government by discussion. And yet, in contemporary political philosophy, the understanding of democracy has broadened vastly, so that democracy is no longer seen just in terms of the demands for public balloting, but much more capaciously, in terms of what John Rawls calls �
�the exercise of public reason’.
Indeed, a large shift in the understanding of democracy has been brought about by the works of Rawls2 and Habermas,3 and by a large recent literature on this subject, including the contributions of Bruce Ackerman,4 Seyla Benhabib,5 Joshua Cohen,6 Ronald Dworkin,7
among others. A similar interpretation of democracy has also come from the writings of the pioneering ‘public choice’ theorist, James Buchanan.8
In his Theory of Justice, Rawls puts this focus upfront: ‘The definitive idea for deliberative democracy is the idea of deliberation itself.
When citizens deliberate, they exchange views and debate their supporting reasons concerning public political questions.’9
Habermas’s treatment of public reasoning is, in many ways, broader
* Clement Attlee invoked that particular description of democracy in what I can only describe as an ‘unjustly famous’ speech in Oxford in June 1957 when he could not resist the temptation to make a little joke – enjoyable enough, I suppose, when you hear it for the first time – on a really grand subject: ‘Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking’ (reported in The Times, 15 June 1957).
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d e m o c r a c y a s p u b l i c r e a s o n than Rawls’s, as Rawls himself has noted.10 Democracy is also given a more directly procedural form in Habermas’s exposition than in other approaches to democracy, including Rawls’s, even though (as argued in Chapter 5) the apparently sharp contrast between Rawlsian and Habermasian uses of procedural features in characterizing the process and outcome of public reasoning may be a little deceptive.
However, Habermas has made a truly definitive contribution in clarifying the broad reach of public reasoning and in particular the dual presence in political discourse of both ‘moral questions of justice’ and
‘instrumental questions of power and coercion’.*