by Amartya Sen
The approach developed in this book is much influenced by the tradition of social choice theory (initiated by Condorcet in the eighteenth century and firmly established by Kenneth Arrow in our own time), and concentrates, as the discipline of social choice does, on making evaluative comparisons over distinct social realizations.* In
* The pioneering contribution to modern social choice theory was undoubtedly Kenneth Arrow’s path-breaking book Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: John Wiley, 1951). But the elegance and reach of Arrow’s astonishing ‘impossibility theorem’ presented in that book inclined many readers to assume that social choice theory must be forever preoccupied with tackling ‘impossibilities’ regarding rational social choice. In fact, the framework used by Arrow, with some small but effective extensions, can be the basis of constructive social analysis as well (on this see my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco, CA: Holden-Day, 1970; republished, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979)). The usability and contribution of 410
j u s t i c e a n d t h e w o r l d this respect, the approach here also has important similarities with the works of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, among others.*
While the roots of the approach go back to the Enlightenment, there is a significant contrast with another tradition particularly cultivated over that period – the discipline of reasoning about justice in terms of the idea of a social contract. The contractarian tradition goes back at least to Thomas Hobbes, but also had major contributions from Locke, Rousseau and Kant, and in our time from leading philosophical theorists from Rawls to Nozick, Gauthier, Dworkin and others. In opting for the social choice approach rather than that of the social contract, it is not of course my intention to deny the understanding and illumination that have been generated by the latter approach to justice. However, enlightening as the social contract tradition is, I have argued that its limitations in providing an underpinning for a theory of justice with adequate reach are so strong that it ultimately serves partly as a barrier to practical reason on justice.
The theory of justice, which is most widely used now and which has served as the point of departure for this work is, of course, the theory of ‘justice as fairness’ presented by John Rawls. Even though Rawls’s broad political analysis has many other elements, his justice as fairness has the characteristics of being directly concerned only with the identification of just institutions. There is a transcendentalism here, even though (as was discussed earlier) Rawls made deeply enlightening observations on comparative issues and also tried to take note of possible disagreements on the nature of a perfectly just society.†
Rawls focused on institutions as the subject matter of his principles of justice. His concentration on institutional choice does not, however, reflect his lack of interest in social realizations. The social realizations social choice theory for the analysis of justice was discussed in Chapter 4, ‘Voice and Social Choice’.
* I have also discussed earlier the similarity between the approach here and the long Indian tradition of seeing justice as nyaya (concentrating on comprehensive outcomes), rather than as niti (focusing on arrangements and institutions). On this, see the Introduction and also Chapter 3, ‘Institutions and Persons’.
† See the discussion on this in the Introduction and in Chapter 2, ‘Rawls and Beyond’.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e are assumed in Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ to be determined by a combination of just institutions and fully compliant behaviour by all to make a predictable transition from institutions to states of affairs.
This is related to Rawls’s attempt at getting to a perfectly just society with a combination of ideal institutions and corresponding ideal behaviour.* In a world where those extremely demanding behavioural assumptions do not hold, the institutional choices made will tend not to deliver the kind of society that would have strong claims to being seen as perfectly just.
d i f f e r e n c e s a n d c o m m o n a l i t i e s In a memorable observation in the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes noted that the lives of people were ‘nasty, brutish and short’. That was a good starting point for a theory of justice in 1651, and I am afraid it is a still good starting point for a theory of justice today, since the lives of so many people across the world have exactly those dire features, despite the substantial material progress of others. Indeed, a good deal of the theory presented here has been directly concerned with people’s lives and capabilities, and the deprivation and suppression suffered.† Even though Hobbes moved on from his powerful characterization of human deprivation to the idealist approach of a social contract (the limitations of which I have tried to discuss), there can be little doubt about the life-enhancing motivations that inspired
* There is, however, some lacuna here (as was discussed earlier) since Rawls does not demand sufficiently selfless behaviour to make it redundant to accommodate inequalities for the sake of incentives. This is so despite his evident egalitarianism, which would make us think that he would have found a society without incentive-relative inequality to have a better claim to be seen as perfectly just. By restraining his behavioural demands in line with allowing incentive-based inequalities (on which G. A. Cohen has complained with reason), Rawls makes a compromise towards pragmatism at the cost of an imaginary ideal. But questions of realism arise with the other demanding behavioural assumptions that Rawls does in fact make. The issue was discussed in Chapter 2, ‘Rawls and Beyond’.
† See Chapter 11, ‘Lives, Freedoms and Capabilities’, but also Chapters 10, ‘Realizations, Consequences and Agency’, 12, ‘Capabilities and Resources’, 13, ‘Happiness, Well-being and Capabilities’, and 14, ‘Equality and Liberty’.
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j u s t i c e a n d t h e w o r l d Hobbes. Much the same thing can be said about the theories of justice of Rawls or Dworkin or Nagel today, for example, even though formally they have anchored their principles of justice to certain arrangements and rules (thereby going in the direction of niti, rather than nyaya), rather than directly to social realizations and human lives and freedoms. The connections between the disparate theories of justice have to be firmly noted since, in the debates about different theories, the focus tends to be on differences rather than on similarities.*
As this book is completed, I realize that I too have largely suc-cumbed to the analytical temptation to concentrate on distinctions and to highlight contrasts. And yet there is an important shared involvement in being concerned with justice in the first place. No matter where our theories of justice take us, we all have reasons to be grateful for the recent intellectual animation around them, which has been, to a great extent, initiated and inspired by John Rawls’s pioneering move in this field, beginning with his outstanding paper in 1958 (‘Justice as Fairness’).
Philosophy can – and does – produce extraordinarily interesting and important work on a variety of subjects that have nothing to do with the deprivations and inequities and unfreedoms of human lives.
This is as it should be, and there is much to rejoice in the expansion and consolidation of the horizon of our understanding in every field of human curiosity. However, philosophy can also play a part in bringing more discipline and greater reach to reflections on values and priorities as well as on the denials, subjugations and humiliations from which human beings suffer across the world. A shared commitment of
* For example, while I find Barbara Herman’s excellent arguments on the reach and importance of what she calls ‘moral literacy’ to be extremely illuminating, I cannot but resist her claim that ‘most of what is required of us individually in this way of helping strangers falls under the general obligation to support just institutions’
(Herman, Moral Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 223).
One could hope that strangers badly in need would have some direct claim to just consideration by others at home and abroad, not merely through ‘the obligation to support just institutions’,
particularly when just institutions are derived from ‘an approximately Kantian or liberal account of social justice, based in something like a nation or a state’ (Herman, p. 222). The limitations of an institution-focused view of justice with direct reach only within a nation or a state was discussed in the Introduction, and also in Chapters 2–7.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e theories of justice is to take these issues seriously and to see what they can do in terms of practical reasoning about justice and injustice in the world. If epistemic curiosity about the world is one tendency that many people have, concern about goodness, rightness and justness also has a powerful presence – manifest or latent – in our minds.
Distinct theories of justice may compete in finding the right use of that concern, but they share the significant feature of being involved in the same pursuit.
Many years ago, in a justly famous paper called ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel presented some foundational ideas on the mind–body problem.* The pursuit of a theory of justice has something to do with a similar question: what is it like to be a human being? In his paper, Nagel too was actually involved with human beings, and only very marginally with bats. He argued powerfully against the cogency of understanding consciousness and mental phenomena by trying to see them in terms of the corresponding physical phenomena (as is attempted by many scientists and some philosophers), and in particular, he differentiated the nature of consciousness from the connections – causal or associative – that may link it to bodily operations.† Those distinctions remain, and my reason for asking what it is like to be a human being is different – it relates to the feelings, concerns and mental abilities that we share as human beings.
In arguing that the pursuit of a theory of justice has something to do with the kind of creatures we human beings are, it is not at all my contention that debates between theories of justice can be plausibly settled by going back to features of human nature, rather to note the fact that a number of different theories of justice share some common presumptions about what it is like to be a human being. We could have been creatures incapable of sympathy, unmoved by the pain and
* Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ The Philosophical Review, 83 (1974).
† Cf. Michael Polanyi’s argument that an understanding of operations at a ‘higher’
level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars forming a ‘lower’
level, and his disputation of ‘the predominant view of biologists – that a mechanical explanation of living functions amounts to their explanation in terms of physics and chemistry’ ( The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967; republished with a Foreword by Amartya Sen, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 41–2).
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j u s t i c e a n d t h e w o r l d humiliation of others, uncaring of freedom, and – no less significant
– unable to reason, argue, disagree and concur. The strong presence of these features in human lives does not tell us a great deal about which particular theory of justice should be chosen, but it does indicate that the general pursuit of justice might be hard to eradicate in human society, even though we can go about that pursuit in different ways.
