The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

In the debates on the characterization of the nature and outcome of public reasoning there has been some misunderstanding of each other’s views. For example, Ju¨rgen Habermas remarks that John Rawls’s theory ‘generates a priority of liberal rights which demotes the democratic process to an inferior status’, and includes in his list of rights that liberals want ‘liberty of belief and conscience, the protection of life, personal liberty, and property’.† The inclusion of property rights here does not, however, match John Rawls’s stated position on this, since a general right to property is not an entitlement that Rawls has, in fact, defended in any of his works of which I am aware.‡

  * Habermas has also commented illuminatingly on the differences between three conceptually disparate general approaches to the idea and role of public reasoning.

  He contrasts his ‘procedural-deliberative view’ with what he describes as the ‘liberal’

  and ‘republican’ views (see his ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)). See also Seyla Benhabib, ‘Introduction: The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference’, in Democracy and Difference (1996), and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

  † Ju¨rgen Habermas, ‘Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism’, Journal of Philosophy, 92 (1995), pp. 127–8.

  ‡ Perhaps Habermas is influenced in his diagnosis by the fact that Rawls makes room for catering to the need for incentives, which could give property rights an important instrumental role. Rawls does allow inequalities in his perfectly just arrangements for reasons of incentives when they enhance the deal the worst-off receive. I have discussed this issue in Chapter 2 (‘Rawls and Beyond’) in addressing G. A. Cohen’s critique (in his book, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 2008) of this feature of Rawlsian principles of justice. Whether the acceptance of inequalities on grounds of incentives should have any role in what is claimed to be a perfectly just society is certainly debatable, but it 325

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e There are, clearly, many differences in the distinct ways in which the role of public reasoning in politics and discursive ethics can be viewed.* However, the main thesis that I am trying to explore here is not threatened by the existence of these differences. What is more important to note is that the totality of these new contributions has helped to bring about the general recognition that the central issues in a broader understanding of democracy are political participation, dialogue and public interaction. The crucial role of public reasoning in the practice of democracy makes the entire subject of democracy relate closely with the topic that is central to this work, namely justice.

  If the demands of justice can be assessed only with the help of public reasoning, and if public reasoning is constitutively related to the idea of democracy, then there is an intimate connection between justice and democracy, with shared discursive features.

  However, the idea of seeing democracy as ‘government by discussion’, which is so widely accepted in political philosophy today (though not always by political institutionalists), is sometimes in tension with contemporary discussions on democracy and its role in older – and more rigidly organizational – terms. The niti-oriented institutional understanding of democracy, seen in terms just of ballots and elections, is not only traditional but it has been championed by many contemporary political commentators, including Samuel Huntington: ‘Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non.’11 Despite the general transformation in the conceptual understanding of democracy in political philosophy, the history of democracy is often recounted, even now, in rather narrowly organizational terms, focusing particularly on the procedure of balloting and elections.

  Ballots do, of course, have a very important role even for the is important to see that Rawls does not support unconditional property rights as a part of a libertarian entitlement, as, for example, Robert Nozick does ( Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974).

  * See Joshua Cohen, ‘Deliberative Democracy and Democratic Legitimacy’, in Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (eds), The Good Polity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Jon Elster (ed.), Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); James Bohman and William Rehg, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

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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 expression and effectiveness of the process of public reasoning, but they are not the only thing that matters, and they can be seen just as one part – admittedly a very important part – of the way public reason operates in a democratic society. Indeed, the effectiveness of ballots themselves depends crucially on what goes with balloting, such as free speech, access to information and freedom of dissent.* Balloting alone can be thoroughly inadequate on its own, as is abundantly illustrated by the astounding electoral victories of ruling tyrannies in authoritarian regimes in the past as well as those in the present, for example in today’s North Korea. The difficulty lies not just in the political and punitive pressure that is brought to bear on voters in the balloting itself, but in the way expressions of public views are thwarted by censorship, informational exclusion and a climate of fear, along with the suppression of political opposition and the independence of the media, and the absence of basic civil rights and political liberties. All this makes it largely redundant for the ruling powers to use much force to ensure conformism in the act of voting itself. Indeed, a great many dictators in the world have achieved gigantic electoral victories even without any overt coercion in the process of voting, mainly through suppressing public discussion and freedom of information, and through generating a climate of apprehension and anxiety.

