"In fact, he limits itself to stating that only “reasoned examination” and “public debate” can establish what is just and what is not."
It's interesting that at least Sen directs the problem towards the public sphere.- back to the community. At the same time it's astonishing that what is just or not is not even questioned. And then it's clear that as long as people concentrate on what is not instead of what is, we won't be able to find our way out of the present conflicts. Is there enough food to feed everyone? Where is it and how do we get it to people who need it?
It doesn't matter who the food belongs to, it belongs more to those who need it.
Wouldn't that be a way of looking at justice? Not on the negative side of things but on the positive side? What is there and where does it need to be? Then we wouldn't be parting from the individual or national but from the global. What is there globally and where does it need to be? Everything belongs to US. Anyone who steals from US is a crook. Anyone who has more than he needs is a thief. Anyone who takes what others need is a criminal.
It's a different kind of morality is it not? It's not about communism but humanism. It's a question of consciousness. It's inevitable to realize that the System as it is working today is a comedy! Who can believe or trust in the crooks in power?
The shift towards consciousness seems to relate to the capacity to perceive from the whole to the part instead of from the part to the whole. Individualism moves from the part to the whole and cannot grasp reality with the necessary integrity. Consciousness needs to be in the individual, in each individual but each individual must be conscious of the whole. We all want that in our hearts, we are just very much afraid of our loneliness.
Is it not just a struggle from the instinctive to consciousness? There is enough for everyone. There is enough for everyone if a few stop stealing what is everyone's. There is enough to take care of our selves and live decent lives helping each other out. There is enough if we're willing to share what we have without taking advantage of each other.
Why is it difficult to understand love? Love as an aspect of life? They were wrong those who said we were a bunch of criminals out to get each other. We are not. We simply aren't a bunch of criminals. They perhaps were criminal enough to generalize such ideas to justify themselves but human beings are not a bunch of criminals.
The superiority complexes in high classes and so called "developed nations" are just that: superiority complexes.
There is nothing superior in them. They are as human as the rest. It hasn't been easy for anyone, anywhere, we've all suffered everywhere but it's possible to start helping each other and minimize our suffering. It is a wonderful thing to help each other. Nothing makes a man happier than other people's well being as a result of his or her actions. That kind of happiness is not the superficial happiness that people experience from owning things but a happiness that comes from the experience of grace. Positive emotions are possible in this world. We have been marked by what seems centuries of negative emotions but I think they were even happier than us in the middle ages and they'll be happier than us at the end of this century. In our times our outlook seems to be particularly dark, we don't know how to experience positive emotions. The disconnectedness from religion may be one possible cause but disconnecting from religion was a necessary step in our evolution. Religion became increasingly connected to powers outside of our selves, a God that petted our heads, at best, while in the decadence of leadership, those in power take from the whole. The transition from “conscious kings” to true democracy is an ongoing process. We are only half way in between.
God as an outside force disconnected from our every day life acts against our consciousness. The realm of the divine is inside each one of us. That is what people today are so afraid of. Taking the light step from the physical dimension to a dimension of consciousness. Letting go of the ego and being the whole. It is a comprehensible fear and a journey that we each must take in our own time for it is absolutely real and cannot be any other way. We can inspire each other to take that step. We can help each other trust our selves enough and take that step. We can love each other enough so that others love their own self enough and take that step. There is much suffering in egoness and it’s through suffering our own egoness that we come to our selves. No one has ever hurt us as much as our egoness. But when we open the door of trust in our self, egoness weakens and our perception of the whole becomes possible.
Justice is possible. We, as human beings, can make justice possible in our world. We can make it possible through actualizing consciousness in our daily lives. The whole belongs to all of us. The whole of Earth belongs to all of us. The whole of life belongs to all of us. The whole of joy, of grace, of gratitude, of light belongs to all of us. We are each blessed with the whole. To be blessed is not an aspect of religion but an aspect of life. To be blessed is an aspect of being human not of being in a religion even if in every true religion they know how blessed human beings are. We are not blessed by superior beings. We are not blessed by popes or gurus. We are blessed because within our selves the dimension of consciousness beats with the same power that life beats in every creature. The dimension of consciousness or a divine dimension is in itself a blessing and it is inside each one of us. All we need from each one of us is to let it actualize itself in our daily lives.
We all know what life was supposed to be when we were children and how it became what it is and it is in our power to understand where our parent’s suffering kept them from actualizing the life we knew was possible. The greatest compassion is realized when we assume responsibility for our times through the understanding of our parent’s suffering. Each parent is the actualization of the state of consciousness of his and her times. Each LIFE, each human life, is the actualization of the state of consciousness of his and her times. Each child inherits the state of consciousness of all human beings and it is his and her task to carry it one generation ahead, actualizing consciousness in his and her daily practice through the transformation of the suffering that he and she inherited from her and his peers. Our legacy is the suffering of all of mankind in that given time and the job of each generation is to create less suffering for future generations.
Happiness is possible in our world. The experience of grace and gratitude, the joy of being, the unfathomable experience of light and delight is possible for each one of us. We are One. We are One and in our Oneness we are also our individual selves. Life trickles down each of our beings like water out of our hands. We can separate from each other in our unconsciousness or unite with each other in consciousness and actualize our selves every second of our lives. We actualize our selves in the weaving of time. Each conscious act is a thread towards our realization.
We actualize our selves in the consciousness of our totality when we allow for the whole to embrace our “individual-nesses”. We must recover the power of the “wholes”. The whole of Speech and its power. The whole of community and its power. The whole of humaneness and its power. We must gather together again not in churches, senates or parliaments but in the Public Square, conscious of our equality, having gotten rid of the hierarchies that have for so long kept us from our wholeness.
Love is possible in our Earth. When we recover our communities and stop hurting each other producing not so many “items” but creating and recreating what is necessary and joyful we can recover our love life. The family is important for children but the community is even more important for the people. We must all be parents of every child and youth. Young people don’t trust us because they know better! We let them down this far making misery of life when life is everything but miserable! Will they have the strength to be more human than we managed to be?
It is never late to be. No matter the age, no matter the difficulty, it is always possible for anyone to actualize their own self and belong to the whole. When we actualize our selves we take responsibility from that moment on and change the whole of our world. It takes will to be and the effort of being is what makes us more human. It is the actualization of the divine realm in our physical practical lives. We all know what it is like to be no matter who, where, when or what we are. We have all tasted our selves as children and the taste of childhood is the taste of our conscious essence. The integrity of our selves in childhood is not only something we can “remember”, it’s something we can actualize. The gradual study of how we lost that integrity helps recover it. But it is a fact that IT is always there within us and all we need is to dare to be our selves again.
Children, young people and old people are suffering a lot more than is necessary. We need to help each other so that we can then help them. We need to help them even if we can’t help each other.
We are One and life trickles through our lives like water through our hands.
For Amartya Sen, a consensus around rejecting injustice is preferable to a general theory of justice. Although his critique of the Rawlsian approach may be useful, his arguments for a comparative approach to justice are not completely persuasive.
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Reviewed: Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2009. (The edition reviewed is the French translation, L’idée de justice, trans. By Paul Chemla, Flammarion, 2010, 558 pp., 25 euros.)
Since it was first published in 1971, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice has been an essential reference for anyone interested in justice or ethics. Amartya Sen’s Idea of Justice, which has just appeared in French translation, takes a clear position in the debate initiated by Rawls. Sen limits himself, however, to what he calls “a theory of justice in the broad sense”, the purpose of which is not to “achieve a perfectly just world” but rather “to remove clear injustices” (p. xiii; Fr. p. 13). The work actually rehearses a number of arguments that Sen has developed over the past thirty years. Some of these, and most notably the critiques of Rawls’ theory, are much more fully developed here than in his previous writings, however.
According to Sen, there are two distinct ways of approaching the question of justice: one, which he calls transcendental institutionalism and associates with the names of Kant, Rousseau, Locke, and Rawls, “concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice” by focusing “primarily on getting the institutions right” (p. 6; Fr. p. 20). The other method — said to be that of Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill — seeks to link justice to comparisons of different ways of life, concrete behaviors, and human interactions in a variety of institutional contexts. Sen, a critic of transcendental institutionalism, prefers this second or “comparative” approach.
Criticizing Rawls
Sen acknowledges that Rawls drew attention to the intrinsic importance of liberty (in itself and not as a means to an end). In his view, however, although “it is indeed possible to accept that liberty must have some kind of priority, but total unrestrained priority is almost certainly an overkill” (p. 65; Fr. p. 96). This critique was previously presented inInequality Reexamined (1992) and Development as Freedom (1999). In The Idea of Justice, however, Sen distances himself even more from Rawls’ theory by challenging the very ground of the principles of justice. For instance, he doubts that individuals placed in what Rawls called “the original position”, in which they do not know their future place in society, can in fact agree on a set of principles to govern just institutions, on which a fully just society must rest (p. 57; Fr. p. 87). There is in fact no reason for individuals to choose, as Rawls does, “the most extensive system of liberty” as the first principle of justice. One must therefore confront “Arrow’s impossibility theorem”, which states that there is no rule for deducing a consistent collective preference regarding a set of options from individual preferences with respect to those same options. Indeed, because individual interests are at least in part contradictory, individual members of a society may not agree on the priority ordering of the various problems the society faces. Hence there is no one option superior to all others. For Sen, however, the search for such a superior option is at the heart of the transcendental individualist approach. The problem of choosing an ethical criterion, or hierarchical principles of justice capable of guiding choice among alternative actions and institutions, remains. Sen proposes a different solution, however.
