The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

  Mandela’s understanding of democracy was hardly aided by the political practice that he saw around him in the apartheid state run by people of European origin, who, it is perhaps worth recollecting in this context, used to call themselves by the cultural term ‘European’

  rather than just ‘white’. In fact, Pretoria had little to contribute to Mandela’s comprehension of democracy. His discernment of democracy came, as we see from his autobiography, from his general ideas about political and social equality, which had global roots, and from his observations of the practice of participatory public discussion that he found in his local town.

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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 i s t h e m i d d l e e a s t a n e x c e p t i o n ?

  In re-examining the historical background of democratic features in the past, we also have to reassess the history of the Middle East, since there is an often-articulated belief that this block of countries has always been hostile to democracy. That constantly repeated conviction is exasperating for fighters for democracy in the Arab world, but as a piece of historical generalization it is basically nonsense. It is of course true that democracy as an institutional system has not been prominent in the past of the Middle East, but institutional democracy is in fact a very new phenomenon in most parts of the world.

  If we look instead for public reasoning and tolerance of different points of view, in line with the broader understanding of democracy that I have been discussing, then the Middle East does have quite a distinguished past. We must not confuse the narrow history of Islamic militancy with the capacious history of the Muslim people and the tradition of political governance by Muslim rulers. When the Jewish philosopher Maimonides was forced to emigrate from Spain in the twelfth century (when more tolerant Muslim regimes had given way to a far less tolerant Islamic regime), he sought shelter not in Europe but in a tolerant Muslim kingdom in the Arab world, and was given an honoured and influential position at the court of Emperor Saladin in Cairo. Saladin was certainly a strong Muslim; indeed, he fought hard for Islam in the Crusades and Richard the Lionheart was one of his distinguished opponents. But it was in Saladin’s kingdom where Maimonides found his new base and a renewed voice. Tolerance of dissent is, of course, central to the opportunity to exercise public reasoning, and the tolerant Muslim regimes in their heyday offered a freedom that Inquisition-ridden Europe sometimes withheld.

  Maimonides’ experience was not, however, exceptional. Indeed, even though the contemporary world is full of examples of conflicts between Muslims and Jews, Muslim rule in the Arab world and in medieval Spain had a long history of integrating Jews as secure members of the social community whose liberties – and sometimes 333

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e leadership roles – were respected.* For instance, as Maria Rosa Menocal has noted in her book, The Ornament of the World, by the tenth century the achievement of Cordoba in Muslim-ruled Spain as being

  ‘as serious a contender as Baghdad, perhaps more so, for the title of most civilized place on earth’ was due to the joint influence of Caliph Abd al-Rahman III and his Jewish vizier, Hasdai ibn Shaprut.19

  Middle Eastern history and the history of Muslim people also include a great many accounts of public discussion and political participation through dialogues. In Muslim kingdoms centred around Cairo, Baghdad and Istanbul, or in Iran, India or for that matter Spain, there were many champions of public discussion. The extent of toleration of diversity of views was often exceptional in comparison with Europe. For example, when in the 1590s the great Mughal emperor Akbar was making his pronouncements in India on the need for religious and political toleration, and when he was busy arranging organized dialogues between holders of different faiths (including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Jews and even atheists), the Inquisitions were still very active in Europe. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome for heresy in 1600, even when Akbar was lecturing in Agra on toleration and the need for dialogue across the borders of religions and ethnicities.

  The present-day problems of the Middle East and what is called, somewhat oversimply, ‘the Muslim world’, may well be immense, but a probing assessment of the causation of these problems requires, as I have argued in my book Identity and Violence (2006), a fuller understanding of the nature and dynamics of identity politics. This calls for the recognition of the multiple affiliations that people have other than that of their religion, and the fact that these loyalties can vary from secular priorities to political interest in exploiting religious differences. We have to take note also of the dialectical encounters of the Middle East with its own imperial past and the subjugation that followed from the dominance of an imperial West – a dominance that

  * It is important in this context to see how the influence of Islamic intellectual heritage affected the development of European culture and the emergence of many features that we now standardly associate with Western civilization. On this, see David Levering Lewis, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008).

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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 still has many remaining influences. The illusion of an inescapably non-democratic destiny of the Middle East is both confused and very seriously misleading – perniciously so – as a way of thinking about either world politics or global justice today.

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  The thesis that democracy is a Western intellectual inheritance derived from a long and unique past (unmatched anywhere else in the world) does not, therefore, work. It would not survive very well even if we took the rather limited public balloting view of democracy, and it does particularly badly when the history of democracy is seen in terms of public reasoning.