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  Even if it is accepted that, properly understood, democracy is closely linked with the analysis of justice as is being explored in this work, is there not a serious difficulty in thinking of the pervasive and omnipresent idea of justice, which inspires discussion and agitation right across the world, in terms of what is often seen as a quintessentially

  ‘Western’ idea in the form of democracy. Are we not, it can be asked, trying in this exercise to focus on a purely Western feature of political

  * On the importance of freedom of speech and the arguments related to it in the United States, see Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e organization as a general approach to fairness and justice in the world?

  If public reasoning is so critically important for the practice of justice, can we even think about justice in the world at large when the art of public reasoning as a part of democracy seems to be, according to common belief, so quintessentially Western and locationally confined?

  The belief that democracy is basically a Western notion with European

  – and American – origins is a widespread one, and it does have some apparent plausibility, despite its being ultimately a wrong and superficial diagnosis.

  John Rawls and Thomas Nagel may have been discouraged about the possibility of global justice because of the absence of a global sovereign state (as discussed in the Introduction), but is there not another difficulty in trying to see the enhancement of global justice through public discussion of, for and by the people of the world? It has been already argued in this work (particularly in Chapters 5

  ‘Impartiality and Objectivity’, and 6 ‘Closed and Open Impartiality’) that the demands for open impartiality make the global perspective a necessity for a full consideration of justice anywhere in the contemporary world. If that is correct, would that necessity not, in
fact, be impossible to meet if it were to turn out that people of the world fall into rigidly separated groups, many of whom could not be drawn into public reasoning in any way whatsoever? This is a huge question, which despite its extensive empirical correlates, can hardly be avoided in this work on the theory of justice. It is, therefore, important to examine whether the tradition of democracy, either in its largely organizational interpretation in terms of ballots and election, or more generally as

  ‘government by discussion’, is quintessentially ‘Western’ or not.

  When democracy is seen in the broader perspective of public reasoning, going well beyond the specific institutional features that have emerged particularly strongly in Europe and America over the last few centuries, we have to reassess the intellectual history of participatory governance in different countries in many parts of the world – not just those in Europe and North America.12 Cultural separatists, who criticize the claim of democracy to be a universal value, often point to the unique role of ancient Greece, particularly that of ancient Athens, where balloting emerged in a particular form in the sixth century bc.

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  Ancient Greece was indeed quite unique.* Its contribution to both the form and the understanding of the content of democracy cannot be overemphasized. But to see that experience as clear evidence that democracy is a quintessentially ‘European’ or ‘Western’ idea deserves much more critical scrutiny than it tends to get. It is, for one thing, particularly important to understand that even the success of Athenian democracy turned on the climate of open public discussion, rather than just balloting, and while balloting certainly began in Greece, the tradition of public discussion (very strong in Athens and ancient Greece) has had a much more widespread history.

  Even as far balloting is concerned, the tendency to seek backing for a culturally segregationist view of the origins of elections in Europe calls for some further examination. First, there is an elementary difficulty in trying to define civilizations not in terms of the exact history of ideas and actions but in terms of broad regionality, for instance, being ‘European’ or ‘Western’, with a grossly aggregative attribution.

  In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Vikings and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the electoral tradition of ancient Greece (since they are part of ‘the European stock’), even though ancient Greeks, who were very involved in intellectual interchange with other ancient civilizations to the east or south of Greece (in particular Iran, India

  * Ancient Greece also had a remarkable combination of circumstances that made the emergence of democratic procedures possible and viable. As John Dunn’s penetrating history of democracy brings out, democratic governance ‘began as an improvised remedy for a very local Greek difficulty two and half thousands years ago, flourished briefly but scintillatingly, and then faded away almost everywhere for all but two thousand years’ ( Democracy: A History (2005), pp. 13–14). While I am arguing that democracy, broadly understood in terms of public reasoning, did not have such an ephemeral history of rise and fall, Dunn’s remark would certainly apply to the formal institutions of democracy that emerged in ancient Greece and were temporarily instituted in a number of countries like Iran, India and Bactria (influenced by the Greek experience – to be discussed presently), but would not re-emerge until much nearer our times.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e and Egypt), seem to have taken little interest in chatting up the lively Goths and Visigoths.

  The second problem relates to what actually followed the early Greek experience of balloting. While Athens certainly was the pioneer in getting balloting started, many Asian regions used balloting in the centuries that followed, largely under Greek influence. There is no evidence that the Greek experience in electoral governance had much immediate impact in the countries to the west of Greece and Rome, in, say, what is now France or Germany or Britain. In contrast, some of the cities in Asia – in Iran, Bactria and India – incorporated elements of democracy in municipal governance in the centuries following the flowering of Athenian democracy; for example, for several centuries the city of Shushan, or Susa, in South-West Iran, had an elected council, a popular assembly and magistrates who were elected by the assembly.*

  The practice of municipal democracy in ancient India is also well recorded. It was to this literature that Sidney Quarles was referring, in his conversations with Rachel, as the subject of his imagined studies in London, though he even quoted the names of the relevant authors on the subject accurately enough.13 B. R. Ambedkar, who chaired the drafting committee that wrote up the new Indian constitution for adoption by the Constituent Assembly shortly after Indian independence in 1947, wrote fairly extensively on the relevance, if any, of India’s ancient experiences in local democracy for the design of a large democracy for the whole of modern India.†

  The practice of elections, in fact, has had a considerable history in non-Western societies, but it is the broader view of democracy in terms of public reasoning that makes it abundantly clear that the

  * See also the various Indian examples of local democratic governance in Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India (1919) (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1958).

  † In fact, after his studies of ancient Indian history in local democracy, Ambedkar saw, eventually, little merit in drawing on that old – and strictly local – experience for devising a constitution for modern Indian democracy. He went on to argue that

  ‘localism’ generated ‘narrow-mindedness and communalism’, and remarked that ‘these village republics have been the ruination of India’ (see The Essential Writings of B. R.

  Ambedkar, edited by Valerian Rodrigues (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), particularly essay 32: ‘Basic Features of the Indian Constitution’).

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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 cultural critique of democracy as a purely regional phenomenon fails altogether.14 While Athens certainly has an excellent record in public discussion, open deliberation also flourished in several other ancient civilizations, sometimes spectacularly so; for example, some of the earliest open general meetings aimed specifically at settling disputes between different points of view, on social and religious matters, took place in India in the so-called Buddhist ‘councils’, where adherents of different points of view got together to argue out their differences, beginning in the sixth century bc. The first of these councils met in Rajagriha (modern Rajgir) shortly after Gautama Buddha’s death, and the second was held, about a hundred years later, in Vaisali. The last one happened in the second century ad in Kashmir.

  Emperor Ashoka, who hosted the third and the largest Buddhist Council in the third century bc in Patna (then called Pataliputra), the capital city of the Indian empire, also tried to codify and propagate what were among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion (some kind of an early version of the nineteenth-century

  ‘Robert’s rules of order’).* To choose another historical example, in early seventh-century Japan the Buddhist Prince Shotoku, who was Regent to his mother, Empress Suiko, produced the so-called ‘constitution of seventeen articles’, in 604 ad. The constitution insisted, much in the spirit of the Magna Carta, signed six centuries later in 1215 a d: ‘Decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone. They should be discussed with many.’15 Some commentators have seen in this seventh-century Buddhism-inspired constitution, Japan’s ‘first step of gradual development toward democracy’.16 The Constitution of Seventeen Articles went on to explain:

  ‘Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong.’ Indeed, the importance of public discussion is a recurrent theme in the history of
many countries in the non-Western world.

  The relevance of this global history does not, however, lie in any implicit presumption that we cannot break from history, cannot initiate a departure. Indeed, departures from the past are always

  * See Chapter 3, ‘Institutions and Persons’, and also The Argumentative Indian (2005).

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e needed in different ways across the world. We do not have to be born in a country with a long democratic history to choose that path today.

  The significance of history in this respect lies rather in the more general understanding that established traditions continue to exert some influence on people’s ideas, that they can inspire or deter, and they have to be taken into account whether we are moved by them, or wish to resist and transcend them, or (as the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore discussed with compelling clarity) want to examine and scrutinize what we should take from the past and what we must reject, in the light of our contemporary concerns and priorities.17

  It is not, therefore, surprising – though it does deserve clearer recognition today – that in the fight for democracy led by visionary and fearless political leaders across the world (such as Sun Yat-sen, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, or Aung San Suu Kyi), an awareness of local as well as world history has played an importantly constructive part. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela describes how impressed and influenced he was, as a young boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the local meetings that were held in the regent’s house in Mqhekezweni:

  Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form.

  There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer . . . The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.18