The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

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  r e a l i z a t i o n s , c o n s e q u e n c e s a n d a g e n c y 1. In collaboration with Swami Prabhavananda (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1989).

  2. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), pp. 29–31.

  3. See Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb (London: Methuen, 1957).

  4. On the integration of procedures in the evaluation of consequences, see the illuminating paper of Kotaro Suzumura, ‘Consequences, Opportunities, and Procedures’, Social Choice and Welfare, 16 (1999).

  5. On these and related issues, see also my essays, ‘Rights and Agency’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11 (Winter 1982), and ‘Evaluator Relativity and Consequential Evaluation’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12 (Spring 1983); the latter also responds to an interesting critique of Donald H. Regan,

  ‘Against Evaluator Relativity: A Response to Sen’, in the same number of the journal.

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  l i v e s , f r e e d o m s a n d c a p a b i l i t i e s 1. I have tried to pursue this more direct approach in a series of publications that followed my initial move towards a capability-based approach in my 1979 Tanner Lecture, published as ‘Equality of What?’ in S. McMurrin, Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1980). See my Commodities and Capabilities (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985, and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); The Standard of Living, edited by G.

  Hawthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999). See also the jointly edited volume with Martha Nussbaum, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

  2. See William Petty’s Political Arithmetick, which was written around 1676

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  but published in 1691; see C. H. Hull (ed.), The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), vol. I, p. 312.

  I have discussed the nature of the debates involved among the early estimators of national income and living standards in my 1985 Tanner Lectures, published, along with comments from others (Bernard Williams, John Muellbauer, Ravi Kanbur and Keith Hart), in The Standard of Living, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  3. These and other related comparisons are discussed in my book Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), Chapters 1 and 4. See also my ‘The Economics of Life and Death’, Scientific American, 266 (1993); ‘Demography and Welfare Economics’, Empirica, 22 (1995); and ‘Mortality as an Indicator of Economic Success and Failure’, Economic Journal, 108 (1998).

  4. One of the pioneering statistical analyses of the policy relevance of this distinction came from Sudhir Anand and Martin Ravallion, ‘Human Development in Poor Countries: On the Role of Private Incomes and Public Services’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7 (1993).

  5. This question is examined in my Development as Freedom (1999); The Argumentative Indian (London and Delhi: Penguin, and New York: FSG, 2005); and Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W.

  Norton & Co., and London and Delhi: Allen Lane, 2006). See also my essay

  ‘Human Rights and Asian Values’, NewRepublic, 14 and 21 July 1997.

  6. That narrow view of opportunity – focusing only on the culmination outcome – has some following in the traditional economic theory of behaviour and choice, particularly in the ‘revealed preference approach’ (even though that theory, pioneered by Paul Samuelson, is not particularly addressed to evaluating or assessing freedom). For example, in the revealed preference approach, the opportunity of choosing from the so-called ‘budget set’ (that is to choose one commodity bundle from the set of alternative bundles that are all within the person’s total budget) would be valued exactly at the value of the chosen element of that set. Nothing would be lost in this ‘thin’ view of opportunity, if the budget set is somehow cut down, so long as the previously chosen element remains available for choice. The relevance of the process of choice, as a contrast, is investigated in my essay, ‘Maximization and the Act of Choice’, Econometrica, 65 (1997).

  7. There is a similar issue of informational choice even within the idea of freedom, which is associated with many distinct features, as I have tried to discuss in my Kenneth Arrow Lectures, included in Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Chapters 20–22. Indeed, even in assessing the opportunity aspect of freedom, distinct ways of doing the accounting can make a substantial difference. While my own approach, 435

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  related to the reasoning in social choice theory, has been to do the assessment taking significant note of the exact preferences of an individual, there are other interesting explorations of evaluation in terms of the ‘range’ of the options available, for example, in some contributions, counting the number of alternatives a person can choose from. On various issues involved in this question, see also Patrick Suppes, ‘Maximizing Freedom of Decision: An Axiomatic Approach’, in G. Feiwel (ed.), Arrowand the Foundations of Economic Policy (London: Macmillan, 1987); Prasanta Pattanaik and Yongsheng Xu, ‘On Ranking Opportunity Sets in Terms of Choice’, Recherches ećonomique de Louvain, 56 (1990); Hillel Steiner, ‘Putting Rights in Their Place’, Recherches ećonomique de Louvain, 56 (1990); Ian Carter, ‘International Comparison of Freedom’, in Economics and Philosophy, 11 (1995), and A Measure of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Robert Sugden,

  ‘A Metric of Opportunity’, Economics and Philosophy, 14 (1998).

  8. See particularly Martha Nussbaum, ‘Nature, Function and Capability: Aristotle on Political Distribution’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, supplementary volume, 1988; ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice’, Political Theory, 20 (1992); Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (eds), Women, Culture and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  9. An illuminating and wide-ranging introduction to the approach can be found in Sabina Alkire’s Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  10. See the collection of essays in Flavio Comim, Mozaffar Qizilbash and Sabina Alkire (eds), The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Reiko Gotoh and Paul Dumouchel (eds), Against Injustice: The NewEconomics of Amartya Sen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ingrid Robeyns and Harry Brighouse (eds), Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur (eds), Arguments for a Better World: In Honor of Amartya Sen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), which is a larger collection but several of the essays deal directly with the capability perspective, including the papers of Bina Agarwal, Paul Anand (and Cristina Santos and Ron Smith), Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Lincoln C. Chen, Kanchan Chopra, James Foster and Christopher Handy, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Jocelyn Kynch, Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, S. R. Osmani, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Sanjay G.

  Reddy (and Sujata Visaria and Muhammad Asali), Ingrid Robeyns, and Rehman Sobhan; some of the other essays also have an indirect bearing on the subject. See also, among other writings in this astonishingly fast-growing literature: Marko Ahtisaari, ‘Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to the 436

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  Standard of Living’, mimeographed, Columbia University Press, 1991; Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); ‘Why the Capability Approach?’ Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 6 (March 2005); ‘Choosing Dimensions: The Capability Approach and Multidimensional Poverty’ in Nanak Kakwani and Jacques Silber (eds), The Many Dimensions of Poverty (Basing-stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Anthony B. Atkinson, ‘Capabilities, Exclusion, and the Supply of Goods’, in Kaushik Basu, Prasanta Pattanaik and Kotaro Suzumura (eds), Choice, Wel
fare, and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Kaushik Basu, ‘Functioning and Capabilities’, in Kenneth Arrow, Amartya Sen and Kotaro Suzumura (eds), The Handbook of Social Choice Theory, vol. II (Amsterdam: North-Holland, forthcoming); Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, ‘A New Approach to Evaluation of Well-being and Poverty by Fuzzy Set Theory’, Giornale degli Economisti, 53 (1994); ‘A Multidimensional Assessment of Well-being Based on Sen’s Functioning Theory’, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, 2 (2000); ‘An Analytical Framework for Conceptualizing Poverty and Re-examining the Capability Approach’, Journal of Socio-Economics, 36 (2007); David Crocker, ‘Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Development Ethic’, Political Theory, 20 (1992); Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability and Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Reiko Gotoh, ‘The Capability Theory and Welfare Reform’, Pacific Economic Review, 6 (2001);

  ‘Justice and Public Reciprocity’, in Gotoh and Dumouchel, Against Injustice (2009); Kakwani and Silber (eds), The Many Dimensions of Poverty (2008); Mozaffar Qizilbash, ‘Capabilities, Well-being and Human Development: A Survey’, Journal of Development Studies, 33 (1996); ‘Capability, Happiness and Adaptation in Sen and J. S. Mill’, Utilitas, 18 (2006); Ingrid Robeyns,

  ‘The Capability Approach: A Theoretical Survey’, Journal of Human Development, 6 (2005); ‘The Capability Approach in Practice’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 17 (2006); Jennifer Prah Ruger, ‘Health and Social Justice’, Lancet, 364 (2004); ‘Health, Capability and Justice: Toward a New Paradigm of Health Ethics, Policy and Law’, Cornell Journal of Lawand Public Policy, 15 (2006); Health and Social Justice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009); Robert Sugden, ‘Welfare, Resources and Capabilities: A Review of Inequality Reexamined by Amartya Sen’, Journal of Economic Literature, 31 (1993).

  11. See Richard A. Arneson, ‘Equality and Equality of Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophical Studies, 56 (1989), and G. A. Cohen, ‘Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods and Capabilities’, in Martha Nussbaum and 437

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  Amartya Sen (eds), The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Paul Streeten, Development Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 1981) and Frances Stewart, Planning to Meet Basic Needs (London: Macmillan, 1985).

  12. This was called ‘elementary evaluation’ in my first book on the capability approach: Commodities and Capabilities (1985).

  13. See Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind, edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997) and Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Bernard Williams,

  ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), and Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

  14. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 8.

