The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

  † We live today in a phase of world history that is peculiarly interconnected through war as well as peace. Indeed, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, ‘it would be easier to write about the subject of war and peace in the twentieth century if the difference between the two remained as clear-cut as it was supposed to be at the beginning of the century’

  (Hobsbawm, Globalization, Democracy and Terrorism (London: Little, Brown & Co., 2007), p. 19). See also Geir Lundestad and Olav Njølstad (eds), War and Peace in the 20th Century and Beyond (London: World Scientific, 2002), and Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-first Century (London: Allen Lane, 2008).

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  j u s t i c e a n d t h e w o r l d Further, AIDS and other epidemics have moved from country to country, and from continent to continent; equally, the medicines developed and produced in some parts of the world are important for the lives and freedoms of people far away. Many other avenues of interdependence can also be readily identified.

  The interdependences also include the impact of a sense of injustice in one country on lives and freedom in others. ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ said Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1963, in a letter from Birmingham jail.* Discontent based on injustice in one country can rapidly spread to other lands: our ‘neighbourhoods’ now effectively extend across the world.† Our involvement with others through trade and communication is remarkably extensive in the contemporary world, and further, our global contacts, in terms of literary, artistic and scientific endeavour, make it hard for us to expect that an adequate consideration of diverse interests or concerns can be plausibly confined to the citizenry of any given country, ignoring all others.

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  In addition to the global features of interdependent interests, there is a second ground – that of avoidance of the trap of parochialism – for accepting the necessity of taking an ‘open’ approach to examining the demands of impartiality. If the discussion of the demands of justice is confined to a particular locality – a country or even a larger region –

  there is a possible danger of ignoring or neglecting many challenging counter-arguments that might not have come up in local political debates, or been accommodated in the discourses confined to the local culture, but which are eminently worth considering, in an impartial perspective. It is this limitation of reliance on parochial reasoning, linked with national traditions and regional understandings, that

  * For the background to King’s judgement on the relevance of global justice for local justice, see The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. , edited by Clayborne Carson (New York: Werner Books, 2001).

  † This has been discussed in Chapter 7, ‘Position, Relevance and Illusion’.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e Adam Smith wanted to resist. He did so by using the device of the impartial spectator, in the form of a thought-experiment that asked what would a particular practice or procedure look like to a disinterested person – from far or near.*

  Smith was particularly concerned about avoiding the grip of parochialism in jurisprudence and moral and political reasoning. In a chapter entitled ‘On the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon the Sentiments of Moral Approbation and Disapprobation’, he gives various examples of how discussions confined within a given society can be incarcerated within a seriously narrow understanding.

  . . . the murder of new-born infants was a practice allowed of in almost all the states of Greece, even among the polite and civilized Athenians; and whenever the circumstances of the parent rendered it inconvenient to bring up the child, to abandon it to hunger, or to wild beasts, was regarded without blame or censure . . . Uninterrupted custom had by this time so thoroughly authorized the practice, that not only the loose maxims of the world tolerated this barbarous prerogative, but even the doctrine of philosophers, which ought to have been more just and accurate, was led away by the established custom, and upon this as upon many other occasions, instead of censuring, supported the horrible abuse, by far-fetched considerations of public utility.

  Aristotle talks of it as of what the magistrate ought upon many occasions to encourage. The humane Plato is of the same opinion, and, with all that love of mankind which seems to animate all his writings, nowhere marks this practice with disapprobation.5

  Adam Smith’s insistence that we must inter alia view our sentiments from ‘a certain distance from us’ is thus motivated by the objective of scrutinizing not only the influence of vested interests, but also the captivating hold of entrenched traditions and customs.

  While Smith’s example of infanticide remains sadly apposite today,

  * Smith’s approach of the impartial spectator was examined in Chapter 6, ‘Closed and Open Impartiality’. It is important to recognize that the device of the impartial spectator is used by Smith to open up questioning, rather than close down a debate with a formulaic answer allegedly derived from the impartial spectator seen as a definitive arbitrator. For Smith, the impartial spectator, who raises a great many relevant questions, is a part of the discipline of impartial reasoning, and it is in that sense that the idea has been used in this work.

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  j u s t i c e a n d t h e w o r l d though only in a few societies, some of his other examples have relevance to many other contemporary societies as well. This applies, for instance, to his insistence that ‘the eyes of the rest of mankind’ must be invoked to understand whether ‘a punishment appears equitable’.6 I suppose even the practice of lynching of identified ‘miscreants’

  appeared to be perfectly just and equitable to the strong-armed enforcers of order and decency in the American South, not very long ago.* Even today, scrutiny from a ‘distance’ may be useful for practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, selective abortion of female foetuses in China, Korea and parts of India,† and widespread use of capital punishment in China, or for that matter in the United States (with or without the celebratory public jubilations that are not entirely unknown in some parts of the country).‡ Closed impartiality lacks something of the quality that makes impartiality – and fairness – so central to the idea of justice.

