RESEARCH PROJECT

IDEA OF JUSTICE BY AMARTYA SEN

SUBMITTED TO: MR. PRATYUSH KAUSHIK

SUBMITTED BY: MISS NIDHI GUPTA

ROLL NUMBER 1632

2016-17

CHANAKYA NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
First and above all, I thank God, the almighty for providing me this opportunity and granting me
the capability to proceed successfully. This project appears in its current form due to the
assistance and guidance of several people.

Immeasurable appreciation and deepest gratitude is extended to MR. PRATYUSH KAUSHIK,

the professor of the Law and Literature for his valuable suggestions towards this project work.

I am highly indebted to my parents for their constant support, guidance and supervision.

Appreciation is also extended to the internet and library for providing me the resources to finish
this project

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .............................................................................................................. 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................................ 3
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 4
SUMMARY OF THE BOOK ......................................................................................................... 6
THEMATIC PATTERNS IN THE IDEA OF JUSTICE ............................................................. 11
SEN’S TRANSCENDENTAL INSTITUTIONALISM V. COMPARITIVE APPROACH ....... 18
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 22
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 25

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 INTRODUCTION

The Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, born in 1933, is one of the most important public
intellectuals of our age, an original thinker whose work transcends the standard disciplinary
boundaries. His 1998 Nobel Prize was awarded for his work in welfare economics, but to
describe him as an "economist'' (as the term is understood today) would be inaccurate. Better
would be "social philosopher,'' or, better still, the old term "political economist,'' since the scope
and range of Sen's work is directly comparable to that of such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
practitioners of political economy as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. Indeed,
Marx and especially Smith are key reference points for Sen, although it is Smith's Theory of
Moral Sentiments rather than his Wealth of Nations to which Sen refers most often, and similarly
it is Marx's more explicitly philosophical works rather than Capital that appeal to him.1In the
course of a stellar academic career, Sen has published more than two dozen books and countless
articles. He taught at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, while on leave from writing his Ph.D. at
Cambridge University and went on to teach at the Delhi School of Economics, Oxford, the
London School of Economics, and Harvard before being elected Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge, in 1998. In 2004 he returned to Harvard as Lamont University Professor, Professor
of Economics and Philosophy. The combining of these two disciplines in the title of his chair
speaks volumes.

In 2009 Sen published a major book, The Idea of Justice, which summarizes and extends many
of the most important themes he has developed over the last quarter century.

The reception of the book has been fairly acclaimed. “[A] majestic book… Reading The Idea of
Justice is like attending a master class in practical reasoning. You can’t help noticing you are
engaging with a great, deeply pluralistic, mind… This is a monumental work.”—Ziauddin
Sardar, The Independent

1
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Penguin Classics, 1999);
and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, with an introduction by Amartya Sen (London: Penguin
Classics, 2009).

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“In The Idea of Justice Sen orchestrates his many contributions and achievements into a
distinctive position on justice… How the current revival of political philosophy will influence
future generations is impossible to predict. But it’s a safe bet that the debates will be of world-
historical importance, and that Sen’s ideas about justice, social choice theory, and the capabilities
approach to assessing well-being will make a crucial contribution to them.”—Samuel Freeman,
The New York Review of Books

“[Sen’s] magnum opus on a line of work he’s long addressed and now thoroughly re-examines:
justice theory… In repeatedly bringing back into the discussion Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral
Sentiments, Sen signals the need for justice theory to reconnect to realistic human psychology,
not the phony formal rationalism that infects modern economics or the for-sake-of-argument
altruism that anchors Rawls’s project.”—Carlin Romano, The Chronicle of Higher Education

“An original contribution to political philosophy.”—Adam Kirsch, City Journal

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 SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

The Idea of Justice is one of those books that–whether we agree with its ultimate conclusions or
not–will be virtually impossible to ignore. And for good reason: it takes on one of the great
political philosophers of our time, John Rawls, and deepens, enriches and challenges some basic
Rawlsian ideas. Sen’s basic argument is that the Rawlsian approach to justice, which has
profoundly influenced the development of contemporary political theory since the publication of
A Theory of Justice in 1971 is so focused on ideal, transcendentally just institutions that it is
unable to offer practical guidance for advancing justice in an increasingly borderless world.
Sen’s ambitious critique of Rawls takes him on a winding but engaging path, through political
and moral philosophy, economics, history and law. Along the way, he challenges mainstream
economic theories of rationality, explores deontological and consequentialist ethics through the
lens of classical Indian thought, articulates and defends an understanding of freedom in terms of
capability, and rethinks the relationship between development, agency and democracy in a global
context.
What is justice? What does a just society look like? And what principles should guide us there?
These questions have occupied an entire tradition - the dominant tradition - of political
philosophy, led above all by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Immanuel
Kant, and among contemporary philosophers by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. But ask
Amartya Sen and he will tell you they are precisely the wrong ones to ask. In his most recent
book, The Idea of Justice, he argues that this traditional strain of political philosophy, which
seeks to identify ‘the just’, or a single set of just principles that can then be used to design
perfectly just institutions for governing society, reveals little about how we can identify and
reduce injustice in the here and now. According to Sen, the dominant approach, which he refers
to as ‘transcendental institutionalism’, is beleaguered by two central problems: the problem of
feasibility and the problem of redundancy. The first is a result of the practical difficulty, even
impossibility, of arriving at a single set of principles that can help us to select just institutions
through a process of impartial reasoning. In Rawls’ theory of justice, for instance, his two
lexically ordered principles of justice are, it is argued, those that would be unanimously selected
through an impartial decision procedure - through the hypothetical original position using the
‘veil of ignorance’ device. These principles then provide the basis for choosing actual institutions

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in the ‘legislative stage’. Clearly, however, much depends on the assumption that Rawls’ two
principles of justice are those that would indeed emerge from the original position. And Sen is
skeptical that this is so. In fact, Sen maintains that there are many principles that can pass the test
of impartiality. He illustrates this point, first, using an anecdote about the competing claims of
three children over the distribution of a single flute. One child argues that they should receive the
flute because they are the best flautist; the second, because they are the poorest of the lot; and the
third, because they crafted the flute without help from the others. The three arguments are based,
in turn, on principles of utility, economic equity, and the entitlement to the fruits of one’s
unaided efforts. Each can be defended with strong, impartial arguments. And, returning to Rawls,
it is similarly possible, for example, to provide substantial reasons for selecting Harsanyi’s
utilitarian principle in the place of Rawls’ maximin principle as the basis for resolving
distributional questions within a situation similar to the original position.
But this indeterminacy has profound implications for Rawls’ theory of justice, for ‘if there is no
unique emergence of a given set of principles of justice that together identify the institutions
needed for the basic structure of society, then the entire procedure of justice as fairness, as
developed in Rawls’ classic theory, would be hard to use’. Sen even suggests that Rawls’ basic
claim about the emergence of a unique set of principles of justice from the original position (as
defended in A Theory of Justice) was considerably qualified in his later writings, such as The
Law of Peoples, and that accepting the full implications of these qualifications would mean
abandoning the stage-by-stage theory of justice.
The second problem - the redundancy problem - is that the identification of fully just social
arrangements is neither a necessary nor sufficient guide to reasoned choice of just policies,
strategies or institutions. It is insufficient because, as Sen explains, ‘the characterization of
spotless justice, even if such a characterization were to emerge clearly, would not entail any
delineation whatsoever of how diverse departures from spotlessness would be compared and
ranked’. In other words, using an analogy with paintings, the fact that a person regards Da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa as the most perfect picture in the world does not reveal anything about how
they would rank a Picasso against a Van Gogh. But it is also unnecessary because in adjudicating
between the various merits of a Picasso and a Van Gogh there is no reason to identify the most
perfect picture in the world, just as when determining the relative heights of Mount Kilimanjaro
and Mount McKinley knowing that Mount Everest is taller than both is an entirely redundant

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fact.

In contrast to transcendental institutionalism, Sen advocates what he calls a ‘realization-focused

comparative approach’. In doing so, he sides with thinkers such as Adam Smith, Marquis de
Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, and JS Mill, among others, who
each attempted to evaluate the desirability of particular ‘social realizations’, rather than search
for a set of perfectly just first principles. It may not be possible to agree on perfectly just
institutions, but, Sen contends, using a comparative approach we can at least arrive at widespread
consensus on the injustice of certain practices or outcomes relative to others.

Such a comparative approach to questions of justice, he believes, is closely aligned with social
choice theory, one of the many fields in which Sen made his mark as an economist, earning him
a Nobel-prize in 1998. Social choice theory assumes that, like the plurality of impartial principles
of justice that can plausibly sustain critical scrutiny, there can be a variety of competing
principles that figure in our assessments of various social orderings. And while it may sometimes
appear to be impossible to satisfy all or even most of these competing principles at once - as in
Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, for example - such impasses can often be resolved by
incorporating more information about interpersonal comparisons of well-being and relative
advantages. Similarly, Sen insists, ‘for an adequate understanding of the demands of justice, the
needs of social organizations and institutions, and the satisfactory making of public policies, we
have to seek much more information and scrutinizing evidence’.

This, in particular, is something that Sen believes that Rawls’ theory does not do well. Sen offers
Rawls’ use of the original position as an example of what he calls ‘closed impartiality’. The ‘veil
of ignorance’ device is, Sen admits, a useful, if hypothetical, way of reaching an impartial social
choice, free of various vested interests. But it does not ensure the open scrutiny of the values of
the people within the original position. The vast plurality of alternative views held by outsiders -
their unique moral perspectives and rankings of social realizations that can reveal hidden biases
in our choice of basic principles - are simply beyond the scope of Rawls’ theory. Furthermore, by
limiting moral claims of outsiders we may be doing an injustice to those that fall outside the
artificially closed circle of the original position. Sen contrasts this example of ‘closed

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impartiality’ with the ‘open impartiality’ of Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’. Smith’s
reflective device, which asks us to observe our actions and institutions from the standpoint of an
outsider, specifically refrains from limiting the extent to which the views of others can be
considered, refusing to confine moral discussion within the boundaries of a nation-state or any
other locality. And, as in social choice theory, such openness to, and critical reflection upon,
alternative views and different ways of approaching social problems, Sen believes, can provide a
more solid ground for ranking the ‘just-ness’ or, at least, manifest injustice of certain social
realizations, even if they are merely partial and ordinal rather than comprehensive, cardinal
rankings.

Of course, an engagement with contrary arguments does not imply that we will be able to arrive
at agreed positions on every issue (and Sen does not see this as a drawback in his theory - not at
all), nor does it oblige us to accept any of them. But there is a connection between what Sen calls
the ‘objectivity’ of an ethical judgment and its ability to withstand open public scrutiny. Sen thus
underscores the importance of public reasoning for justice throughout the book, and he regards
democracy, especially when understood as ‘government by discussion’ rather than the
Schumpeterian ‘government by elections’, as a particularly appropriate form of public reasoning,
which can serve to increase the ‘objectivity’ of political solutions.2
Without doubt, the argument Sen presents in the The Idea of Justice deserves to be seriously
considered by contemporary political philosophers and lay-readers alike. It commands respect,
for even if it fails to convince it will surely sharpen the arguments of others. Much of what
passes for philosophy, including political philosophy, has been repeatedly accused of being
irrelevant to the real choices and concerns of those outside of philosophy departments. And in
The Idea of Justice Sen presents a serious challenge to those departments, forcing them to prove
their relevance and demonstrate how they can actually inform tough decision-making.

However, if we are convinced by Sen’s argument, this raises interesting questions about the role
of the philosopher and their claim to any authority or special knowledge. According to Sen,
‘philosophers’ should not - and cannot - strive to become the architects of castles in the sky.
Instead, he asks us all to start right at the foundations: to share, explore, and debate our

2
https://www.opendemocracy.net/charles-barclay-roger/amartya-sen-and-idea-of-justice

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perspectives on how to repair the edifices in which we currently live. Justice arises not from a
blueprint, but from a process of open public reasoning in which as many potential policies,
strategies or institutions are considered as possible. However, in this process it is not clear that
the people who currently occupy philosophy departments have any special standing. They
become, according to Sen, purveyors rather than adjudicators of wisdom, on an even standing
with economists, doctors, scientists and lawyers, with whom they should collaborate intensely.
Sen’s Philosopher turns out to be anyone willing to cross boundaries, willing to explore
alternative ways of thinking and living across disciplines, communities and time. What matters is
that people know more about what’s out there and make more informed choices - that they are
smarter - because, for Sen, smarter is better.
His idea of democracy and public institutions is very different. While he concedes that these
institutions are very essential for preserving democracy, he argues that democracy in reality is
not the presence of these institutions, rather it is the absence of poverty and the quality of life and
the freedoms enjoyed by the people.
an important distinction between two different concepts of justice in early Indian jurisprudence–
between niti and nyaya. The former idea, that of niti, relates to organizational propriety as well
as behavioural correctness, whereas the latter, nyaya, is concerned with what emerges and how,
and in particular the lives that people are actually able to lead. This difference sums up the
difference of sens idea vis a vis the other themes of justice.
a number of other Enlightenment philosophers (Smith, Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Bentham,
Marx, John Stuart Mill, for example) took a variety of approaches that shared a common interest
in making comparisons between different ways in which people’s lives may be led, influenced
by institutions but also by people’s actual behaviour, social interactions and other significant
determinants. This book draws to a great extent on that alternative tradition.* The analytical –
and rather mathematical – discipline of ‘social choice theory’, which can be traced to the works
of Condorcet in the eighteenth century, but which has been developed in the present form
by the pioneering contributions of Kenneth Arrow.

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 THEMATIC PATTERNS IN THE IDEA OF JUSTICE

Utilitarianism

This theory was propounded by JS MILL.

Utilitarianism as a theory of justice is based on a principle of utility, approving every action that
increases human happiness (by increasing pleasure and/or decreasing pain, those being the two
"sovereign masters" of man) and disapproving every action that diminishes it.

A utilitarian view is that justice should seek to create the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. A law is just if it results in a net gain in happiness, even at the expense of
minorities. The problem here is that minorities may not form part of the "greater number". This
is a particular problem in a pluralist society. Utilitarianism still plays a major part in the
democratic decision-making process; it is a secular theory requiring no reference to any natural
rights or other abstract religious principles defensible only by faith. The idea of maximising the
total happiness of the community is often applied on a national political level and in ordinary
dealings among friends3.

In marginal cases, the theory breaks down and produces results far removed from those that most
people would consider right. In an Economic Theory of Justice, there is conflict between the
views of the individual and the collective view, sometimes referred to as the, social
contract. Such conflict can be seen by asking how a doctor with £100,000 to spend should chose
between 100 patients with a minor condition; he can treat all of them, or 1 very sick person who
would take all his resources4. There is no legal requirement that the National Health Service
distributes its assets evenly. This can produce results that anger the majority, who respond
emotionally; the case of Child B produced national anger, fuelled by newspaper reports. Jaymee
Bowen (Child B) has come to epitomise the dilemmas involved in making tragic choices in
health care. When 11 year-old Jaymee needed life-saving cancer treatment for the third time, the
hospital refused funding in R v Cambridge Heath Authority ex parte 5the Court of Appeal
upheld the hospital’s decision. Medical advice that Jaymee had only a 2.5 per cent chance of

3
Sen’s ‘The Idea of Justice’ (Chapter 1, ‘Reason and Objectivity’)
4
http://sixthformlaw.info/01_modules/other_material/law_and_justice/2_distributive.htm
5
B [1995] CA

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survival was basically that the £75,000 it would cost to carry on her treatment would be wasted
and could be put to better use for others. An anonymous benefactor stepped in and paid for
Jaymee to receive the treatment privately, she died 16 months later. T S Eliot famously
remarked, “Human kind cannot take very much reality".

Mill said that justice was a subset of morality—“injustice involves the violation of the rights of
some identifiable individual” (ibid.). Mill suggests, “Justice implies something which is not only
right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his
moral right” (ibid.). Morality is larger than justice because it’s plausible that we can be heroic or
act beyond the call of duty to help others and such acts would not be best described as examples
of “justice.”

When do we (or should we) have a right? When we can legitimately make demands on society
based on utilitarian grounds. “To have a right, then, is… to have something which society ought
to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask why it ought, I can give him no
other reason than general utility” (ibid.). Rights are rules society can make for everyone that
could help people flourish and prosper in general, and we should have rights given the
assumption that they are likely to increase goodness in the long run.

Mill’s conception of rights can include both positive rights (for public education, food, shelter,
medical assistance, etc.) and negative rights (to be allowed to say what we want, to be allowed to
have any religion, etc.)6 Both of these sorts of rights can potentially help people have greater
well being.

Concrete utilitarian suggestions

Utilitarians have suggestions for improving economic systems. For example:

1. Mill argued that we should reduce the division between workers and owners (92-94).
Workers and owners often engage in class warfare or other hostile relations. There might
be a way for workers and owners to blend together rather than be sharply divided groups,

6
https://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/three-theories-of-justice/

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 which could reduce class warfare and hostile relations. For example, profits could be
shared with the workers.

2. We can promote greater equality of income (93). The more money you get, the less that
additional money can help your well-being. People who have billions of dollars don’t get
as much of a benefit from each dollar they own than others would. The poor often die
from medical neglect, but everyone else can pretty much attain everything needed for
survival. The luxuries enjoyed by the rich are much less important to their well being
than the necessities that could be enjoyed by others if that wealth is shared. If we tax the
rich to help the poor, than we could expect that greater goodness would result.

Applying Mill’s theory of justice

Mill thinks that we should have rights, laws, and government intervention when doing so will
best maximize the good, which he finds to be happiness, and minimize evil in the form of
suffering. We often say that utilitarianism asks us to “maximize happiness” for short, and it’s
implied that suffering is incompatible and destructive to happiness. He thinks something’s just if
it doesn’t violate any rights, and there are ideal rights that would maximize happiness. His
utilitarian theory of justice doesn’t tell us what the ideal rights are. How can we apply Mill’s
utilitarian theory of justice to our lives? First, we need to figure out what rights will probably
lead to greater happiness. Second, we have to figure out whether those rights are being violated
in a given situation.

