Product Description

Is justice an ideal, forever beyond our grasp, or something that may actually guide our practical decisions and enhance our lives?In this wide-ranging book, Amartya Sen presents an alternative approach to mainstream theories of justice which, despite their many specific achievements have taken us, he argues, in the wrong direction in general. At the heart of Sen’s argument is his insistence on the role of public reason in establishing what can make societies less unjust. But it is in the nature of reasoning about justice, argues Sen, that it does not allow all questions to be settled even in theory; there are choices to be faced between alternative assessments of what is reasonable; several different and competing positions can each be well-defended.Far from rejecting such pluralities or trying to reduce them beyond the limits of reasoning, we should make use of them to construct a theory of justice that can absorb divergent points of view. Sen also shows how concern about the principles of justice in the modern world must avoid parochialism, and further, address questions of global injustice. The breadth of vision, intellectual acuity and striking humanity of one of the world's leading public intellectuals have never been more clearly shown than in this remarkable book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4988 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

Review
Sen is one of the great thinkers of our era ... if a public intellectual is defined by his or her capacity to bridge the worlds of pure ideas and the most far-reaching policies, Sen has few rivals --The Times, July 4th 2009, David Aaronovitch

Review
I believe that Amartya Sen's THE IDEA OF JUSTICE is the most important contribution to the subject since John Rawls's A THEORY OF JUSTICE appeared in 1971

Review
In lucid and vigorous prose, THE IDEA OF JUSTICE gives us a political philosophy that is dedicated to the reduction of injustice on Earth

Customer Reviews

An undefined and unworkable idea of justice
Amartya Sen has one idea in this book. He claims that John Rawls' theory of justice relies on just institutions working with a social contract towards a transcendental (ie unachievable?) vision of a perfectly just society. Sen critiques this for ignoring real actual achievable outcomes, excluding wider interests and failing to address behaviour. He proposes instead that justice should operate by comparing actual outcomes through a process of `unrestricted'(page 44) public reasoning. He offers one example, of whether a flute should belong to a child who can play it, a child who has no other toys, or the child who made it (although he frequently but vaguely refers to meta-examples of slavery and women's rights).

Had he stated this single idea and single example clearly once and then proceeded to analyse each thoroughly we might have a more succinct book on justice. Instead the text is repetitive and long, and strays into vast themes with weak linkage to justice. Sen is ever keen to tell us who he knows - there are 9 pages of acknowledgements which include a vast panoply of the intellectual great and good. He frequently name drops his friendship and/or working relationship with everyone from Isaiah Berlin to W V Quine. There are long sections on welfare economics, rational decision making and happiness which are Sen's Nobel Prize specialisms but are of vague if any connectivity to his theme of justice. A long discourse on democracy conceived as `government by discussion' rather than mere votes and elections, suggests that since `no major famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy' (page 342) then democracy implements Sen's concept of public reasoning and thereby is a `protective power' in the drive for Senian justice in society (as distinct from a Rawlsian transcendental `just society'). This argument is underdeveloped and extremely weak. Theoretically a benign dictator may offer greater justice than an indecisive corrupt or even evil democracy. Democracy is almost always twinned with a free market economy whose concerns for distributive justice Sen and others have long and properly challenged. Access to the `free press' Sen celebrates is extremely limited - the media is in fact a near total oligopoly. Power game play within and between political parties has perverted the democratic process and shifted it from any original value or justice focus. Bureaucracies rule supreme and unchallenged.

Even weaker is his reliance on public reasoning. He fails to show how this could possibly work in practice (his own recent presentation in Bristol UK was booked out and so many were excluded from participation). How is a myriad of `bottom up' detailed outcomes to be compared and judged? Sen might be right in that just institutions do not guarantee just outcomes. His conceptualisation of justice is more bottom up than top down and is more akin to linear programming by outcome comparisons than to top down differential calculus. This might be OK but he simply does not show how it could work - there is no Simplex algorithm. Even government by referenda would undoubtedly re-introduce capital punishment to the statute book which surprisingly Sen is reluctant to clearly oppose.

But more importantly he fails to show how reason and (public) reasoning necessarily promote just outcomes. He doesn't even try to establish this very necessary connection but just assumes it. The puzzle of the Enlightenment is that reason and reasonableness have no necessary link. Fascism has its own internal logic. Reason does not require or drive virtue. Ethics are arbitrary and justice is indefinable. His example of the flute somewhat proves this, although he fails to work this through as thoroughly as he works nuances of concepts of `capability' et al. The base hypothesis of justice would be that the child who has made the flute owns it. Providing that the producer child used her own materials and equipment (and Sen fails to make the crucial point that more detailed information is needed here and in every situational determination of justice), then on what possible basis can two other children who want the flute claim it from the child who made it? If the producer simply has to give the flute to another child then there are unlikely to be any more flutes made. Sen also omits any creative solutions such as sharing of the flute, training other children how to make flutes themselves etc and in this sense he is no Solomon. The book is unnecessarily long and disappointingly empty since in the end Sen's `Idea of Justice' fails to solve the one simple example he offers and leaves justice as an unresolved dilemma.

Disappointment
I found this much-hyped book a great disappointment. It is mostly waffle. True, Sen's heart is in the right place, and he makes (or repeats) some valid criticisms of Rawls' theory of justice, and of Pareto-optimality as a standard of the right. But the book is very long (and repetitive) and contains insufficient substance to fill more than a fraction of its pages. By and large the intellectual pressure is pretty low.

The consummation of Economics and Ethics
The book is not merely excellent, it is profound.

The author, Dr Amartya Sen, is the Nobel prize laureate in Economics for 1998 but his Economics is informed with morality. This fact did not elude the Nobel Prize committee who commented that he had restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of economic problems. In addition to being imbued with morality, Amartya Sen is endowed with erudition and philosophical disposition. He is a prolific author and I mention here just two of his books:Poverty and Famines;and Development as Freedom in which he persuasively argues that Freedom is at once the ultimate goal of Economic life and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare.

The present book represents the consummation of a life long effort and work by the author at humanizing economics and bringing content from the real world to ethics.

The book also serves as a summation of the author's work on economic reasoning and on the elememts and measurement of human well-being.

His conviction is that the mission of economists and philosophers is to improve the world which is a recurring theme in the book.

The author writes with wit, a feel for history and a global perspective. He presumes that the values in play are of global, not purely Western origin.

Two themes predominate in the book - economic rationality and social injustice.

The author argues that economists have tended to content themselves with an overly simple picture of human motivation, rationality and well-being. The author argues that people are not purely self-interested. They care for others and observe social norms. They do not always reason mechanistically, seeking least-cost to given ends. They question the point of their aims and the worth of their wants. Well-being has no single measure but is comprehensible. Its elements are many and do not amount to just utility or some cash value equivalent.

Well-being though a complex concept is not elusive. Among its diverse elements, there are important ones such as freedom from hunger, disease, indignity and discrimination which are generally observable and the author contends measurable.

Unlike John Rawls who held that social justice depended on having just institutions, Amartya Sen thinks that good social outcoms are what matter.

Tying the whole together is the author's confidence that, though values are complex, economics provides tools for thinking clearly about complexity.

The author concludes with democracy which can take many institutional forms. But non succeds without open debate about values and principles. To that vital element in public reason, 'The Idea of Justice' is an important contribution.