by Amartya Sen
5. Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
6. See Isaiah Berlin: Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, Henry Hardy (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1979); Henry Hardy (ed.), The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990); Henry Hardy (ed.), Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Henry Hardy (ed.), Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (London: Pimlico, 2000).
7. See Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), pp. 6–7.
8. Ibid., p. 310.
9. Ibid., p. 313.
10. The discussion that follows draws on my review essay of Jonathan 419
n o t e s t o p p . 35 – 48
Glover’s book, ‘The Reach of Reason: East and West’, in the NewYork Reviewof Books, 47 (20 July 2000); republished, slightly revised, in The Argumentative Indian (London: Penguin, 2005), essay 13.
11. See Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 40.
12. Ibid., p. 7.
13. Translation from Vincent Smith, Akbar: the Great Mogul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 257.
14. See Irfan Habib (ed.), Akbar and His India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) for a collection of fine essays investigating the beliefs and policies of Akbar as well as the influences that led him to his heterodox position, including the priority of reason over tradition.
15. For this and other references to policy decisions based on Akbar’s reasoning, see the fine discussion in Shireen Moosvi, Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994), from which the particular translations of Akbar’s statements used here are also taken.
16. See M. Athar Ali, ‘The Perception of India in Akbar and Abul Fazl’, in Habib (ed.), Akbar and His India (1997), p. 220.
17. Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2004), p. 75.
18. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 110, 119. See also his Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, edited by Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
19. Ju¨rgen Habermas, ‘Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism’, Journal of Philosophy, 92
(March 1995); see also John Rawls’s response, ‘Reply to Habermas’, Journal of Philosophy, 92 (1995).
20. See my ‘The Reach of Reason: East and West’, NewYork Reviewof Books, 47 (20 July 2000); ‘Open and Closed Impartiality’ Journal of Philosophy, 99 (2002); The Argumentative Indian (London: Penguin, 2005); Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., and London: Penguin, 2006).
21. See particularly Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). There is a vast literature – and some debate – on this subject now. The investigation of human culpability in environmental decline goes back a long time. An insightful assessment of the early literature on this can be found in Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Lawand the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
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n o t e s t o p p . 49 – 57
22. See also Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
23. David Hume, Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. E. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 172.
24. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: T. Cadell, 1790; republished Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 319–20.
2
r aw l s a n d b e y o n d
1. See Rawls, ‘Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics’, Philosophical Review, 60 (1951); ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, Philosophical Review, 64
(1955), and ‘Justice as Fairness’, Philosophical Review, 67 (1958). They are included in Samuel Freedman (ed.), John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, edited by Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). See also his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001).
3. Rawlsian ideas on justice did, in turn, deeply influence welfare economics; see E. S. Phelps (ed.), Economic Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), and ‘Recent Developments in Welfare Economics: Justice et e´quite´’, in Michael Intriligator, (ed.), Frontiers of Quantitative Economics, vol. III (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1977).
4. Scepticism about Rawls’s claim regarding the exact contractarian outcome of the original position can be raised on other grounds as well. Economists and decision theorists in particular have tended to be sceptical of Rawls’s conclusion about the plausibility of the outcome that he predicts in the original position, particularly the likelihood of the ‘maximin’ solution being chosen, on which Rawls’s ‘Difference Principle’ can be seen to be based.
On particular reasons for scepticism about Rawls’s conclusion, see Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Justice: Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow, vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Edmund Phelps has pioneered the extensive use of Rawlsian rules of justice in economic analysis, though he too has expressed considerable scepticism about Rawls’s derivations; see E. S. Phelps (ed.), Economic Justice (1973); and his Studies in Macroeconomic Theory, II: Redistribution and Growth (New York: Academic Press, 1980).
421
n o t e s t o p p . 57 – 65
5. Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics, translated by T. K. Abbott, 3rd edn (London: Longmans, 1907), p. 66. For the demands of Kantian reasoning see, among others, Barbara Herman, Morality as Rationality: A Study of Kant’s Ethics (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990).
6. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), pp. 133–4.
7. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), pp. 60–65.
8. On related issues, see also Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
9. See G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). See also Amartya Sen, ‘Merit and Justice’, in Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles and Steven Durlauf (eds), M eritocracy and Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
10. Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993), p. 110.
