The Idea of Justice Read online

  The Idea of Justice

  .

  The Idea of Justice

  a m a r t ya s e n

  The Belknap Press

  of Harvard University Press

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  2009

  In memory of

  John Rawls

  ©2009 by Amartya Sen

  All rights reserved.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sen, Amartya, 1933-The idea of justice / Amartya Sen.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-674-03613-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Justice. 2. Social contract.

  3. Rawls, John, 1921-2002. Theory of justice.

  4. Ethics. I. Title.

  JC578.S424 2009

  320.01’1--dc22

  2009014924

  Contents

  Preface

  vii

  Acknowledgements

  xxi

  Introduction

  An Approach to Justice

  1

  p a r t i

  The Demands of Justice

  1 Reason and Objectivity

  31

  2 Rawls and Beyond

  52

  3 Institutions and Persons

  75

  4 Voice and Social Choice

  87

  5 Impartiality and Objectivity

  114

  6 Closed and Open Impartiality

  124

  p a r t i i

  Forms of Reasoning

  7 Position, Relevance and Illusion

  155

  8 Rationality and Other People

  174

  9 Plurality of Impartial Reasons

  194

  10 Realizations, Consequences and Agency

  208

  v

  c o n t e n t s

  p a r t i i i

  The Materials of Justice

  11 Lives, Freedoms and Capabilities

  225

  12 Capabilities and Resources

  253

  13 Happiness, Well-being and Capabilities

  269

  14 Equality and Liberty

  291

  p a r t i v

  Public Reasoning and Democracy

  15 Democracy as Public Reason

  321

  16 The Practice of Democracy

  338

  17 Human Rights and Global Imperatives

  355

  18 Justice and the World

  388

  Notes

  417

  Name Index

  451

  Subject Index

  462

  vi

  Preface

  ‘In the little world in which children have their existence’, says Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, ‘there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt, as injustice.’1 I expect Pip is right: he vividly recollects after his humiliating encounter with Estella the ‘capricious and violent coercion’ he suffered as a child at the hands of his own sister. But the strong perception of manifest injustice applies to adult human beings as well. What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.

  This is evident enough in our day-to-day life, with inequities or subjugations from which we may suffer and which we have good reason to resent, but it also applies to more widespread diagnoses of injustice in the wider world in which we live. It is fair to assume that Parisians would not have stormed the Bastille, Gandhi would not have challenged the empire on which the sun used not to set, Martin Luther King would not have fought white supremacy in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’, without their sense of manifest injustices that could be overcome. They were not trying to achieve a perfectly just world (even if there were any agreement on what that would be like), but they did want to remove clear injustices to the extent they could.

  The identification of redressable injustice is not only what animates us to thinkabout justice and injustice, it is also central, I argue in this book, to the theory of justice. In the investigation presented here, diagnosis of injustice will figure often enough as the starting point for vii

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  critical discussion.2 But, it may be asked, if this is a reasonable starting point, why can’t it also be a good ending point? What is the need to go beyond our sense of justice and injustice? Why must we have a theory of justice?

  To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning. We have to ‘read’ what we feel and seem to see, and askwhat those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a conclusion based mainly on signals. Adam Smith’s conviction of the importance of moral sentiments did not stop him from seeking a

  ‘theory of moral sentiments’, nor from insisting that a sense of wrong-doing be critically examined through reasoned scrutiny to see whether it can be the basis of a sustainable condemnation. A similar requirement of scrutiny applies to an inclination to praise someone or something.*

  We also have to askwhat kinds of reasoning should count in the assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injustice. In what way can a diagnosis of injustice, or the identification of what would reduce or eliminate it, be objective? Does this demand impartiality in some particular sense, such as detachment from one’s own vested interests? Does it also demand re-examination of some attitudes even if they are not related to vested interests, but reflect local preconceptions and prejudices, which may not survive reasoned confrontation with others not restricted by the same parochialism?

  What is the role of rationality and of reasonableness in understanding the demands of justice?

  These concerns and some closely related general questions are addressed in the first ten chapters, before I move on to issues of

  * Smith’s classic book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was published exactly 250

  years ago in 1759, and the last revised edition – the 6th – in 1790. In the new anniversary edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, to be published by Penguin Books later this year (2009), I discuss, in the Introduction, the nature of Smith’s moral and political engagement and its continuing relevance to the contemporary world.

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  application, involving critical assessment of the grounds on which judgements about justice are based (whether freedoms, capabilities, resources, happiness, well-being or something else), the special relevance of diverse considerations that figure under the general headings of equality and liberty, the evident connection between pursuing justice and seeking democracy seen as government by discussion, and the nature, viability and reach of claims of human rights.

  W h a t K i n d o f a T h e o r y ?

  What is presented here is a theory of justice in a very broad sense. Its aim is to clarify how we can proceed to address questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice, rather than to offer resolutions of questions about the nature of perfect justice. In this there are clear differences with the pre-eminent theories of justice in contemporary moral and political philosophy. As will be discussed more fully in the Introduction that follows, three differences in particular demand specific attention.

  First, a theory of justice that can serve as the basis of practical reasoning must include ways
of judging how to reduce injustice and advance justice, rather than aiming only at the characterization of perfectly just societies – an exercise that is such a dominant feature of many theories of justice in political philosophy today. The two exercises for identifying perfectly just arrangements, and for determining whether a particular social change would enhance justice, do have motivational links but they are nevertheless analytically disjoined. The latter question, on which this workconcentrates, is central to making decisions about institutions, behaviour and other determinants of justice, and how these decisions are derived cannot but be crucial to a theory of justice that aims at guiding practical reasoning about what should be done. The assumption that this comparative exercise cannot be undertaken without identifying, first, the demands of perfect justice, can be shown to be entirely incorrect (as is discussed in Chapter 4, ‘Voice and Social Choice’).

  Second, while many comparative questions of justice can be successfully resolved – and agreed upon in reasoned arguments – there could ix

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  well be other comparisons in which conflicting considerations are not fully resolved. It is argued here that there can exist several distinct reasons of justice, each of which survives critical scrutiny, but yields divergent conclusions.* Reasonable arguments in competing directions can emanate from people with diverse experiences and traditions, but they can also come from within a given society, or for that matter, even from the very same person.†

  There is a need for reasoned argument, with oneself and with others, in dealing with conflicting claims, rather than for what can be called

  ‘disengaged toleration’, with the comfort of such a lazy resolution as:

  ‘you are right in your community and I am right in mine’. Reasoning and impartial scrutiny are essential. However, even the most vigorous of critical examination can still leave conflicting and competing arguments that are not eliminated by impartial scrutiny. I shall have more to say on this in what follows, but I emphasize here that the necessity of reasoning and scrutiny is not compromised in any way by the possibility that some competing priorities may survive despite the confrontation of reason. The plurality with which we will then end up will be the result of reasoning, not of abstention from it.

  Third, the presence of remediable injustice may well be connected with behavioural transgressions rather than with institutional short-comings (Pip’s recollection, in Great Expectations, of his coercive sister was just that, not an indictment of the family as an institution).

  Justice is ultimately connected with the way people’s lives go, and not merely with the nature of the institutions surrounding them. In contrast, many of the principal theories of justice concentrate over-

  * The importance of valuational plurality has been extensively – and powerfully –

  explored by Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams. Pluralities can survive even within a given community, or even for a particular person, and they need not be reflections of values of ‘different communities’. However, variations of values between people in different communities can also be significant (as has been discussed, in different ways, in important contributions by Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, among others).

  † For example, Marx expounded the case both for eliminating the exploitation of labour (related to the justness of getting what can be seen as the product of one’s efforts) and for allocation according to needs (related to the demands of distributive justice). He went on to discuss the inescapable conflict between these two priorities in his last substantial writing: The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875).

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  whelmingly on how to establish ‘just institutions’, and give some derivative and subsidiary role to behavioural features. For example, John Rawls’s rightly celebrated approach of ‘justice as fairness’ yields a unique set of ‘principles of justice’ that are exclusively concerned with setting up ‘just institutions’ (to constitute the basic structure of the society), while requiring that people’s behaviour complies entirely with the demands of proper functioning of these institutions.3 In the approach to justice presented in this work, it is argued that there are some crucial inadequacies in this overpowering concentration on institutions (where behaviour is assumed to be appropriately compliant), rather than on the lives that people are able to lead. The focus on actual lives in the assessment of justice has many far-reaching implications for the nature and reach of the idea of justice.*

  The departure in the theory of justice that is explored in this work has a direct bearing, I argue, on political and moral philosophy. But I have also tried to discuss the relevance of the arguments presented here with some of the ongoing engagements in law, economics and politics, and it might, if one were ready to be optimistic, even have some pertinence to debates and decisions on practical policies and programmes.†