Rawls’s theory of justice

Rawls described his theory of justice called “Justice as Fairness” in his book A Theory of
Justice. Rawls agrees with Nozick that justice is quite separate from morality and he too rejects
utilitarian forms of justice. He first suggests a new way to learn about principles of justice—the
original position (103-105). The original position asks us to imagine that a group of people will
get to decide the principles of justice. These people don’t know who they are (what he calls a
‘veil of ignorance’), they are self-interested, and they know everything science has to offer. He

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argues that in a veil of ignorance they couldn’t be as biased towards their profession, race,
gender, age, or social status because they wouldn’t know which categories they belong to (104-
105). As far as self-interest is concerned, Rawls argues that they will want principles of justice
that will “fairly distribute” certain goods that everyone will value—what Rawls calls “primary
social goods” (105). Rawls argues that the people in the original position will discuss which
principles of justice are best before voting on them, and the best principles worth having will
reach a “reflective equilibrium”—the most intuitive principles will be favored and incompatible
less intuitive principles will have to be rejected in order to maintain coherence. He argues that
two intuitive principles of justice in particular will reach reflective equilibrium:

1. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic
liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.
2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be
attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of
opportunity; and second, they are to be the greatest expected benefit of the least
advantaged members of society (107).

Rawls says that the first principle has priority over the second, “at least for societies that have
attained a moderate level of affluence” (ibid.). The liberties Rawls has in mind are negative
rights, like the freedom of thought. The distribution of social goods can include education, food,
and housing; which could be considered to be positive rights.

The second principle’s second restriction—that social and economic inequalities must benefit the
worst off group—is known as the “difference principle” and seems to imply that total
communism is automatically just if such a system has no economic or social inequalities because
it’s only inequalities that require a rationale. Capitalism will only be justified if it benefits the
least advantaged group—the poor, orphans, and so on. The assumption is that inequality can
allow hard work to be rewarded to the point that people decide to be more productive and share
their wealth with the poor. People won’t be allowed to be wealthier unless the wealth is shared
with the poor.

Applying Raws’s theory of justice

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Rawls agrees with Nozick that we have negative rights and no positive rights, but he argues that
social and economic inequalities are unjust unless they meet certain requirements. In particular,
there must be equal opportunity (public education) and greater inequality must benefit those who
have the least social and economic goods (the worst off group). Rawls disagrees with utilitarians
that economic inequality is justified if it maximizes happiness—by providing rewards to being
productive members of society—if such inequality doesn’t help those who are the worst off. (A
utilitarian could argue that some people living in poverty are a necessary for the “greater good”
but Rawls would rather no one live in poverty.)

Rawls thinks that redistribution of wealth and taxes are justified if it is the best way for the
“worst off” to benefit from social and economic inequalities. He thinks total economic equality is
just (perhaps in a socialist state), but he thinks that a capitalistic system might actually be better
and help the “worst off” by rewarding productive behavior to give an incentive to increase
productivity and therefore prosperity.

Objections

1. Basic liberties aren’t good enough – The first principle of justice equates freedom with some
list of negative rights, but we can argue that freedom is and ought to be more than that. The idea
of having a finite list of rights implies that we can restrict freedom and oppress people willy nilly
as long as the specific freedom in question isn’t on some official list. Why not make freedom
innocent until proven guilty? We shouldn’t be restricting any freedom until we have an
overriding reason to do so.

2. Aren’t these people too risk averse? – It’s not entirely clear how Rawls knows what principles
people will agree to in the original position nor is it entirely clear that the original position is
going to help us discover the best principles of justice. In particular, some people argue that they
wouldn’t agree the difference principle because so few people will be part of the least
advantaged group. Why not take a risk by screwing over the poor to help everyone else as long
as there’s a very low chance of being poor?

3. The difference principle unjustly restrains freedom and power – Someone could argue that
many of us want as much freedom and power as possible and the difference principle will deny

15
the ability of the wealthy and powerful to attain more wealth or power, even when it doesn’t hurt
anyone. What if the rich could attain a great deal more power and wealth without hurting
anyone? It seems oppressive to stop them from doing so.

4. The difference principle can lead to poverty – First, it’s possible that communism might lead
to mass poverty. Everyone can all be equally poor, but that doesn’t seem to imply that it’s a just
economic system. Second, it’s logically possible that every economic system that leads to
prosperity requires that the least off group to do very poorly. The difference principle would
force us to reject prosperity and live in poverty just because economic differences might
inevitably require that the worst off group do poorly compared to everyone else.

