Amartya Sen on Justice (6) - Institutions and Persons (a) - Social Justice

Image credit. Continued from Amartya Sen (5) - Rawls and Beyond (c)

Persuasion versus Institutional Constraint

Crudely speaking, in juxtaposing the Indian (effective) rulers Ashoka and his grandfather's influential adviser Kautilya, Amartya Sen contrasts 

(a) Ashoka's rule by persuasion and appeal to voluntary moral responsibility and restraint against 

(b) Kautilya's rule mediated by properly designed institutions, incentives and strictly enforced rules. 

The former suggesting a more liberal approach, the latter expressing more trust in paternalism than in individual responsibility. No doubt, Sen is right to point out that as mutually exclusive alternatives these visions are not likely to be successful - wisdom would rather commend a mix of both.

Social Justice

However, before I proceed further in the chapter, let me report about an implication I have been able to extract from the first pages. 

Sen suggests that Ashoka subscribed to a view of social justice which is based on the premise

... that advancing the welfare and freedom of people in general is an important role for the state as well as of the individuals in society ... (p. 76)

For a long time I had been under the influence of Hayek's disparaging reception of the term social justice. Essentially, his argument is that justice is something that only human beings are capable of attaining or failing to attain. Results of such human action cannot be of themselves just or unjust, only the manner can, the manner in which people behaved to engender the result. Thus, there is no injustice in Bill Gates being richer than I am, unless he had conducted himself in such a way as to act unjustly vis-à-vis me. Since his wealth has been the result of just action on his part, his being richer than anyone else cannot be regarded as a violation of justice. 

According to Hayek, the notion of social justice, which is truly meaningless in his view, stands for the idea that outcomes unconnected to or not engendered by just or unjust human action, do nevertheless represent states of affairs capable of being judged in terms of justice.

Let us bypass, for the moment, the fact that many believers in social justice feel they have grounds to consider the processes that Hayek would regard as impersonal and unaffected by just or unjust human behaviour, as depending on manifestly unjust behaviour such as the wilful exploitation and oppression of workers (or even consumers) by capitalists. And let us put aside what I regard to be the invented offences, notably the complaint about inequality, which strikes me as a remarkably effective figment that is being widely recognised as a evil and detrimental part of reality, when in fact it is of this quality only if we decide to ascribe such presumed effect.

In essence, what Sen's account of Ashoka's approach to social justice has made me realise is that Hayek's narrowing of the applicability of the term justice only to acts that are strictly the responsibility of the individual commits him to an incompleteness of his idea of justice that excludes the purpose of liberalism. 

Freedom is a public good. That is, she cannot be attained by private human acts of the type to which Hayek confines the quality of being just or unjust. In order to bring about and maintain the public good of freedom, we need to mark out structures of human interaction that represent common responsibilities. 

I remain highly sceptical of claims of social justice that are rapaciously instrumentalised to take away endowments from one group in order to give them to others.

But I would admit that there is a dimension of justice that deserves to be labelled social justice.

Taxes and Social Justice

The most graphic example that I can think of off the top of my head is the practice of taxation. If we accepted Hayek's notion of just and unjust human acts, the very likely event that only few people will be paying taxes voluntarily, could not be challenged on grounds of justice. In order to raise such a challenge, we need to introduce the idea of social justice.

Admittedly, I am not entirely sure about my argument, but I hope I am onto something here.

What, then, would be the difference between justice and social justice?

I would say, the difference is that an individual may be able to do a lot of things that are entirely up to her discretion and remain within the frame of justice - justice considered as socially accepted outcomes.

But then, there are forms of behaviour that cannot be left to an individual's discretion - like the payment of taxes. And so we introduce social justice, the imposition of (credibly threatened) coercion in order to force an individual into refraining from or engaging in certain actions, whose absence or presence, as the case may be, are deemed absolutely requisite to coordinate the individual and her society.

So, social justice comes in when it is considered necessary to ensure conduct that is unlikely to be forthcoming in the absence of enforcement. It is called social justice because it is thought to be a necessary condition of a well-coordinated relationship between the individual and the community.

Apparently, social justice is actually the basis of justice - since the freedom of the individual and his ability to choose between acting justly or unjustly - and to enjoy wide latitude of personal initiative without being jammed in by narrow social prescriptions, a hallmark of freedom - is largely constrained, and, indeed, thereby protected, by socially coercive rules, rules intended to coordinate the individual with his community. 

One result of such coordination is the production of a public good called freedom.