11. I have discussed the limitations of the leading versions of ‘rational choice theory’ in my Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), particularly in the introductory essay 1, and also in essays 3 –5.
12. See, particularly, Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 48–54.
13. The priority of liberty plays an important part in the result derived in my
‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal’, Journal of Political Economy, 78
(1970). John Rawls comments illuminatingly on this connection in his essay,
‘Social Unity and Primary Goods’, in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). I shall discuss the issue more fully in Chapter 16.
14. The allocational criterion of ‘lexicographic maximin’ is used in Rawls’s
‘Difference Principle’, which involves giving priority to the worst-off people
– judged in terms of the index of holdings of primary goods – in each respective conglomeration. When the worst-off people in two different conglomerations are equally well off, then it is the position of the second worst-off group that becomes the focus of attention, and so on. For those who are interested in the formal structure of this criterion,
an easy statement and motivating discussion can be found in my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970); see also Phelps, Economic Justice (1973), and Anthony Atkinson, The Economics of Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
15. This issue is discussed also in my essay ‘Justice: Means versus Freedoms’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19 (Spring 1990).
16. Herbert Hart, ‘Rawls on Liberty and Its Priority’, University of Chicago LawReview, 40 (1973).
17. See Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993), chapter VIII. There are also 422
n o t e s t o p p . 65 – 81
qualifications to the priority of liberty in his first book, A Theory of Justice (1971), pp. 132, 217–18.
18. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993), p. 23.
19. Samuel Freedman, ‘Introduction: John Rawls – An Overview’, in Samuel Freedman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 3–4.
20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), English translation by L. W. Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956).
21. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), p. viii.
22. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), pp. 95–6. Indeed, that was the principal point of departure to which Rawls drew explicit attention in his pioneering essay, ‘Justice as Fairness’, Philosophical Review, 67
(1958).
23. See Thomas W. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
3
i n s t i t u t i o n s a n d p e r s o n s
1. Italics added. These statements of Ashoka occur in Edict XII (on ‘Toleration’) at Erragudi; I am using here the translation presented by Vincent A.
Smith in Asoka: The Buddhist Emperor of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), pp. 170–71, except for some very minor emendations based on the original Sanskrit text).
2. On Ashoka’s life, see Romila Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); Upindar Singh, A History of Ancient and Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century (New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2008).
3. On the last point, see also Bruce Rich’s excellent book, To Uphold the World: The Message of Ashoka and Kautilya for the 21st Century (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008), Chapter 8.
4. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, edited by Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 42–3.
5. On this question, see Anthony Laden, ‘Games, Fairness, and Rawls’s ‘‘A Theory of Justice’’ ’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 20 (1991).
6. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 50.
7. Ibid., p. 86.
8. John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1952; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1954; revised edn, 1957). See also Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Straus & 423
n o t e s t o p p . 81 – 93
Giroux, 2005); republished as John Kenneth Galbraith: A Twentieth-Century Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
9. Some of the reasons for this variance between rigidly institutional visions and actual realizations are discussed in my Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
10. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Chapter IV (‘The Market: Freedom from Morality’).
11. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).
4
v o i c e a n d s o c i a l c h o i c e
1. For the source material on this and other related conversations, see my The Argumentative Indian (London: Allen Lane, and New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005).
2. See Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 356–323 B.C.: A Historical Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 428.
3. 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).
4. See C. L. Dodgson, A Method of Taking Votes on More Than Two Issues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876), and The Principles of Parliamentary Representation (London: Harrison, 1951).
5. The classic book of social choice theory is the remarkable monograph of Kenneth Arrow, based on his Ph.D. dissertation, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951; 2nd edn, 1963).
6. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951, 1963). For explications of the result in informal as well as mathematical terms, see my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco, CA: Holden-Day, 1970; republished, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979).