  15. I have discussed this question in ‘Incompleteness and Reasoned Choice’, Synthese, 140 (2004).

  16. Frances Stewart and Se´verine Deneulin, ‘Amartya Sen’s Contribution to Development Thinking’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 37 (2002).

  17. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 104. See also Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  18. Karl Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), pp. 21–3.

  19. The Brundtland Report is the report produced by the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Brundtland (the former Prime Minister of Norway, and later the Director-General of the World Health Organization): Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  20. Robert Solow, An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1992).

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  c a p a b i l i t i e s a n d r e s o u r c e s 1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edn, 1980), Book I, section 5, p. 7.

  2. See, among other writings on this important subject, Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

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  3. On this see my ‘Poor, Relatively Speaking’, Oxford Economic Papers, 35

  (1983), included in Resources, Values and Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) Also, Dorothy Wedderburn, The Aged in the Welfare State (London: Bell, 1961), and J. Palmer, T. Smeeding and B. Torrey, The Vulnerable: America’s Young and Old in the Industrial World (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1988).

  4. On this, see my Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), Chapters 8 and 9, and the literature cited there. Two of the pioneering contributions in this area are Pranab Bardhan, ‘On Life and Death Questions’, Economic and Political Weekly, 9 (1974), and Lincoln Chen, E. Huq and S.

  D’Souza, ‘Sex Bias in the Family Allocation of Food and Health Care in Rural Bangladesh’, Population and Development Review, 7 (1981). See also my joint paper with Jocelyn Kynch, ‘Indian Women: Well-being and Survival’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 7 (1983), and jointly with Jean Drèze, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and India: Development and Participation (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  5. These estimates come from the World Bank.

  6. Wiebke Kuklys, Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach: Theoretical Insights and Empirical Applications (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2005).

  7. Thomas Pogge has made important contributions on this line; see particularly his World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002; 2nd edn, 2008).

  8. Thomas Pogge, ‘A Critique of the Capability Approach’, in Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns (eds), Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

  9. Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Justifying the Capabilities Approach to Justice’, in Brighouse and Robeyns (eds) Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (forthcoming). On related issues, see also her ‘What Is the Point of Equality?’ Ethics, 109 (1999).

  10. See Kenneth Arrow and Frank Hahn, General Competitive Analysis (San Francisco, CA: Holden-Day, 1971; Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979); George Akerlof, ‘The Market for ‘‘Lemons’’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84 (1970); Joseph Stiglitz and M. E. Rothschild, ‘Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90 (1976); among many other important contributions in this area.

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  h a p p i n e s s , w e l l - b e i n g a n d c a p a b i l i t i e s 1. See John E. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1996). In this closely argued critique of different theories of justice, Roemer presents his reasoned assessment of some of the major approaches to the theory of justice in contemporary political philosophy and welfare economics.

  2. Richard Easterlin, ‘Will Raising the Income of All Increase the Happiness of All?’, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, 27 (1995). See also Easterlin’s far-reaching analysis of the dissonance between income and happiness, and about ways and means of advancing happiness, both with the help of raising levels of income and through other means, ‘Income and Happiness: Towards a Unified Theory’, Economic Journal, 111 (2001). See also Bernard M. S. van Praag and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell, Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  3. Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).

  4. Richard Layard, Happi
ness: Lessons from a NewScience (London and New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 3.

  5. Ibid., p. 113.

  6. Ibid.

  7. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  8. Lionel Robbins, ‘Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility: A Comment’, Economic Journal, 48 (1938).

  9. Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951; 2nd edn, 1963).

  10. Ibid. p. 9.

  11. On this issue, see also my Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), and

  ‘Social Choice Theory’, in K. J. Arrow and M. Intriligator (eds), Handbook of Mathematical Economics (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986).

  12. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a NewScience (2005). See also Daniel Kahneman, ‘Objective Happiness’, in Daniel Kahneman and N. Schwartz (eds), Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), and Alan Krueger and Daniel Kahneman,

  ‘Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-being’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20 (2006). On related issues, see van Praag and 440

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  Carbonell, Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach (2004).

  13. Layard, Happiness (2005), p. 4.

  14. I have discussed this issue more fully elsewhere, in particular in ‘Economic Progress and Health’, with Sudhir Anand, in D. A. Leon and G. Walt (eds), Poverty, Inequality and Health (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and ‘Health Achievement and Equity: External and Internal Perspectives’, in Sudhir Anand, Fabienne Peter and Amartya Sen (eds), Public Health, Ethics and Equity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  15. See, particularly, Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988) and Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).