  One of the central issues to consider for the advancement of public reasoning in the world is support for a free and independent press, which is often conspicuous by its absence – a situation that can certainly be reversed. And here the traditions established in Europe and America over the last three hundred years have indeed made a gigantic difference. The lessons derived from these traditions have been transformational for the world as a whole, from India to Brazil, and from Japan to South Africa, and the need for a free and vigorous media is being rapidly learned across the globe. What I think is particularly heartening is the speed with which the coverage – and indeed sometimes the culture – of the media can change.*

  An unrestrained and healthy media is important for several different reasons, and it is useful to separate out the distinct contributions it can make. The first – and perhaps the most elementary – connection concerns the direct contribution of free speech in general and of press freedom in particular to the quality of our lives. We have reason enough to want to communicate with each other and to understand

  * On a personal note, I have to say that on my first visit to Thailand in 1964, I could have hardly guessed how the miserable newspaper situation in that country could so rapidly become enriched into what is now one of the most vigorous media traditions in the world, making a huge contribution to the reach of public discussion in that country.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e better the world in which we live. Media freedom is critically important for our capability to do this. The absence of a free media and the suppression of people’s ability to communicate with each other have the effect of directly reducing the quality of human life, even if the authoritarian country that imposes such suppression happens to be very rich in terms of gross national product.

  Second, the press has a major informational role in disseminating knowledge and allowing critical scrutiny. The informational function of the press relates not only to specialized reporting (for example on scientific advances or on cultural innovations), but also to keeping people generally informed about what is going on where. Furthermore, investigative journalism can unearth information that would have otherwise gone
unnoticed or even unknown.

  Third, media freedom has an important protective function in giving oice to the neglected and the disadvantaged, which can greatly contribute to human security. The rulers of a country are often insulated, in their own lives, from the misery of common people. They can live through a national calamity, such as a famine or some other disaster, without sharing the fate of its victims. If, however, they have to face public criticism in the media and confront elections with an uncensored press, the rulers have to pay a price too, and this gives them a strong incentive to take timely action to avert such crises. I shall further pursue this question in the next chapter, ‘The Practice of Democracy’.

  Fourth, informed and unregimented formation of values requires openness of communication and argument. The freedom of the press is crucial to this process. Indeed, reasoned value formation is an interactive process, and the press has a major role in making these interactions possible. New standards and priorities (such as the norm of smaller families with less frequent child bearing, or greater recognition of the need for gender equity) emerge through public discourse, and it is public discussion, again, that spreads the new norms across different regions.*

  * The role of communication and deliberation in social choice was discussed in Chapter 4, ‘Voice and Social Choice’. See also Kaushik Basu, The Retreat of Democracy And Other Itinerant Essays on Globalization, Economics, and India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).

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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 The relationship between majority rule and the protection of minority rights, both of which are integral parts of democratic practice, is particularly dependent on the formation of tolerant values and priorities. One of the lessons drawn from the social choice result of

  ‘the impossibility of the Paretian liberal’, as discussed in Chapter 14

  (‘Equality and Liberty’), is the crucial relevance of mutually tolerant preferences and choice in making liberty and liberal rights consistent with the priority of majority rule and of being guided by unanimity over particular choices. If a majority is ready to support the rights of minorities, and even of dissenting or discordant individuals, then liberty can be guaranteed without having to restrain majority rule.

  Finally, a well-functioning media can play a critically important role in facilitating public reasoning in general, the importance of which for the pursuit of justice has been a recurrent theme in this work. The evaluation needed for the assessment of justice is not just a solitary exercise but one that is inescapably discursive. It is not hard to see why a free, energetic and efficient media can facilitate the needed discursive process significantly. The media is important not only for democracy but for the pursuit of justice in general. ‘Discussionless justice’ can be an incarcerating idea.

  The many-sided relevance of the media connection also brings out the way institutional modifications can change the practice of public reason. The immediacy and strength of public reasoning depends not only on historically inherited traditions and beliefs, but also on the opportunities for discussion and interactions that the institutions and practice provide. The allegedly ‘age-old and unshiftable’ cultural parameters that are far too often invoked to ‘explain’, and even justify, the deficiencies in public discussion in a particular country, very often do a much worse job in providing a robust explanation than can be obtained from a fuller understanding of the working of modern authoritarianism – through censorship, regulation of the press, suppression of dissent, banning of opposition parties and the incarceration (or worse) of dissidents. The removal of those barriers is not the least of the contributions that the idea of democracy can make. It is a contribution that is important in itself, but further, if the approach developed in this book is right, it is centrally important for the pursuit of justice as well.

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  16

  The Practice of Democracy

  ‘The Secretary of State for India seems to be a strangely misinformed man,’ wrote The Statesman, the Calcutta newspaper, in a powerfully worded editorial, published on 16 October 1943.* It went on to say: Unless the cables are unfair to him, he told Parliament on Thursday that he understood that the weekly death-roll (presumably from starvation) in Bengal including Calcutta was about the 1,000, but that it might be higher. All the publicly available data indicate that it is very much higher; and his great office ought to afford him ample means of discovery.†

  Two days later the Governor of Bengal (Sir T. Rutherford) wrote to the Secretary of State for India:

  Your statement in the House about the number of deaths, which was presumably based on my communication to the Viceroy, has been severely criticised in some of the papers . . . The full effects of the shortage are now being felt, and I would put the death-roll now at no less than 2,000 a week.

  So what was it: 1,000 or 2,000, or something quite different?

  * In contrast with the rest of this book, this chapter is primarily empirical. An understanding of some of the central issues in political philosophy turn, as I have already discussed, on a plausible reading of the causal connections that influence social realization: the unfolding of nyaya from the institutional niti s. How democracies have tended to behave, and how the absence of democracy can be assessed, are part of the subject matter of this chapter. We can obtain some insights in examining these actual experiences, despite the well-known limitations involved in trying to get general empirical insights from studies of particular experiences and specific cases.

  † ‘The Death-Roll’, editorial, The Statesman, 16 October 1943. On this subject, see my Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), which also provides the full references for the citations used here.

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  t h e p r a c t i c e o f d e m o c r a c y The Famine Inquiry Commission that reported on the famine in December 1945 concluded that in the period July–December 1943, 1,304,323 deaths were recorded as against an average of 626,048 in the same period in the previous quinquennium, and it concluded that the number of further deaths due to the famine was over 678,000.

  That amounts to a weekly death toll not very close to 1,000 or 2,000, but rather larger than 26,000 every week.*

  The Bengal famine of 1943, which I witnessed as a child, was made viable not only by the lack of democracy in colonial India, but also by severe restrictions on reporting and criticism imposed on the Indian press, and the voluntary practice of ‘silence’ on the famine that the British-owned media chose to follow (as a part of the alleged ‘war effort’, for fear of aiding the Japanese military forces that were at the door of India, in Burma). The combined effect of imposed and voluntary media silence was to prevent substantial public discussion on the famine in metropolitan Britain, including in Parliament in London, which neither discussed the famine, nor considered the policy needs of dealing with it (that is, not until October 1943 when The Statesman forced its hand). There was of course no parliament in India under the British colonial administration.

  In fact, governmental policy, far from being helpful, actually exacer-bated the famine. There was no official famine relief over the many months in which thousands were dying every week. More than this, the famine was aggravated, first, by the fact that the British India Government in New Delhi had suspended the trade in rice and food grains between the Indian provinces, so that food could not move through legitimate channels of private trade despite the much higher price of food in Bengal. Second, rather than trying to get more food into Bengal from abroad – the New Delhi colonial administration was adamant that it did not want to do that – the official policy took the form of looking for food exports out of Bengal over that period.

  * In my Poverty and Famines (1981), I show that the Famine Inquiry Commission’s own estimate of the total death toll from the famine was also a serious underestimation mainly because the increase in mortality caused by the famine remained for a number of years following the starvation because of the ongoing fam
ine-induced epidemics (Appendix D). See also my entry on ‘Human Disasters’ in The Oxford Handbook of Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e Indeed, even as late as January 1943, when the famine was about to break, the Viceroy of India told the head of the local Bengal government that he ‘simply must produce some more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon even if Bengal itself went short!’.1

  It must be mentioned here, to make any kind of sense of British Indian official thinking on the subject, that these policies were based on the idea that there was no particular decline in food output in Bengal at that time, and ‘therefore’ a famine ‘simply could not occur’

  there. The government’s understanding of the volume of the food output was not altogether wrong, but its theory of famine was disastrously mistaken, since the demand for food had radically expanded, primarily because of the war effort in Bengal, with the arrival of soldiers and other war personnel, new construction and ancillary economic activities associated with the war boom. A very substantial part of the population, mostly in rural areas, with stationary income, was facing much higher food prices, thanks to the demand-fed price rise, and consequently starved. To secure the ability of the vulnerable to buy food, it would have helped to have given them more income and purchasing power, for example through emergency employment or public relief, but help could also have come from having a larger supply of food grains in the region – despite the fact that the crisis was not caused by a supply decline, but by a demand rise.

  What was extraordinary, even beyond the colonial government’s belief in a wrong theory of famine, was New Delhi’s inability to notice that so many thousands were actually dying on the streets every day: the officers had to be real ‘theorists’ to miss the facts on the ground in such a gross way. A democratic system with public criticism and parliamentary pressure would not have allowed the officials, including the Governor of Bengal and the Viceroy of India, to think the way they did.*