Justice and the world

02 August, 2009 11:25:00

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There is a strong case for focussing questions of justice on what actually happens and actual lives rather than merely looking for ideal institutions and arrangements.

Amartya Sen

If the reliance on public reasoning is an important aspect of the approach to justice, so is the form in which questions of justice are asked. There is a strong case for replacing what I have been calling transcendental institutionalism — that underlies most of the mainstream approaches to justice in contemporary political philosophy, including John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness — by focussing questions of justice, first, on assessments of social realisations, that is, on what actually happens (rather than merely on the appraisal of institutions and arrangements); and second, on comparative issues of enhancement of justice (rather than trying to identify perfectly just arrangements).

The approach developed in this book is much influenced by the tradition of social choice theory (initiated by Condorcet in the 18th century and firmly established by Kenneth Arrow in our own time), and concentrates, as the discipline of social choice does, on making evaluative comparisons over distinct social realisations. In this respect, the approach here also has important similarities with the works of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, among others.

While the roots of the approach go back to the Enlightenment, there is a significant contrast with another tradition particularly cultivated over that period — the discipline of reasoning about justice in terms of the idea of a social contract. The contractarian tradition goes back at least to Thomas Hobbes, but also had major contributions from Locke, Rousseau and Kant, and in our time from leading philosophical theorists from Rawls to Nozick, Gauthier, Dworkin and others. In opting for the social choice approach rather than that of the social contract, it is not of course my intention to deny the understanding and illumination that have been generated by the latter approach to justice. However, enlightening as the social contract tradition is, I have argued that its limitations in providing an underpinning for a theory of justice with adequate reach are so strong that it ultimately serves partly as a barrier to practical reason on justice.

The theory of justice, which is most widely used now and which has served as the point of departure for this work is, of course, the theory of ‘justice as fairness’ presented by John Rawls. Even though Rawls’s broad political analysis has many other elements, his justice as fairness has the characteristics of being directly concerned only with the identification of just institutions. There is a transcendentalism here, even though Rawls made deeply enlightening observations on comparative issues and also tried to take note of possible disagreements on the nature of a perfectly just society. Rawls focussed on institutions as the subject matter of his principles of justice. His concentration on institutional choice does not, however, reflect his lack of interest in social realisations. The social realisations are assumed in Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ to be determined by a combination of just institutions and fully compliant behaviour by all to make a predictable transition from institutions to states of affairs. This is related to Rawls’s attempt at getting to a perfectly just society with a combination of ideal institutions and corresponding ideal behaviour. In a world where those extremely demanding behavioural assumptions do not hold, the institutional choices made will tend not to deliver the kind of society that would have strong claims to being seen as perfectly just.

In a memorable observation in the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes noted that the lives of people were ‘nasty, brutish and short’. That was a good starting point for a theory of justice in 1651, and I am afraid it is a still good starting point for a theory of justice today, since the lives of so many people across the world have exactly those dire features, despite the substantial material progress of others. Indeed, a good deal of the theory presented here has been directly concerned with people’s lives and capabilities, and the deprivation and suppression suffered. Even though Hobbes moved on from his powerful characterisation of human deprivation to the idealist approach of a social contract, there can be little doubt about the life-enhancing motivations that inspired Hobbes. Much the same thing can be said about the theories of justice of Rawls or Dworkin or Nagel today, for example, even though formally they have anchored their principles of justice to certain arrangements and rules (thereby going in the direction of niti, rather than nyaya), rather than directly to social realisations and human lives and freedoms. The connections between the disparate theories of justice have to be firmly noted since, in the debates about different theories, the focus tends to be on differences rather than on similarities.

I realise that I too have largely succumbed to the analytical temptation to concentrate on distinctions and to highlight contrasts. And yet there is an important shared involvement in being concerned with justice in the first place. No matter where our theories of justice take us, we all have reasons to be grateful for the recent intellectual animation around them, which has been, to a great extent, initiated and inspired by John Rawls’s pioneering move in this field, beginning with his outstanding paper in 1958 (‘Justice as Fairness’).

Philosophy can — and does — produce extraordinarily interesting and important work on a variety of subjects that have nothing to do with the deprivations and inequities and unfreedoms of human lives. This is as it should be, and there is much to rejoice in the expansion and consolidation of the horizon of our understanding in every field of human curiosity. However, philosophy can also play a part in bringing more discipline and greater reach to reflections on values and priorities as well as on the denials, subjugations and humiliations from which human beings suffer across the world. A shared commitment of theories of justice is to take these issues seriously and to see what they can do in terms of practical reasoning about justice and injustice in the world. If epistemic curiosity about the world is one tendency that many people have, concern about goodness, rightness and justness also has a powerful presence — manifest or latent — in our minds. Distinct theories of justice may compete in finding the right use of that concern, but they share the significant feature of being involved in the same pursuit.

Many years ago, in a justly famous paper called ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel presented some foundational ideas on the mind-body problem. The pursuit of a theory of justice has something to do with a similar question: what is it like to be a human being? In his paper, Nagel too was actually involved with human beings, and only very marginally with bats. He argued powerfully against the cogency of understanding consciousness and mental phenomena by trying to see them in terms of the corresponding physical phenomena (as is attempted by many scientists and some philosophers), and in particular, he differentiated the nature of consciousness from the connections — causal or associative — that may link it to bodily operations. Those distinctions remain, and my reason for asking what it is like to be a human being is different — it relates to the feelings, concerns and mental abilities that we share as human beings.

In arguing that the pursuit of a theory of justice has something to do with the kind of creatures we human beings are, it is not at all my contention that debates between theories of justice can be plausibly settled by going back to features of human nature, rather to note the fact that a number of different theories of justice share some common presumptions about what it is like to be a human being. We could have been creatures incapable of sympathy, unmoved by the pain and humiliation of others, uncaring of freedom, and — no less significant — unable to reason, argue, disagree and concur. The strong presence of these features in human lives does not tell us a great deal about which particular theory of justice should be chosen, but it does indicate that the general pursuit of justice might be hard to eradicate in human society, even though we can go about that pursuit in different ways.

I have made considerable use of the existence of the human faculties just mentioned (for example, the ability to sympathise and to reason) in developing my argument, and so have others in presenting their theories of justice. There is no automatic settlement of differences between distinct theories here, but it is comforting to think that not only do proponents of different theories of justice share a common pursuit, they also make use of common human features that figure in the reasoning underlying the irrespective approaches. Because of these basic human abilities — to understand, to sympathise, to argue — people need not be inescapably doomed to isolated lives without communication and collaboration. It is bad enough that the world in which we live has so much deprivation of one kind or another (from being hungry to being tyrannised); it would be even more terrible if we were not able to communicate, respond and altercate.

When Hobbes referred to the dire state of human beings in having ‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives, he also pointed, in the same sentence, to the disturbing adversity of being ‘solitary’. Escape from isolation may not only be important for the quality of human life, it can also contribute powerfully to understanding and responding to the other deprivations from which human beings suffer. There is surely a basic strength here which is complementary to the engagement in which theories of justice are involved.

(Excerpted with permission from The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen published by Allen Lane (Penguin). Hardcover Rs. 699. Paperback Rs. 496.)