  The use of a comparative perspective, going well beyond the limited

  – and limiting – frameworkof social contract, can make a useful contribution here. We are engaged in making comparisons in terms of the advancement of justice whether we fight oppression (like slavery, or the subjugation of women), or protest against systematic medical neglect (through the absence of medical facilities in parts of Africa or Asia, or a lackof universal health coverage in most countries in

  * The recent investigation of what has come to be called the ‘capability perspective’

  fits directly into the understanding of justice in terms of human lives and the freedoms that the persons can respectively exercise. See Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (eds), The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). The reach and limits of that perspective will be examined in Chapters 11–14.

  † For example, the case for what is called here ‘open impartiality’, which admits voices from far as well as near in interpreting the justice of laws (not only for the sake of fairness to others, but also for the avoidance of parochialism, as discussed by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and in Lectures on Jurisprudence), has direct relevance to some of the contemporary debates in the Supreme Court of the United States, as is discussed in the concluding chapter of this book.

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  the world, including the United States), or repudiate the permissibility of torture (which continues to be used with remarkable frequency in the contemporary world – sometimes by pillars of the global establishment), or reject the quiet tolerance of chronic hunger (for example in India, despite the successful abolition of famines).* We may often enough agree that some changes contemplated (like the abolition of apartheid, to give an example of a different kind) will reduce injustice, but even if all such agreed changes are successfully implemented, we will not have anything that we can call perfect justice. Practical concerns, no less than theoretical reasoning, seem to demand a fairly radical departure in the analysis of justice.

  P u b l i c R e a s o n i n g a n d

  D e m o c r a c y a n d G l o b a l J u s t i c e Even though in the approach presented here principles of justice will not be defined in terms of institutions, but rather in terms of the lives and freedoms of the people involved, institutions cannot but play a significant instrumental role in the pursuit of justice. Together with the determinants of individual and social behaviour, an appropriate choice of institutions has a critically important place in the enterprise of enhancing justice. Institutions come into the reckoning in many different ways. They can contribute directly to the lives that people are able to lead in accordance with what they have reason to value.

  Institutions can also be important in facilitating our ability to scrutinize the values and priorities that we can consider, especially through opportunities for public discussion (this will include considerations of freedom of speech and right to information as well as actual facilities for informed discussion).

  In this work, democracy is assessed in terms of public reasoning

  * I was privil
eged to address the Indian Parliament on ‘The Demands of Justice’ on 11 August 2008 at the invitation of the Speaker. This was the first Hiren Mukerjee Memorial Lecture, which is going to be an annual parliamentary event. The full version of the address is available in a brochure printed by the Indian Parliament, and a shortened version is published in The Little Magazine, vol. 8, issues 1 and 2 (2009), under the title ‘What Should Keep Us Awake at Night’.

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  (Chapters 15–17), which leads to an understanding of democracy as

  ‘government by discussion’ (an idea that John Stuart Mill did much to advance). But democracy must also be seen more generally in terms of the capacity to enrich reasoned engagement through enhancing informational availability and the feasibility of interactive discussions.

  Democracy has to be judged not just by the institutions that formally exist but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard.

  Furthermore, this way of seeing democracy can have an impact on the pursuit of it at the global level – not just within a nation-state. If democracy is not seen simply in terms of the setting up of some specific institutions (like a democratic global government or global elections), but in terms of the possibility and reach of public reasoning, the task of advancing – rather than perfecting – both global democracy and global justice can be seen as eminently understandable ideas that can plausibly inspire and influence practical actions across borders.

  T h e E u r o p e a n E n l i g h t e n m e n t a n d O u r G l o b a l H e r i t a g e

  What can I say about the antecedents of the approach I am trying to present here? I will discuss this question more fully in the Introduction that follows, but I should point out that the analysis of justice I present in this bookdraws on lines of reasoning that received particular exploration in the period of intellectual discontent during the European Enlightenment. Having said that, however, I must immediately make a couple of clarificatory points to prevent possible misunderstanding.

  The first clarification is to explain that the connection of this work with the tradition of European Enlightenment does not make the intellectual background of this book particularly ‘European’. Indeed, one of the unusual – some will probably say eccentric – features of this bookcompared with other writings on the theory of justice is the extensive use that I have made of ideas from non-Western societies, particularly from Indian intellectual history, but also from elsewhere.