7. There were a number of impossibility results involving variations of the axioms used by Arrow and showing other conflicts of apparently sensible demands on rational social choice; see my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970); Peter C. Fishburn, The Theory of Social Choice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Jerry Kelly, ArrowImpossibility Theorems (New York: Academic Press, 1978); Kotaro Suzumura, Rational Choice, Collective Decisions, and Social Welfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Prasanta K. Pattanaik and Maurice Salles (eds), 424
n o t e s t o p p . 93 – 94
Social Choice and Welfare (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1983); Thomas Schwartz, The Logic of Collective Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), among many other contributions. Fine introductory discussions can be found in Jerry Kelly, Social Choice Theory: An Introduction (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1987); Wulf Gaertner, A Primer in Social Choice Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
8. This was also one of the principal issues discussed in my Nobel Lecture in 1998, ‘The Possibility of Social Choice’ (1999). See also Marc Fleurbaey,
‘Social Choice and Just Institutions; New Perspectives’, Economics and Philosophy, 23 (March 2007).
9. Interpersonal comparisons of various types can be fully axiomatized and exactly incorporated in social choice procedures, and various constructive possibilities can be devised and used: see my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), and ‘Social Choice Theory’ in Handbook of Mathematical Economics (1986). The literature on this subject is quite large, and includes, among other contributions, Peter J. Hammond, ‘Equity, Arrow’s Conditions and Rawls’ Difference Principle’, Econometrica, 44 (1976); Claude d’Aspremont and Louis Gevers,
‘Equity and the Informational Basis of Collective Choice’, Reviewof Economic Studies, 44 (1977); Kenneth J. Arrow, ‘Extended Sympathy and the Possibility of Social Choice’, American Economic Review, 67 (1977); Eric Maskin, ‘A Theorem on Utilitarianism’, Reviewof Economic Studies, 45
(1978); Louis Gevers, ‘On Interpersonal Comparability and Social Welfare Orderings’, Econometrica, 47 (1979); Eric Maskin, ‘Decision-making under Ignorance with Implications for Social Choice’, Theory and Decision, 11
(1979); Kevin W. S. Roberts, ‘Possibility Theorems with Interpersonally Comparable Welfare Levels’, and ‘Interpersonal Comparability and Social Choice Theory’, Reviewof Economic Studies, 47 (1980); Kotaro Suzumura, Rational Choice, Collective Decisions, and Social Welfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Charles Blackorby, David Donaldson, and John Weymark, ‘Social Choice with Interpersonal Utility Comparisons: A Diagrammatic Introduction’, International Economic Review, 25 (1984); Claude d’Aspremont, ‘Axioms for Social Welfare Ordering’, in Leonid Hurwicz, David Schmeidler and Hugo Sonnenschein (eds), Social Goals and Social Organization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); to mention just a few of this large body of constructive literature.
10. Kenneth J. Arrow, ‘Extended Sympathy and the Possibility of Social Choice’, American Economic Review, 67 (1977).
11. See Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Esqui
sse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1793). Later 425
n o t e s t o p p . 94 – 108
included in Oeuvres de Condorcet, vol. 6 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1847; republished, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1968).
12. On this, see my Nobel Lecture in December 1998, ‘The Possibility of Social Choice’, American Economic Review, 89 (1999). See also Marc Fleurbaey and Philippe Mongin, ‘The News of the Death of Welfare Economies Is Greatly Exaggerated’, Social Choice and Welfare, 25 (2005).
13. Sometimes the formulations of social choice theory specify the outcomes not as rankings of social states but as ‘choice functions’ that tell us what the choosable alternatives are in each possible set. While the choice functional format may look quite remote from the relational formulation, they are, in fact, analytically linked with each other, and we can identify the implicit rankings that lie behind the respective choice functions; on this see my Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), essays 1 and 8, and Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), essays 3, 4 and 7, and the literature – I fear rather large – cited there.
14. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. 28.
15. On this, see my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco, CA: Holden-Day, 1970; republished, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979), Chapter 9.
16. Indeed, even in social choice theory, where the analytical framework is firmly relational and altogether geared to comparative judgements, the actual investigations of ‘social justice’ have been closely linked with the identification of transcendental justice (often in the Rawlsian mould). The hold of the transcendental format is almost ubiquitous in academic investigations of the demands of justice and, despite having a broader analytical base, social choice theory has not escaped the influence of transcendentalism in the choice of problems that have been investigated in detail.