  The relevance of distant perspectives has a clear bearing on some current debates in the United States, for example that in the Supreme Court in 2005, on the appropriateness of death sentence for crimes committed in a person’s juvenile years. The demands of justice being seen to be done, even in a country like the United States cannot entirely neglect the understanding that may be generated by asking questions about how the problem is assessed in other countries in the world, from Europe and Brazil to India and Japan. The majority judgment of the Court, as it happens, was against the use of the death sentence for a crime that was committed in juvenile years, even

  * See, for example, Walter Johnson’s study of the ideas surrounding slave markets in the south of the United States: Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  † On this, see my ‘The Many Faces of Gender Inequality’, The New Republic, 522

  (17 September 2001), and Frontline, 18 (2001).

  ‡ Amnesty International reports that of the 2,390 people known to have been executed in 2008, 1,718 were in China, followed by Iran (346), Saudi Arabia (102), the United States (37) and Pakistan (36). In the whole of the two continents of North and South America, there is ‘only one state – the United States – [that] consistently executes’ (‘Report Says Executions Doubled Worldwide’, New York Times, 25 March 2009).

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e though the execution would take place after the person had reached adulthood.*

  With the change in the composition of the US Supreme Court, this judgment may no longer be easy to sustain. In an explicit statement at his confirmation hearing, the current Chief Justice, John G. Roberts, Jr., has expresse
d his agreement with the minority opinion of the court, which would have allowed execution for a murder committed by a minor person once he or she had reached adulthood: ‘If we’re relying on a decision from a German judge about what our Constitution means, no president accountable to the people appointed that judge . . . And yet he’s playing a role in shaping the law that binds the people in this country.’7 To this, Justice Ginsburg, who voted with the majority of the Supreme Court at the time of the judgment, has responded: ‘Why shouldn’t we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article written by a professor?’8

  General wisdom, including its connection with law, is certainly one issue, and Ginsburg is right to think that it can come from abroad as well as home.† But there is a more specific point of relevance to the debate, made by Adam Smith, that distant judgments are particularly important to consider and scrutinize in order to avoid being trapped in local or national parochialism. It is for that reason that Smith argued for taking note of what is seen by ‘the eyes of the rest of mankind’. In denying the appropriateness of capital punishment in the case of murder committed by a minor, the majority in the Supreme Court did not simply ‘defer to like-minded foreigners’ (as Justice Scalia, who wrote a dissenting note at the time of the court judgment, suggested). Scrutiny from ‘a distance’ can be very useful in order to arrive at grounded but open-minded judgements, taking note of

  * Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 2005.

  † Unlike some of the US Supreme Court judges, who took the view that it would be wrong to pay attention to foreigners and their evaluations in making legal judgments in the United States, civil society in America is not insistent on ignoring the ideas of foreigners (from Jesus Christ to Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela) that have a bearing on the demands of law and justice today. It is quite a specialized thesis to assert that while it was OK for Jefferson to be influenced by the arguments of foreigners, the ears should now be closed to arguments presented outside the United States.

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  j u s t i c e a n d t h e w o r l d questions that consideration of non-local perspectives can help to generate (as Smith discussed in some detail).

  Indeed, the apparent cogency of parochial values often turns on the lack of knowledge of what has proved feasible in the experiences of other people. The inertial defence of infanticide in ancient Greece, on which Smith wrote, was clearly influenced by the lack of knowledge of other societies in which infanticide is ruled out and yet which do not crumble into chaos and crisis as a result. Despite the undoubted importance of ‘local knowledge’, global knowledge has some value too, and can contribute to the debates on local values and practices.

  To listen to distant voices, which is part of Adam Smith’s exercise of invoking the ‘impartial spectator’, does not require us to be respect-ful of every argument that may come from abroad. Willingness to consider an argument proposed elsewhere is very far from a predis-position to accept all such proposals. We may reject a great many of the proposed arguments – sometimes even all of them – and yet there would remain particular cases of reasoning that could make us reconsider our own understandings and views, linked with the experiences and conventions entrenched in a country, or in a culture.

  Arguments that may first appear to be ‘outlandish’ (especially when they do actually come, initially, from other lands) may help to enrich our thinking if we try to engage with the reasoning behind these locally atypical contentions. Many people in the USA or China may not be impressed by the mere fact that many other countries – the bulk of Europe for example – do not allow capital punishment. And yet if reasons are important, there would be, in general, a strong case for examining the justificatory arguments against capital punishment that are used elsewhere.*

  * There would, of course, be a similar case for continuing to examine the arguments in favour of using capital punishment that may emanate from the USA or China, or any other country that makes substantial use of that system of punishment.

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  Giving serious consideration to distinct and contrary arguments and analyses coming from different quarters is a participatory process that has much in common with the working of democracy through public reasoning, which was explored earlier.* The two are not of course the same, since democracy is concerned with a political assessment –

  leading us (in this interpretation) to ‘government by discussion’ –

  whereas undertaking non-self-centred and non-parochial scrutiny through paying attention to distant perspectives may be largely motivated by the demands of objectivity. And yet there are common features, and indeed, even the demands of democracy can be (at least in one interpretation) seen as ways of enhancing the objectivity of the political process.† It can be asked, in this context, what the implications of these recognitions are for the demands of global justice and also for the nature and requirements of global democracy.

  The point is often made, with evident plausibility, that, for the foreseeable future, it is really impossible to have a global state, and therefore a fortiori a global democratic state. This is indeed so, and yet if democracy is seen in terms of public reasoning, then the practice of global democracy need not be put in indefinite cold storage. Voices that can make a difference come from several sources, including global institutions as well as less formal communications and exchanges.

  These articulations are not, of course, perfect for the purpose of global arguments, but they do exist and actually operate with some effectiveness, and they can be made more effective through supporting the institutions that help the dissemination of information and enhance the opportunities for discussions across borders. The plurality of sources enriches the reach of global democracy seen in this light.‡

  * See Chapters 15, ‘Democracy as Public Reason’, 16, ‘The Practice of Democracy’, and 17, ‘Human Rights and Global Imperatives’.

  † See Chapter 15, ‘Democracy as Public Reason’.

  ‡ Just as in the assessment of justice, in which the case for comparisons is strong (as has been argued throughout this work), for democracy too the central question is not so much the characterization of an imagined perfect democracy (even if there could 408

  j u s t i c e a n d t h e w o r l d Many institutions have a role here, including the United Nations and the institutions associated with it, but there is also the committed work of citizens’ organizations, of many NGOs and of parts of the news media. There is also an important role for the initiatives taken by a great many individual activists, working together. Washington and London may have been irritated by the widely dispersed criticism of the Coalition strategy in Iraq, just as Paris or Tokyo may be appalled by the spectacular vilification of global business in parts of the so-called ‘anti-globalization’ protests – one of the most globalized movements in the world today. The points that the protesters make are not invariably sensible (sometimes not at all), but many of them do ask very relevant questions and thus contribute constructively to public reasoning.

  The distribution of the benefits of global relations depends not only on domestic policies, but also on a variety of international social arrangements, including trade agreements, patent laws, global health initiatives, international educational provisions, facilities for techno-logical dissemination, ecological and environmental restraint, treatment of accumulated debts (often incurred by irresponsible military rulers of the past), and the restraining of conflicts and local wars.

  These are all eminently discussable issues which could be fruitful subjects for global dialogue, including criticisms coming from far as well as near.*

  Active public agitation, news commentary and open discussion are be agreement on what it would be like), but how the reach and vigour of democracy can be enhanced. See also Chapters 15, ‘Democracy as Public Reason’, an
d 16, ‘The Practice of Democracy’.

  * The global reach of voices coming from previously ignored nations is also much larger now in what Fareed Zakaria calls ‘the post-American world’ at a time when a

  ‘great transformation is taking place around the world’ (Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), p. 1). That is certainly an important change, but there also remains the need to go beyond voices coming from countries with recent economic success (including, in different ways, China, Brazil, India and others), which speak more forcefully now, but often do not represent the concerns and views of people in countries with lesser economic stride (including much of Africa and parts of Latin America). There is also the need, in any country, to go beyond the voices of governments, military leaders, business tycoons and others in commanding positions, who tend to get an easy hearing across borders, and to pay attention to the civil societies and less powerful people in different countries around the world.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e among the ways in which global democracy can be pursued, even without waiting for the global state. The challenge today is the strengthening of this already functioning participatory process, on which the pursuit of global justice will to a great extent depend. It is not a negligible cause.

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  If the reliance on public reasoning is an important aspect of the approach to justice presented in this work, so is the form in which questions of justice are asked. There is a strong case, I have argued, for replacing what I have been calling transcendental institutionalism

  – that underlies most of the mainstream approaches to justice in contemporary political philosophy, including John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness – by focusing questions of justice, first, on assessments of social realizations, that is, on what actually happens (rather than merely on the appraisal of institutions and arrangements); and second, on comparative issues of enhancement of justice (rather than trying to identify perfectly just arrangements). That programme, which was outlined in the Introduction, has been followed throughout the book, making use of the demands of impartiality in open public reasoning.