I have made considerable use of the existence of the human faculties just mentioned (for example, the ability to sympathize and to reason) in developing my argument, and so have others in presenting their theories of justice. There is no automatic settlement of differences between distinct theories here, but it is comforting to think that not only do proponents of different theories of justice share a common pursuit, they also make use of common human features that figure in the reasoning underlying their respective approaches. Because of these basic human abilities – to understand, to sympathize, to argue –
people need not be inescapably doomed to isolated lives without communication and collaboration. It is bad enough that the world in which we live has so much deprivation of one kind or another (from being hungry to being tyrannized); it would be even more terrible if we were not able to communicate, respond and altercate.
When Hobbes referred to the dire state of human beings in having
‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives, he also pointed, in the same sentence, to the disturbing adversity of being ‘solitary’. Escape from isolation may not only be important for the quality of human life, it can also contribute powerfully to understanding and responding to the other deprivations from which human beings suffer. There is surely a basic strength here which is complementary to the engagement in which theories of justice are involved.
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Notes
p r e f a c e
1. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860–61) (London: Penguin, 2003), Chapter 8, p. 63.
2. The critically important role of a sense of injustice has been well discussed by Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). He develops – and to some extent broadens – his analysis of justice in his later publications, beginning with Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
4. John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness’, Philosophical Review, 67 (1958).
5. Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3. See also Onora O’Neill, Acting on Principle – An Essay on Kantian Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), and A. Reath, C. Korsgaard and B. Herman (eds), Reclaiming the History of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
6. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Sen’s Identities’, in Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur (eds), Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, vol. I (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 488.
i n t r o d u c t i o n
1. The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. X (London: John C. Nimmo, 1899), pp. 144–5.
2. The remark was made by William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, as cited in John Campbell, The Lives of the Chief Justices in England: From the Norman Conquest to the Death of Lord Mansfield (London: John Murray, 1949 –57), vol. 2, Chapter 40, p. 572.
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n o t e s t o p p . 6 – 27
3. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); Immanuel Kant, Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics, translated by T. K. Abbott, 3rd edn (London: Longmans, 1907).
4. See John Rawls, The Lawof Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 137, 141.
5. See Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
6. These issues are discussed more fully in my paper, ‘What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice?’, Journal of Philosophy, 103 (May 2006). On related questions, see also Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, ‘Extra Rempub-licam Nulla Justitia?’, and A. L. Julius, ‘Nagel’s Atlas’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 34 (Spring 2006).
7. See particularly J.-C. de Borda, ‘Me´moire sur les eĺections au scrutin’, Me´moires de l’Acade´mie Royale des Sciences (1781); Marquis de Condorcet, Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilite´ des decisions rendues à la pluralite´ des voix (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1785).
8. Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951; 2nd edn, 1963).
9. Amartya Sen, ‘Maximization and the Act of Choice’, Econometrica, 65
(1997).
10. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’ in Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), pp. 29–31.
11. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (London and Delhi: Penguin, 2005).
12. I shall return to this issue in Chapter 10,
‘Realizations, Consequences and Agency’.
13. See Thomas Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33 (2005), p. 115.
14. Ibid., pp. 130–33, 146–7.
15. See John Rawls, The Lawof Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
16. Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (London: Faber and Faber, 1991).
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n o t e s t o p p . 31 – 35
1
r e a s o n a n d o b j e c t i v i t y
1. See Brian F. McGuinness (ed.), Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 4–5.
2. See, for example, Thomas Schelling, Choice and Consequence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Matthew Rabin, ‘A Perspective on Psychology and Economics,’ European Economic Review, 46 (2002); Jean Tirole, ‘Rational Irrationality: Some Economics of Self-Management’, European Economic Review, 46 (2002); Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole,
‘Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation’, Reviewof Economic Studies, 70 (2003); E. Fehr and U. Fischbacher, ‘The Nature of Human Altruism’, Nature, 425
(2003).
3. Different ways of thinking about smart behaviour are considered in Essays 1 –6 in my Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
4. On this and related issues, see Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Amartya Sen, ‘Behaviour and the Concept of Preference’, Economica, 40 (1973), and ‘Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6
(1977), both included in Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); George Akerlof, An Economic Theorist’s Book of Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Jon Elster, The Cement of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).