5. International responsibilities – Rawls’s Justice as Fairness doesn’t guarantee that a civilization

will treat other civilizations with respect nor does it require civilizations to help other
civilizations living in poverty and with many people who are starving to death. Utilitarians could
argue that justice doesn’t stop within our borders, but it expands to everyone in the world and
Rawls’s Justice as Fairness ignores this fact.

Harm principle

Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill believed that the law should not interfere with private
actions unless they caused harm to others.

JS Mill writing in “On Liberty” said that private acts of immorality increase the pleasure of those
who indulge in them and cause little pain to others. Their net effect is to increase the sum of
human happiness and laws prohibiting them would be unjust.

Comparison between the the various ideas of Justice

One approach, led by the work of Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and followed in
different ways by such outstanding thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, concentrated on
identifying just institutional arrangements for a society. This approach, which can be called
‘transcendental institutionalism’, has two distinct features. First, it concentrates its attention on
what it identifies as perfect justice, rather than on relative comparisons of justice and injustice. It
tries only to identify social characteristics that cannot be transcended in terms of justice, and its

16
focus is thus not on comparing feasible societies, all of which may fall short of the ideals of
perfection. The inquiry is aimed at identifying the nature of ‘the just’, rather than finding some
criteria for an alternative being ‘less unjust’ than another.
Second, in searching for perfection, transcendental institutionalism concentrates primarily on
getting the institutions right, and it is not directly focused on the actual societies that would
ultimately emerge.

The nature of the society that would result from any given set of institutions must, of course,
depend also on non-institutional features, such as actual behaviours of people and their social
interactions
In contrast with transcendental institutionalism, a number of other Enlightenment theorists took a
variety of comparative approaches that were concerned with social realizations (resulting from
actual institutions, actual behaviour and other influences). Different versions of such
comparative thinking can be found, for example, in the works of Adam Smith, the Marquis de
Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, among a
number of other leaders of innovative thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even
though these authors, with their very different ideas of the demands of justice, proposed quite
distinct ways of making social comparisons, it can be said, at the risk of only a slight
exaggeration, that they were all involved in comparisons of societies that already existed or
could feasibly emerge, rather than confining their analysis to transcendental searches for a
perfectly just society. Those focusing on realization-focused comparisons were often interested
primarily in the removal of manifest injustice from the world that they saw.
Sen falls in the second class.

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 SEN’S TRANSCENDENTAL INSTITUTIONALISM V. COMPARITIVE
APPROACH

In The Idea of Justice, Sen places Rawls within one of two divergent strands of modern western
thought about justice. Stretching from Hobbes to Rousseau and Kant, political philosophers have
taken the model of a social contract as the way to secure agreement over the allocation of
freedoms, obligations and goods among individuals. Sen calls this “transcendental
institutionalism”, focused as it is on identifying a singular institutional model, derived from
abstract principles. This, for Sen, is a mistaken way to think about justice. First, we are unlikely
ever to agree on what is a “just society”.7 The idea of justice is necessarily multi-faceted, not
smooth-cut. To illustrate the “pervasive plurality” of the idea of justice, Sen gives us an example.
Imagine three children quarrelling over a musical instrument, let’s say a flute. The first claims
the flute is hers because only she knows how to play it; the second demands it because he, the
poorest of the group, lacks toys of his own, and this will give him something to play with; the
third notes that she has laboured for months in making the flute, and it would therefore be unjust
for her not to have it.8 The claims of justice collide here: and no singular meaning of justice will
help us. Second, in comparing what furthers justice, or lessens injustice, Sen argues that we do
not need an institutional blueprint of the just society to guide us. We don’t need to know the
height of Mount Everest to decide whether K2 or Kanchenjunga is the higher peak. Rejecting
Rawls and his intellectual lineage, Sen favours a more motley thought-line: Adam Smith,
Condorcet, Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marx, John Stuart Mill. Each, according to Sen,
thought about justice in comparative rather than absolutist terms. Instead of asking what is a
perfectly just society, their ideas were incited by particular injustices. Sen also takes inspiration
from Indian philosophy. Sanskrit has two distinct words to refer to justice: niti, which denotes
the rules and behavioural norms of justice; and nyaya, the actual social “realisations” of justice –
the lives people can lead, regardless of whether or not the institutional architecture and laws have

7
Sunil Khilnani, ‘Book Review, The idea of Justice”https://www.ft.com/content/abcb1ea8-77e2-11de-9713-
00144feabdc0

8
http://sharadjk-jk.blogspot.in/2012/06/summary-of-amartya-sens-idea-of-justice.html

