Asian Window

In Literary Review, John Gray reviews Amartya Sen’s new book, The Idea of Justice (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press):

In a letter written to a friend in 1917 Ludwig Wittgenstein reported: ‘I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.’ The notion that being a smarter human being and a better person are in the end the same thing is one that Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist who has made fundamental advances in welfare economics and the theory of social choice, finds appealing. Citing Wittgenstein’s assertion at the start of the first chapter of The Idea of Justice and referring to it at several points in the book, Sen suggests that reason can do more than help people to achieve their goals. It can also enable them to criticise their goals, and in this way make them better people.

In Sen’s view, a smarter world is sure to be a better world. Unlike some rationalists in the past, however, he does not think we need a conception of an ideal world in order to improve the one we live in. One of the recurring themes of The Idea of Justice is to contest the assumption that a theory of ideal justice is either necessary or desirable. Much of the book is a critique of the work of the late twentieth-century American liberal philosopher John Rawls. While Rawls’s work has shaped academic discussion for over thirty years, it has had a negligible impact on political practice, and one of the reasons may be that his theory leaves so little room for politics. For Rawls, justice is a unique set of principles that reasonable people would choose from an imaginary initial position that ensures impartiality. Once these principles have been chosen all that remains is to set the right institutions in place. Conflicts about the scope of basic liberties and the distribution of resources will then be settled by applying the theory, which is a legal rather than political process.

It is a far-fetched view of how any society could operate, but Sen’s objection is not to the lack of realism in Rawls’s theory. It is the very idea of perfect justice that he questions. The reasons why society may be unjust are many and various; there is no reason to think that there is a set of just principles that everybody will accept. A just society will accord its members a range of basic liberties but also the capabilities needed to make use of them – in Isaiah Berlin’s terminology, it will protect both negative and positive freedoms. Clearly, however, reasonable people will at times disagree as to which of these freedoms are most important. Again, though Sen argues strongly that justice should have a global reach, he knows that people will reasonably disagree about how wide the scope of particular requirements of justice should be. So, rather than opting for what he calls ‘transcendental institutionalism’ – the attempt to design an ideally just framework for society – Sen urges a comparative approach, which recognises the plural demands of justice while maintaining the struggle for a less unjust world. More:

And below, in the Economist:

How to do it better

AT THE disputed crossroads where economics and ethics meet stands Amartya Sen, a Nobel-prize-winning economist who thinks like a philosopher. In a dauntingly impressive flow of books and papers over 40 years he has done much to change both disciplines for the better, humanising the one, bringing content from the real world to the other. His work is technical, however, and the fine detail has sometimes hidden the shape of the whole. Mr Sen’s latest book answers both difficulties in magisterial style.

In the courtliest of tones, Mr Sen charges John Rawls, an American philosopher who died in 2002, with sending political thinkers up a tortuous blind alley. The Rawlsian project of trying to describe ideally just institutions is a distracting and ultimately fruitless way to think about social injustice, Mr Sen complains. Such a spirited attack against possibly the most influential English-speaking political philosopher of the past 100 years will alone excite attention. More: