The Chronicle Review

Amartya Sen Shakes Up Justice Theory

Bias Das, AP Photo

The economist Amartya Sen’s magnum opus on justice theory is published this month.
September 14, 2009

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

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





Petitioner: "Justice, justice, I demand justice!"


When Rawls declared justice "the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought," and began his painstaking probe of the conditions of just institutions, he re-established a modern tradition dating back to Hobbes: using social-contract theory to articulate ideal forms of social justice, sometimes in quasi-syllogistic form. But there was also a longstanding, skeptical, antisystematic tradition in justice theory. One of the suspenseful aspects of Sen's book is how its author, personally close to Rawls (who died in 2002) but more expansive and historical in regard to justice, walks a difficult line between the analytic foundationalism Rawls and Nozick practiced and the sensitivity to real-world justice in people's lives that Sen and Martha Nussbaum argue for and describe as the "capabilities" conception of justice.

Although Sen mentions neither the late philosopher Robert C. Solomon, author of A Passion for Justice (1995), nor the very-much-with-us Elizabeth H. Wolgast, author of The Grammar of Justice (1987), both deserve credit for adumbrating ideas in justice theory that Sen, with his enormous intellectual prestige and cachet as a star in Harvard's firmament, may finally infiltrate into elite Ivy League and Oxbridge political theory.


That common-sense attempt at causal explanation—taking seriously how feelings of injustice spur the intellectual drive toward a theory of justice—had also been observed by Wolgast, who argued in The Grammar of Justice that injustice "grammatically" precedes justice. Sen's Harvard colleague, Michael J. Sandel, at the outset of his new Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?—not quite The Idiot's Guide to Justice but, unlike Sen's work, mainly a summary for general readers of key ideas in justice theory—notes, "At the heart of the bailout outrage was a sense of injustice."



Thus the great economist, who long ago transcended the bounds of his discipline, goes full-frontal with justice—and John Rawls. Displaying his customary mix of erudition and worldliness, his irritation at the "parochial" slighting of Eastern thought (see The Argumentative Indian) and resistance to (despite mastery of) purely formal approaches to justice, Sen both praises Rawls profusely for his "rightly celebrated" work and nicks him with a score of cuts.





Alas, Sen spends some of the most arid sections of his book arguing for how its insights can aid "enhancement of justice." He's far more convincing when he sticks to nonformal arguments. Nothing would be sadder than if An Idea of Justice, like A Theory of Justice, generates a fresh industry of acolyte-driven justice literature without moving political actors to improve people's lives (surely the author's paramount goal).

Still, one should never underestimate the influence in philosophy of a big book by a Harvard or Princeton luminary that impeaches an intellectual tradition, however politely. Richard Rorty successfully undermined the pretensions of analytic epistemology (except among its practitioners) because he was an ex-analyst whistle-blower. Sen may be just the inside man to redirect philosophical thinking about justice to that real-world "capabilities approach" he and Nussbaum urge.

One irony is that the famously media-shy Rawls had a complicated human relationship to "justice" few students of the magisterial system-builder understood. With the 2007 publication of Thomas Pogge's John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, we learned that Rawls evolved away from Christianity and toward his secular theory of justice from deep feelings about concrete injustices such as the Holocaust. Another challenge to justice—the chanciness of life—occurred closer to home and similarly left a profound impact on him. In the Philippines during World War II, an assignment from a superior officer that might have gone to Rawls or another soldier went to the other man, who was killed.

"Reasoning," writes Sen early on, "is a robust source of hope and confidence in a world darkened by murky deeds." In The Idea of Justice, Sen provides us with a stunning model despite his eternally ambiguous and imperfectible subject. As he so winningly adds, "The remedy for bad reasoning is better reasoning."