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been perfectly rendered. From the perspective of nyaya, the prevention of blatant injustice can be
more important than the pursuit of perfect justice. Our perceptions of injustice are, of course,
always coloured by the values, interests and customs we happen to have. Yet, Sen insists, by
using our powers of critical reasoning, we can move beyond their grip towards agreement about
certain injustices. He adopts Adam Smith’s device of the “impartial spectator”: no omniscient
viewpoint, but a comparing eye. Smith’s is an estranging device, encouraging us to step outside
our given values and prejudices in order to reason about them – and to work towards altering
those that don’t stand up to such reasoning. In the second, more worldly half of the book, Sen
asks what is it that the pursuit of justice should actually advance? Can we agree on a measure by
which to judge when a society, in its quest for justice, is getting closer or drawing further away
from it? The possible categories he considers include liberty, “primary goods” and resources,
happiness and well-being. Sen’s own preferred category is that of “capabilities”. By this he
means not just the resources to live certain kinds of life that we have reason to value, but the
capability of an individual to choose to use – or not use – the resources at hand to achieve what
he has reason to value. Sen is interested in outcomes. But unlike utilitarians, who are interested
in little else, he is also interested in how those outcomes are brought about – especially the extent
to which they are brought about through the free choices of individuals. The point of such an
approach is not to arrive at a singular idea of “perfect justice” – that icy ideal. Justice is a plural
and evolving idea – if it must reckon with age-old injustices, it must also be responsive to the
astonishing human ingenuity for inventing new ones. The advancement of justice therefore
relies, Sen concludes, on democracy, understood in Bagehot’s phrase as “government by
discussion” – a process of collective reasoning that injects more information, more perspectives
and more voices into debate. For Sen, democracy, like justice, is best understood not as an
institutional or indeed even as a state or governmental form. Rather, it is the possibility of
voicing continuous assessments about how a society and its members, or even how we as a
species, are doing. In this intricate, endlessly thought-provoking book, Sen brings the full force
of his formidable mind and his moral sense to show how specific questions – of chronic
malnourishment, ill-health, demographic gender imbalance – must be analysed in terms of
justice. Doing something about them is not a discretionary matter – it is a requirement of being
human. Sen is the most sophisticated intellectual campaigner of our times – his arguments have
shaped not just academic disciplines but the policies of governments and of global institutions.

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Sen’s central thesis is that justice is about real-world choices to improve human lives. Sen’s
approach to justice seems to direct us to practice and comparative assessments rather than
abstract philosophising and is rather reminiscent of Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach,
“the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it”. What motivates the
common perception of injustice, he observes, is not that the world falls short of being completely
just, but that there exist manifest and remediable injustices which we want to eliminate (vii).

Justice for Sen is comparative, then, not transcendental. The purpose of the book, as he describes
it, is to “attempt to investigate realization-based comparisons that focus on the advancement or
retreat of justice” (8).

However, although this theme is repeated throughout the book, there is a certain irony in the fact
that this work remains a piece of political philosophy, and is very thin on policy or the real-world
practice which Sen directs us to. On one hand, his theory of justice gives no ideal, no ranking of
alternatives; on the other, it is policy-light and has little to say about how injustices which are
agreed to exist might be remedied, despite its claims to be focused on real injustice.

Sen does not offer anything by way of suggestion of rankings of plural reasons. The thrust of his
work is in rejecting finality, rejecting a fixed threshold from which comparative assessments and
rankings may be derived. But the claim that there may be no ultimate ranking is one thing; it is
another to get on with the real-world problems of ranking competing claims. Sen provides no
indication of how justice may then be achieved; he leaves the reduction of injustice to the
exercise of public reason. Justice, it seems, is whatever emerges from the exercise of public
reason, although that reasoning will give no final result. While Rawls accepts that unanimity may
be impossible, but nevertheless offers his reasons for thinking that Justice as Fairness is the best
theory so far, Sen seems to have nothing to say on the relative merits of different conceptions, or
on how justice might be advanced in the world. For a work which focuses on moving away from
abstract ideas of justice, this is at times frustratingly abstract.9

9
David Markoribanks, “Book Review Idea of Justice”
http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2010/144

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21
 CONCLUSION

The eminent professor and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has chosen for his deeply interesting
synthesis of political philosophy, economics and "social choice theory" a title that might at first
appear rather bland, but it is holding two opposing ideas in a kind of dynamic stasis. Half the
implication is indeed that it is possible to spend too much time on justice-as-a-mere-idea. But the
other half is an insistence that justice-the-idea could be re-engineered to work better as a basis
for "practical reasoning", such that it might improve the world.

For Schopenhauer, injustice was the analytically primary term: justice was merely the absence of
injustice. (There seems to be a primordial sense of injustice: animal researchers have observed
chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys showing a keen sense of when treats are distributedly
unfairly.) Schopenhauer does not make an appearance in this book, but Sen's approach is
arguably Schopenhauerian to this extent: "[A] theory of justice that can serve as the basis of
practical reasoning," he writes, "must include ways of judging how to reduce injustice and
advance justice, rather than aiming only at the characterisation of perfectly just societies."

This might seem obvious to some. Aid workers, lawyers, or humanitarian NGOs might
understandably have little time for perfectionist justice-talk as they go about their business. Sen
argues that philosophy could help, were it not that too much talk of justice in modern political
philosophy has, by contrast, been concerned with interrogating an otherworldly ideal of the
perfectly just society constructed ab ovo. His main target in this tradition is John Rawls, who
published his monumental A Theory of Justice in 1975. Sen calls Rawls's method "transcendental
institutionism", in contrast to his own "comparative" approach.

By "comparative", Sen means first that we can compare the justice of two different situations, X
and Y, without needing a perfect theory of justice, and we can also make good use of partial
rankings: if X is better than Y and Z, we can choose X without waiting to know which of Y or Z
is better. Secondly, the term "comparative" acknowledges that different reasonable principles of
justice exist, which Sen illustrates with a beautiful parable. Suppose three children are
quarrelling over a flute. Anna says she is the only one who can play the flute, so obviously we
should give it to her. But then Bob says that he is the only child who has no toys at all, so surely

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he ought at least to have a flute to play with? Suddenly the question does not look so easy. And
finally Carla points out that she spent months actually making the flute. So who should get it?
For Sen, any theory of justice must begin in recognition of such clashing principles.

The contrast between "transcendental" and "comparative" theories is just one of the clarifying
and useful distinctions that Sen goes on to draw, in a long argument that can at times seem slow-
moving, and perhaps generously repetitive, but is also enlivened with many asides of twinkling
humour. Thinkers of all political hues agree that justice means equality of some kind – the
question is: equality of what? Sen's preferred answer appears to be equality of freedom: though
he warns, near the end of the book, of the quixotic nature of any attempt to translate all possible
values into one commensurable measure, he does do this to some extent himself: "sustainable
development" becomes "sustainable freedom", and a defence of the idea of human rights near the
end of the book essentially translates rights into freedoms too.

Sen is exquisitely civilised in his disagreements with other thinkers, even while he is elegantly
trashing whole schools of economic and social thought. He dismisses reliance on GDP as a
measure of "the enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience"; and notes that the use of
income as a comparative measure of wellbeing is flawed because there are differences in the
rates at which people can convert wealth into other things. (This latter point is an example of his
insistence that justice-thinking must take account of the lives people can actually lead, rather
than the static bureaucratic situations in which they are placed.) Refreshingly, his terms of
reference are not limited to western politics: he borrows an illuminating distinction from
classical Indian thought, and demolishes the prejudice that democracy, if understood broadly as
government by public reasoning, is an exclusively western tradition.

The very inclusiveness and generosity of Sen's thinking might invite criticism on the basis that
his "capacious theory" is indeed so capacious, so concerned to be "open" rather than "closed",
that there is nothing that could not, with a little tweaking, fit in it. The less a theory excludes, the
more work is left up to the post-theoretical "practical reasoning". But Sen provides enough
brilliant examples of such reasoning (with regard to famine, disability, disease and so on) that
this comes to seem, on balance, a virtue. A second, tougher criticism might point to the apparent
assumption throughout that the argument is essentially taking place between well-meaning

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liberals. He writes: "To argue that we do not really owe anything to others who are not in our
neighbourhood, even though it would be very virtuous if we were to be kind and charitable to
them, would make the limits of our obligations very narrow indeed." For Sen, that appears to
suffice as a dismissal, on the grounds of implausibility, of such a view; yet it appears to be the
principle behind Republican efforts to stymie universal healthcare in the US, or Conservative
hopes to offload more social provision on to charities.

Perhaps, then, Sen's magisterial summation of his thought suffers from an excess of niceness; but
this is surely preferable to its opposite. There is something quietly inspiring about his final
chapter on the increasing reach and quality of "global reasoning", via institutions and less formal
methods, which for him already constitute a kind of global democracy in embryo, and he ends on
a delicately pitched note of calm optimism: "The general pursuit of justice might be hard to
eradicate in human society." We can hope so.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Articles

-David Markoribanks, “Book Review Idea of Justice”.

-Steven Pool, The Idea of Justtice

- The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press,
2009),

Books

-The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen

-The Theory of Justice, John Rawls

Websites

- https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/journal/24_3/review_essays/001.

- http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674060470&content=reviews

-www.theguardian.com

-www.marxandphilosophy.com

-www.theindependent.com

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