Stefan Bird-Pollan: Review of Amartya Sen's 'The Idea of Justice'

Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, Belknap Press, 2009, pp. 496.

It is a mark of the greatness of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice that, after nearly 40 years, it still retains its position as the one work of post-war political theory which must be contended with. One might say of Amartya Sen’s new book what Jürgen Habermas, in his own debate with Rawls, once said: namely, that any disagreement between the two is basically a family feud. The dispute, to be sure, is a significant one. It concerns the viability of an idealized theory of society such as Rawls has presented it in A Theory of Justice. I say viability since it is not really Sen’s concern to argue about the philosophical foundations of Rawls’ approach. Rather, Sen wishes to substitute a more practically oriented theory of justice, the capabilities approach, for Rawls’ foundationalism about institutional structures and their relation to justice. Sen’s main criticism is thus that Rawls’ idealized theory excludes too much of what we should care about: the person’s
real position in the world, as well as parts of the world which are not included in Rawls’ closed system of the state. In short, Sen is driven by the practical need to provide a theory which is truly universal in scope, but which is also able to deal with vexing questions of real world politics like persistent inequalities among people and relative lack of basic freedoms. This situates Sen’s work at the intersection of political theory and social science.

Sen’s book is in many ways an introduction to and summary of work done over the past 50 years. Readers who are already familiar with Sen will find here a compelling elaboration and systematization of the many topics that Sen has worked on: economics, philosophy, and, it seems, all of the social sciences which lie in between. New readers will be dazzled by the copious references not only to Sen’s own work, but by the near encyclopedic knowledge Sen evinces of work done in the past 50 years in the social sciences and political philosophy. Sen peppers his pages with references to friends and colleagues, especially at Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, who have influenced him and who, inevitably, have been influenced by him. His style in these references is chatty and warm, and further contributes to the impression that what we have in these pages is a disagreement only within liberalism, which, in different forms, Sen believes has carried the day. (The only prominent references to a non-liberal thinker that I could detect are to the late G. A. Cohen, whose own recent book takes issues with the central tenets of Rawls’ theory.)

Sen has many philosophical heroes but chief among these is Adam Smith who, for Sen, himself an avowed child of the enlightenment, represents a sort of counter current to the Kantian enlightenment, which Sen sees Rawls embodying in his emphasis on abstraction. This counter-current includes thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft, the Marquise de Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and even Karl Marx. What all of these thinkers have in common, according to Sen, is their comparative rather than foundationalist approach. Thus, Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator is championed as a comparative version of Kant’s foundational categorical imperative. The difference between the two is that the impartial spectator, while impartial, proceeds by comparison of different perspectives rather than by moral judgment concerning the correct position to take, as the Kantian categorical imperative does. Smith’s view is meant to permit us to see other positions without judging them right or wrong, but rather giving the spectator an appreciation of the relative advantages and disadvantages of a particular comprehensive position.

Sen’s thought, as he makes clear on several occasions, is also influenced by Indian philosophical thought. Here the distinction between niti and nyaya conceptions of justice is particularly important to him. The niti conception of justice is characterized by “organizational propriety and behavioral correctness”, while the nyaya conception “stands for a comprehensive concept of realizing justice” (20). And with this, the centralconcern of theory has been named: Sen is concerned with realization of justice rather than the determination of its pure definition. Sen writes: “an approach to justice can be both entirely acceptable in theory and eminently useable in practice, even without its being able to identify the demands of perfectly just societies.” (401) What Sen wants, in other words, is a theory that is both responsive to the needs of justice and responsive to real world problems.

For someone who has worked as extensively on real world problems, from the Bengal famine of 1943, which Sen witnessed first hand, to the problems of the ‘missing’ generation of women in Asia (due to the impact of inequality on life expectancy of children and newborns), Rawls’ idealized theory of justice surely leaves something to be desired. The problem with a procedure like Rawls’ original position is that, as Senuts it, “there is still a large question about how the chosen institutions would work in a world in which everyone’s actual behavior may or may not come fully into line with the identified reasonable behavior [stipulated by Rawls].” (68) The problem, however, is not only that people are not sufficiently rational, but also, that formulating the question of justice in the way Rawls does means that certain important features of justice will be neglected. These are, as I have noted, the agent’s real position and her real possibilities.

Sen develops this theory out of the social choice model developed by Kenneth Arrow. While much social contract theory depends on an idealized conception of rational agents, the social choice model, as developed by Sen, relies on our actual and only somewhat rational ability to rank different outcomes based on our particular situation. Such ranking, for Sen, means that we can weigh outcomes that are not ideal againsteach other, regardless of how close to the ideal outcome they get. Social choice theory thus makes room for incompleteness.

Sen identifies several features of the social choice framework. (1) Focus on the comparative, not just the transcendental. For Sen this means that “a theory of justice must have something to say about the choices that are actually on offer”. (2) Recognition of the inescapable plurality of competing principles. This means that there will be different conceptions of freedom that can be employed in social choice theory and this, in turn, means that there will be different and potentially incompatible outcomes of social choice theory. (3) Permissibility of partial resolution. This means that the result of social choice may be tentatively incomplete (a work in progress) or that it may arrive at an impasse which is conceptually accounted for, though also open to further revision. (4) Social choice theory reflects diversity of input which means that social choice can give us functional connection between individual rankings and priorities on the one hand and results relevant to social policy on the other. These too will be helpful in determining a closer approximation to justice. (5) Finally, social choice, even if it yields conclusions which conflict, tells us a great deal about current positions and thus should help us come up with better solutions than the ones we already have (106-111).

Sen argues that this framework can help us evaluate relative freedom and justice in terms of outcome as well as in terms of agency. Avowing that he shares Rawls’ commitment to the priority of liberty (62), Sen argues that justice in actual human affairs is not simply a matter of cumulative outcome (what results) but also of comprehensive outcome (what results and how it is brought about), as in Rawls’ proceduralism. Sen thus sides with Rawls against economists and utilitarians who tend to see human freedom merely as welfare. Sen’s approach of freedom as capability holds that freedom is valuable for at least two reasons: freedom must provide opportunity to pursue our ends, and freedom must give us a choice about which opportunities to pursue (228). Sen calls this capability. The approach is pluralist in the sense that it “points to an informational focus in judging and comparing overall individual advantages” without specifying how
information may be used (232). It does not specify any particular ‘primary goods’ as Rawls does. Its second decisive feature is that it “is inescapably concerned with a plurality of different features of our lives and concerns.” (233) These are what Sen calls functionings. Sen writes: “The capability that we are concerned with is our ability to achieve various combinations of functionings that we can compare and judge againsteach other in terms of what we have reason to value.” (233) Freedom as capability thus seeks to do justice to the diversity of human positions as well as to the diversity of human interests.

But how are these different interests to be coordinated? Sen’s answer is: through public debate. For Sen the model of debate is essentially given by the comparative model of Smith’s impartial spectator, as I have noted. The impartial spectator permits open and open-ended discussion, hence the opportunity for people to revise their views based on their changing positions and changing information. This, for Smith, is taken as a fairly unproblematic point.

It is difficult to do justice to such a synthetic work in a few pages, and perhaps more difficult to launch any substantive criticisms of it. However, philosophy being what it is, it is perhaps worth dwelling for a few moments at least on what Sen’s book is and what it is not. As I said at the outset, Sen’s book is not concerned with the grounding of its theory in any meta-ethical sense, that is, Sen does not seek to give a final justification of his pluralist approach to liberty nor to his claim that the impartial spectator is the best
sort of model for deliberation. He does argue, however, that the impartial spectator can help us become more clear about the ways in which human agency could be more fully realized in terms of both functionings and capability. He has, however, also argued that Rawls’ conception of the original position is idealized in a way that makes it unsuitable to tackle real world problems. This too I will not dispute. Sen’s book is a work that seeks to form a bridge between philosophy and social policy in the sense that it argues for the methodology of the capability approach largely from a mixture of philosophical and empirical observation but does not try to systematize these in a philosophical foundational way.

For all of Sen’s criticism of Rawls there is one concept that Sen barely mentions: the concept of the reflective equilibrium. The reflective equilibrium, which in Rawls is meant to ground the whole theory of justice, is the idea that we can abstract from our own perspectives, check these against those of others and adjust our own views accordingly. The reflective equilibrium, in my view, is remarkably close to Sen’s own view of public deliberation. When all is said and done, Sen’s and Rawls’ theories bare remarkable similarity to one another when it comes to their philosophical commitments about the role of rationality and human agency. What they share is a rejection of Kant’s attempt to provide a metaphysical foundation for morality. This means that they have, from a philosophical point of view, more in common than Sen may think.

Resource: Public Reason, Vol. 2, No. 2, December 2010

Amartya Sen: Equality of What?

Origins of a Debate

In his 1979 Tanner lecture entitled “Equality of What?,” Sen presented the capability metric as an alternative for, and improvement on, the social primary goods metric. Sen argued that “the primary goods approach seems to take little note of the diversity of human beings. … If people were basically very similar, then an index of primary goods might be quite a good way of judging advantage. But, in fact, people seem to have very different needs varying with health, longevity, climatic conditions, location, work conditions, temperament, and even body size. … So what is involved is not merely ignoring a few hard cases, but overlooking very widespread and real differences” . A person with a disability, however severe, would not have a claim to additional resources grounded in his impairment under Rawls’s two principles of justice. Sen argues that Rawls’s difference principle would not justify any redistribution to the disabled on grounds of disability. Rawls’s strategy has been to postpone the question of our obligations towards the disabled, and exclude them from the scope of his theory. Rawls certainly does not want to deny our moral duties towards the people that fall outside the scope of his theory, but he thinks that we should first work out a robust and convincing theory of justice for the “normal” cases and only then try to extend it to the “more extreme cases”.

Sen’s critique in his Tanner lecture, however, was not only about the case of the severely disabled. Sen’s more general critique concerned what he saw as the inflexibility of primary goods as a metric of justice. Sen believes that the more general problem with the use of primary goods is that it cannot adequately deal with the pervasive inter-individual differences between people. Primary goods, he argues, cannot adequately account for differences among individuals in their abilities to convert these primary goods into what people are able to be and to do in their lives. For Sen, the more general problem with the primary goods metric is that “interpersonal variability in the conversion of primary goods into [capabilities] introduces elements of arbitrariness into the Rawlsian accounting of the respective advantages enjoyed by different persons; this can be a source of unjustified inequality and unfairness” . We should focus directly on people’s beings and doings, that is, on their capabilities to function. Primary goods are among the valuable means to pursue one’s life plan. But the real opportunities or possibilities that a person has to pursue her own life plan, are not only influenced by the primary goods that she has at her disposal, but also by a range of factors that determine to what extent she can use these primary goods to generate valuable states of being and doing. Hence, Sen claims that we should focus on the extent of substantive freedom that a person effectively has, i.e. her capabilities.

Rawls responded to Sen’s criticism in two ways. First, he defended
the restricted scope of his theory. Rawls stressed, especially in his later work, that in his theory “everyone has physical needs and psychological capacities within the normal range,” and therefore he excludes people with severe physical or mental disabilities from the scope of justice as fairness. In A Theory of Justice this restriction was justified by arguing that a theory of justice should in any case apply for “normal cases” – if the theory is inconsistent or implausible for such cases, then it will certainly not be an attractive theory for the more challenging cases, such as people with severe disabilities. We could postpone the question of how to treat people with disabilities to one of the later (legislative) stages of the design of the basic structure of society though, of course, even in his earliest discussions of this Rawls thinks that the final theory of justice must deal adequately with the claims of people whose abilities fall outside the normal range, and that any theory that cannot do so should be rejected on those grounds. In later work Rawls no longer argued that the case of justice towards the disabled had to be postponed to the legislative phase, but rather that we had to try to extend justice as fairness to include those cases. Rawls has not pursued this task systematically himself, though he has emphasized the role that his conception of the person possessed of the capacities for a sense of justice and a conception of the good plays in justice, and has argued that this conception enables him to deflect accusations of “fetishism” about the primary goods.

In addition to defending his theory against Sen’s criticism, Rawls criticized the capability approach. Two Rawlsian critiques of the capability approach are particularly important in the present context.

Firstly, Rawls criticized the capability approach for endorsing a particular comprehensive moral view. In his later work, Rawls greatly stresses the distinction between a political conception of justice and a comprehensive moral doctrine. “The idea [of a political conception of justice] is that in a constitutional democracy the public conception of justice should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines”. According to Sen, Rawls has argued that the capability approach presupposes the acceptance of a comprehensive doctrine, and therefore goes against political liberalism. Sen has replied that Rawls’s claim that the capability approach would endorse one unique view of the good,
is mistaken. He maintains that the capability approach holds that the relevant focus is on “the actual freedom of choice a person has over alternative lives that he or she can lead”.

The second main Rawlsian objection to the capability approach concerns the publicity criterion. Since Rawls wants to analyze how people with very different comprehensive moral values of the good life can come to a reasonable agreement on the principles of political justice, he stresses that the conception of justice must be public and the necessary information to make a claim of injustice must be verifiable to all, and easily accesible. A theory of justice needs a public standard of interpersonal comparisons, as otherwise the obtained principles of justice between citizens with divers views on the good life will not prove stable. The suggestion is that as capabilities are very hard to measure or assess in such a public fashion, and as they would require very large amounts and difficult sorts of information, the capability approach is unworkable as a theory of justice. Rawls acknowledged that capabilities are important “to explain the propriety of the use of primary goods,” but maintained that the capability approach amounts to an unworkable idea.

Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns

Amartya Sen: The Idea of Justice

Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2009, 496 pp.


[The powerful tradition of the Enlightenment saw clear-headed reasoning as a primal resource of making societies decent and acceptable.]

[However, t]he leaders of thought in the Enlightenment did not [...] speak with one voice. In fact, there is a substantial dichotomy between two different lines of reasoning about justice that can be seen among two groups of leading philosophers associated with the radical thought of the Enlightenment period. One approach concentrated on identifying perfectly just social arrangements, and took the characterisation of "just institutions" to be the principal – and often the only identified – task of the theory of justice.
Woven in different ways around the idea of a hypothetical "social contract", major contributions were made in this line of thinking by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, and later by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, among others. The contractarian approach has become the dominant influence in contemporary political philosophy, led by the most prominent political philosopher of our time, John Rawls – whose classic book of 1971, A Theory of Justice, presents a definitive statement on the social contract approach to justice. The principal theories of justice in contemporary political philosophy draw in one way or another on the social contract approach, and concentrate on the search for ideal social institutions.

In contrast, a number of other Enlightenment theorists (Adam Smith, Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, for example) took a variety of approaches that shared an interest in making comparisons between different ways in which people's lives may go, jointly influenced by the working of institutions, people's actual behaviour, their social interactions, and other factors that significantly impact on what actually happens. The analytical, and rather mathematical, discipline of "social choice theory" – which can be traced to the works of Condorcet in the 18th century, but has been developed in the present form under the leadership of Kenneth Arrow in the last century – belongs to this second line of investigation. That approach, suitably adapted, can make a substantial contribution, I believe, to addressing questions about the enhancement of justice and the removal of injustice in the world.

In this alternative approach, we don't begin by asking what a perfectly just society would look like, but asking what remediable injustices could be seen on the removal of which there would be a reasoned agreement. "In the little world in which children have their existence," says Pip in Great Expectations, "there is nothing so finely perceived, and finely felt, as injustice." In fact, the strong perception of manifest injustice applies to adult human beings as well. What moves us is not the realisation 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. One of the limitations of the social contract approach to justice, which is so pervasive in contemporary political philosophy, is the unjustified conviction that there could only be one precise combination of principles that could serve as the basis of ideal social institutions. In contrast with this rigid insistence, a social choice approach allows the possibility of a plurality of competing principles, each of which is given a status, after being subjected to critical scrutiny.

Thanks to this plurality, we may not be able to resolve on grounds of justice alone all the questions that may be asked: for example, whether a 40% top tax rate is more just – or less just – than a 41% top rate. And yet we have every reason to try to see whether we can get reasoned agreement on removing what can be identified as clear injustice in the world, such as slavery, or the subjugation of women, or extreme exploitation of vulnerable labour (which so engaged Adam Smith, Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft, and later Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill), or gross medical neglect of the bulk of the world population today (through the absence of medical facilities in parts of Africa or Asia, or a lack of universal health coverage in most countries in the world, including the US), or the prevalence of torture (which continues to be used with remarkable frequency in the contemporary world – sometimes practised by pillars of the global establishment), or the quiet tolerance of chronic hunger (for example in India, despite the successful abolition of famines).

The idea of justice demands comparisons of actual lives that people can lead, rather than a remote search for ideal institutions. That is what makes the idea of justice relevant as well as exciting in practical reasoning.

Tomado de The Guardian, 13 de Julio de 2009

Amartya Sen: Capitalism Beyond the Crisis

Hoy en día los economistas son tecnócratas --especialistas en modelos técnicos aplicables a problemas muy concretos-- o ideólogos --defensores de un fundamentalismo del mercado--, posiciones que se traducen en una política económica inocua o en un fervor casi religioso sin justificación teórica. A propósito de la actual recesión mundial, Amartya Sen se pregunta, desde una perspectiva pragmática, en su ensayo 'Capitalism Beyond the Crisis', publicado en The New York Review of Books, sobre la naturaleza del capitalismo y su necesidad de cambio, sin olvidar los grandes precursores y el desarrollo del pensamiento económico. Ver aquí