Rejecting an Explicit Definition of Justice
For Sen, there is no need to define precisely what justice is in order to decide what is just or not just. He “sees no reason at all why”, in order to judge that option X is better than option Y, one needs to invoke a completely different option Z that would supposedly be “the best of all”. “The possibility of having an identifiably perfect alternative does not indicate that it is necessary, or indeed useful, to refer to it in judging the relative merits of two other alternatives. […] There would be something deeply odd in a general belief that a comparison of any two alternatives cannot be sensibly made without a prior identification of a supreme alternative. There is no analytical connection there at all” (p. 102; Fr. pp. 137-8). Sen explains this by saying that the knowledge that Everest is the highest mountain in the world is of no use in comparing the heights of Kilimanjaro and McKinley. A possible response to this is that, in comparing two mountains, the standard of measurement is simple and well-known (height), so that it is sufficient to specify what one is looking for (the taller mountain or the less tall one). In justice, specifying the standard of measurement (liberty, or collective happiness) is itself part of the problem in deciding whether one situation, rule, or action is better than another. As John Stuart Mill forcefully showed in Utilitarianism, it is precisely the existence of a criterion, a standard, that makes it possible to compare alternatives (see Mill, 1861, p. 158).
Criteria of Classification
Sen denies that it is necessary to know “the best option” in order to compare two other options. This may well be true. But he does not propose a unique criterion for making the comparison. For him, it is sufficient to have “a theory of practical reason to accommodate a framework for reasoning with the body of a capacious theory — that, at any rate, is the approach to the theory of justice that this work pursues” (p. 89; Fr. p. 123). But a “reasoned debate” does not necessarily lead to consensus — in this case, to a decision as to what is just and what is not. Even without such a standard or criterion, Sen believes that one can nevertheless agree about certain aspects of injustice: “For the emergence of a shared and useful understanding of many substantive issues of rights and duties (and also of rights and wrongs), there is no need to insist that we must have agreed complete orderings or universally accepted full partitions of the just, strictly separated from the unjust; for example, a common resolve to fight for the abolition of famines, or genocide, or terrorism, or slavery, or untouchability, or illiteracy, or epidemics, etc., does not require that there be a similarly extensive agreement on the appropriate formulae for inheritance rights, or income tax schedules, or levels of minimum wages, or copyrights laws” (pp. 144-145; Fr. p. 187). Yet if there is no reason why a group of diverse individuals should converge on Rawls’s principles of justice, it is not clear why there should be any consensus about ridding the world of famines, untouchability, epidemics, etc. Indeed, as Sen himself concedes: “Even when all the parties involved have their own complete orderings of justice that are not congruent, the ‘intersection’ between the rankings — that is, the sharedbeliefs of the different parties — will yield a partial ranking with different extents of articulation (depending on the extent of similarity among the orderings)” (pp. 104-105; Fr. p. 141). In other words, agreement will be only as extensive as the degree of commonality among the individual classifications. Extrapolating, one can even say that if the individuals share the same concept of justice, the ranking will be complete. But if their views partially diverge, there is no guarantee that they will agree any more about famine, genocide, or epidemics than they do about income tax schedules. More than that, even if they do agree about the injustice of such scourges, they may not agree about the means of combating them. Does the “capability approach” that Sen stresses in the final part of the book offer an answer to these objections?
Capability
For Sen, “the idea of capability … gives a central role to a person’s actual ability to do the different things that she values doing. … A person’s advantage in terms of opportunities is judged to be lower than that of another if she has less capability — less real opportunity — to achieve those things that she has reason to value” (p. 253, p. 231; p. 284, 279). Sen here refrains from stating any explicit criterion of well-being or justice. Indeed, he insists on the absence of such a criterion and points to “the absurdity of the argument that is sometimes presented, which claims that the capability approach would be usable — and “operational” — only if it [came] with a set of “given” weights on the distinct functionings in some fixed list of relevant capabilities. The search for given, pre-determined weights is not only conceptually ungrounded, but it also overlooks the fact that the valuations and weights to be used may reasonably be influenced by our own continued scrutiny and by the reach of public discussion” (p. 242; Fr. p. 296-297). Thus the decision is left to individual scrutiny and public debate — but that is all we learn about the content that Sen ascribes to the notion of justice. When Sen seeks to refine this concept, he writes that “the capability approach points to an informational focus in judging and comparing overall individual advantages, and does not, on its own, propose any specific formula about how that information may be used. […] The capability perspective does point to the central relevance of the inequality of capabilities in the assessment of social disparities, but it does not, on its own, propose any specific formula for policy decisions” (p. 232; Fr. p. 285). This may prove disappointing to the reader who expects to find in Sen’s work what the introduction promises, namely, a reflection intended to show what should be done to promote justice and eliminate injustice. Sen’s use of technical terminology from social choice theory makes reading The Idea of Justicesomewhat heavy-going (and the difficulty is compounded for the French reader by the rather heavy hand of the translator). Perhaps this is the price to be paid for understanding such a subtle and complex thinker. Although the work suggests new ways of thinking about various ethical doctrines and raises a number of critical questions, and although it does touch on many issues essential to any reflection on the nature of justice (such as the criteria by which one situation is judged to be better than another), Sen does not place himself on the same terrain as the philosophers whose work he challenges. Unlike Rawls (1971) and Bentham (1823), he does not seek to present a complete and fully developed theory of justice to which one might subscribe after examining its arguments. In fact, he limits itself to stating that only “reasoned examination” and “public debate” can establish what is just and what is not.
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer with the support of the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
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