Amartya Sen on Justice (2) - Reasons and Objectivity

Image credit. Continued from Amartya Sen on Justice (1)

There is an academic discipline called the Theory of Rational Choice, whose central tenet is

... that rational choice consists only in clever promotion of self-interest ...

Sen, A. (2010), The Idea of Justice, p. 32

A Preliminary Excursus on 'Self-Interest'

The idea of self interest has something ubiquitous and elusive about it. The concept is certainly a hallmark of the modern liberal era, which promotes personal autonomy and therefore makes self-interest quite naturally one of our foremost concerns. A free person is a person whose interests are under her own management rather than being determined by some authority. The proto-liberals were taken in by the assumption that human beings compelled to enact Zweckrationalität are likely to be more productive and peaceful than members of a tribe that imposes a heteronomous corset of cultural defaults. Greater sociogenic freedom creates constraints of a peculiarly rational type. The attendant economic freedom imposes legal and commercial limits whose handling demands just as much rational calculation as do the gainful prospects and advancements now open to the individual and her collaborative projects. The individual is no longer an extension of the kin group but must navigate her own course subject to a set of traffic rules that are much more general and abstract and in that sense broader than the kinship world that is fully covered by the directions of absolute justice.

For that reason, it is little wonder that in modern societies "self-interest" gains substantially more currency in word and deed.

Yet, this is no reason to give up the differentiated view of human psychology of the proto-liberals, who clearly understood that - next to norms, names (presumptions), and doctrines -  rational conduct in the pursuit of self-interest is but a segment in the spectrum of powerful human habits and propensities.

It is an outrage that economists in particular as well as many liberal philosophers and partisans betray a strong tendency to lend the term self-interest a practically infinite elasticity, to the point where every kind of human action is being considered the result of self-interested aspiration.

From my point of view, the main objection to the hyper-rationalistic idea that human conduct is comprehensively self-interested follows from the fact that most of the preconditions of human survival, including the social preconditions, are outside the purview of individual self-creation and self-reproduction. We need to be tied into a network of other-directed prompts, constraints, necessities, which we comply with mostly unconsciously, half-consciously, or with hapless aversion.

In getting up every work day at five o'clock in the morning, Mr. X is violating any number of "self-interests" (sleeping enough, seeing his wife and children etc.) which help him fulfil (only) a certain range of "self-interests" (earning money from a particular employer etc.), which, in principle, can always turn out to be mistaken choices. Reducing human beings to self-interest rather smacks of an endeavour to make reality conform to the needs of a certain wonkish theory.

Reason and Objectivity

In the first chapter on "Reason and Objectivity," Amartya Sen sets out to defend reason against the strictures it has been facing thanks to unwarranted claims (such as those of Rational Choice Theory) and uses (such as cold and callous, even cold-blooded calculation) that the human faculty of rational reflection has been subjected to. I shall return to this point presently. In the meantime, having done a fair amount of rambling of my own, I take the liberty of pinching the great man insolently:

Amartya Sen is a man of such stature that nothing that he writes can be unimportant. It seems to me, he takes this status as a license to write much that lesser characters would condense or do without. Sen works from a papal seat, he is a doyen that gives his congregation its sense of identity, coherence, direction and etiquette - hence instead of name dropping, a veritable carpet bombing of names. He is a walking "who is who" in his fields, and admired for his patriarchal signals, for much of what happens in them is not evidently important, but relies on setting up and advertising one's own subcultural importance. All in all, verbose and rambling, Sen does not say much. That however is not say that there is not the odd gem among his unctuous meditations. This may be one, at least, it is a solid part in the liquid flow:

While reason cannot guarantee the success and superiority of ethical deliberations, it is still an indispensable part of them. For without disciplined thought we cannot achieve ethical objectivity. In the absence of serious efforts at ethical objectivity we are apt to have to face outcomes of the ethical discourse of lesser quality. Sen does not yet explain why impartiality is an indispensable feature of any cultural feat deserving to be called justice; but ethical objectivity, he insinuates, is the means that brings us closer to justice-forming impartiality. 

Moreover, there are Popperian echoes in Sen's notion of ethical objectivity. The Popperian slant in objectivity is manifest in the idea of 

• turning outside what is individually inside, 

• presenting internal senses and ideas to the public, to other human beings, for mutual exchange,  

•  linking up one brain with many others, 

• congregating in a place where we have occasion to force or encourage each other to think about what we owe one another.

Continued in Amartya Sen on Justice (3) - Rawls and Beyond (a).

See also What Is Ethics ? (1) - The Science of What We May or May Not Do To One Another, What Is Ethics ? (2) - Moral Coordination.