Tag Archive for 'The Idea of Justice'

Amartya Sen shakes up justice theory

Published on September 30, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , .

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Suppose three children-Anne, Bob, and Carla-quarrel over a flute. Anne says it’s hers because she’s the only one who knows how to play it. Bob counters that he’s the poorest and has no toys, so the flute would at least give him something to play with. Carla reminds Anne and Bob that she built the darn thing, and no sooner did she finish it than the other two started trying to take it away.

Intuitions clashing yet? Need something more complex to tingle your justice antennae-perhaps a puzzler from game theory? The example is Amartya Sen’s, from the Nobel-Prize-winning economist’s just-published The Idea of Justice (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press), his magnum opus on a line of work he’s long addressed and now thoroughly re-examines: justice theory. And what a growth industry it’s been since John Rawls revived the subject with his classic, A Theory of Justice (1971), and colleague Robert Nozick made its core principles into an Emerson Hall battle with his libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Since Rawls, one hardly ranks as a political theorist without a whack at the J-word. Sen’s stepping into the fray should keep things hopping, but justice theory is one subsidiary of philosophy that never really suffers a bad century. More:

There is no such thing as perfect justice

Published on August 30, 2009 in Books. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

But Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen believes there can be a reasoned agreement in a society on outcomes which are unjust. In his new book, The Idea of Justice (Penguin Allen Lane), Sen says that putting in place the right institutions and entitlements is a step towards a more just society. Neelima Mahajan-Bansal and Udit Misra in Forbes India:

amartyasenWhy is justice so intriguing to you?
Mainly it’s the face of injustice we see in our day to day life that makes us feel what we can do to make things better from the point of view of justice. If I walked around in India or any other country today and were not invaded by a sense of injustice, then there is something to be explained there. There is nothing to be explained about why one is invaded by a sense of injustice because it is there. So much inequality. So much lack of freedom, tyranny and denial of liberty on one side and inequality and deprivation, and denial of substantive opportunity on the other.

In the Indian context post 1991, there has been a remarkable change in the lives of people. Would you say that India as a society or as an economy is more just today?
I wouldn’t even try to bring about an overall judgment. Do I think there are many unremoved injustices in India? Yes. Have some of the unremoved injustices been tackled reasonably well? I would say yes. There have been changes. The percentage of illiteracy has gone down. That’s one way of putting it. But the percentage of illiteracy is still unacceptably high. That’s also true. So the overall judgment is far less interesting than the detailed assessment of what the society is like. More:

I prefer to fight today’s battles: Amartya Sen

Published on August 11, 2009 in Books and India. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In Outlook, Vinod Mehta and Anjali Puri interview Amartya Sen:

amartyasen

In the 63rd year of Independence, how many cheers would you give Indian democracy?

Out of a total of three (laughs)? That was a scale invented by E.M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy. I think I will give it a bit more than two but somewhat less than three. If you take the view, is democracy functioning as well as it could, it may even be one. But given the adversities we have had-a very poor country, largely illiterate, border wars with China and Pakistan, with Pakistan going its peculiarly difficult way, the relationship problems that we have had with the United States and the global powers-have we done as well as expected? Yes. Except in one big respect, namely that I had expected that non-dramatic deprivations would receive more attention than they ended up getting. Famines did go away with democracy, as I had expected, but I thought other things like gender inequality and the huge undernourishment of children would get more attention, but they did not get enough. That’s the disappointment.

Of all the injustices that haunt India today, the deprivations you have just spoken of, what disappoints you the most?

They are all complementary. One of the reasons that child undernourishment is so hard to remove in India is that children are born much more deprived here than in much of the world, because women are very deprived when they are pregnant. One basic issue is gender inequality. But I don’t want to say it is the only important one. I would rather speak of a cluster of deprivations. And we should address all of them together. More:

Is a smarter world a better world?

Published on August 8, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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

amartya-senIn 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:

The thinker: Inside the mind of prized intellectual Amartya Sen

Published on July 27, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , .

An intellectual who picks up honorary degrees in his spare time, Amartya Sen believes in reason and human rights. Just don’t call him idealistic, says Sholto Byrnes in the Independent:

The Idea of Justice is billed as Amartya Sen’s most ambitious book yet. This is quite a claim for a man whose publications on famine are acknowledged as having changed global perceptions on poverty and food production, and whose work on welfare economics significantly contributed to the United Nations’ Human Development Index. He has been garlanded with honours, including the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. So celebrated is he as a thinker and academic that, asked what Sen does at weekends, his publisher replied, “he collects honorary degrees”.

And not just at weekends, it turns out: when we meet on a Wednesday at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Sen was master from 1998-2004 (the first Asian person to be head of an Oxbridge college), he reveals: “I’m off to Dublin tomorrow, to receive an honorary degree.” When Trinity College, Dublin rang to offer him the scroll, he had to explain that he’d just received one from University College, Dublin. A delay in conferring the degree was agreed upon because, as Sen joked, he wasn’t used to going to Dublin that often.

After a lunch enlivened by the kind of high- table gossip Anthony Powell would have relished, we repair to his office and I ask him about his “most ambitious” book. “Well, those are my publisher’s words,” he begins, “although that doesn’t mean I disagree. I am, of course, mainly trained as an economist, although I have been writing on philosophy for more than 40 years now. I’m trying to make sense of thinking about justice in a way that’s philosophically engaged, but which will also have a reach to the public. It’s taking all the very difficult subjects but trying to make them accessible.” More: