Amartya Sen on Justice (1)

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Justice Happens

In my own thinking, I have approached the concept of justice from a quasi-historical point of view, as opposed to a philosophical one. I do not see justice primarily as a matter of justificatory closure, such that we may speak of justice when we are able to come up with a closed and consistent defence of it. This is what I mean by a philosophical view of justice. I believe that coordinating our behaviour with the help of morality is far too complex an exercise than to be amenable to a purely deliberative process of discovery. A lot of justice just happens, we stumble on it, or experimentally chance on it. And, for justice to work, it needs not be free from contradictions. This is what I mean by my quasi-historical approach to justice. Justice happens, just like better ways of pulling teeth happen.

Economising on Justice by Resorting to Legitimacy

Hence, so far, in my own theory of justice, I emphasise what I suspect to be a historical trend: compared to earlier forms of human togetherness, in modern societies, in our actions  (not necessarily in our words), we  make reference to justice more sparingly.

In a tightly knit tribe, almost every activity of human life may be regulated by notions of justice. Justice coincides with every thing of which one is entitled to speak of in terms of being allowed to do it or not being so authorised. This may pertain to something as trivial - from a modern viewpoint - as headgear. When is it just to wear a hat, in the presence of my peers and underlings, aye; in the presence of my Early, nay.

Justice is about absolute requirements - what justice demands must be heeded under all circumstances, failing which stark retribution is to be expected.

In a modern economy, the world of Gellner's modular man - a man who lives in many different worlds that make partial rather than total and absolute demands on his morality (as a banker I must pay attention to a number of rules, but I need not believe in the same God as my boss or my customers do) - we cannot afford an all-encompassing and rigid outreach of absolute justice. We need to be more flexible, so that more human diversity, more personal autonomy can spread among us.

Procedural Justice (Legitimacy) versus Absolute Justice

Hence, we reserve (absolute) justice for a relatively small number of dos and donts, the absolutely inviolable rules of the game. Other moral issues we subject to a more flexible form of justice, putting them to the test of what I call legitimacy. Action is legitimate (rather than just) when it is incapable of commanding full substantive consensus among those affected by it, while achieving such agreement on procedural terms: essentially, this means, we do not agree on the specific issue being just or not (abortion e.g.), but we consider the decision taken on it legitimate on the grounds that permission has been arrived at by a chain of procedures that ensure social peace in the face of divergent values and attitudes toward a divisive issue. Legitimising practices are full of contradictions and fuzzy ends - which is precisely their strength. Thanks to legitimising procedures we are in a position to coordinated our behaviour morally, despite the fact that we adhere to different moral standards. This creates an entirely different society - an open access society, where people can be said to be free and equal to an unprecedented extent.

For more see my Scarce Justice - When What Is Just Is Not Known (1/2), and (2/2).

Amartya Sen's Two Approaches to Justice

In his The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen takes 37 pages to deliver one essential insight that partially parallels my above thinking: there are ways of thinking about justice which tend toward the objective of absolute justice, and there are conceptions of justice that are relatively more concerned with practical feasibility, at the price of being less adamant about intellectual consistency - in that sense economising on justice. 

In looking at the tradition of philosophical reasoning on justice, Sen distinguishes between twi basic schools: transcendental institutionalism and realization-focused comparison. 

Transcendental institutionalism (Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls) seeks to identify perfect justice, and expects to find it in specific institutional arrangements, notably in some sort of social contract. The preoccupation of this line of thinking is with ideal concepts and entities (the theoretically best social institutions).

Realization-focused comparison (Adam Smith, Marquis de Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, James Stuart Mill) is not so much obsessed with the true and pure nature of justice and the conditions of its perfect realisation, but with the comparison of feasible alternatives, with "the removal of manifest injustice from the world" (p. 7), and "finding some criteria for an alternative being 'less unjust' than another (p. 6).

To be continued in Amartya Sen on Justice (2).