Amartya Sen on Justice (5) - Rawls and Beyond (c)

Image credit. Continued from Amartya Sen on Justice (4) - Rawls and Beyond (b)

More Needling - Being Unfair about Fairness

As mentioned before, I have no sympathy for Amartya Sen's disingenuous adulation of John Rawls. Yes, disingenuous. For (a) neither is there any substance to Sen's courteous emphasis on the putative depth and pioneering quality of the points that he gives Rawls exuberant credit for, (b) nor does he own up to his analytic destruction of Rawls philosophy, which amounts to whose conclusion a non-academic would instantly characterise as Rawls "having no relevance for the real world."

As for (a), let me pick out

the basic Rawlsian idea of the foundational priority of fairness in developing a theory of justice

p. 62 - for source see below

so much acclaimed by Sen.

To see that this borders on hysterical idolatry just recall what fairness is defined to mean:

So what is fairness? This foundational idea can be given shape in various ways, but central to it must a demand to avoid bias in our evaluations, taking note of the interests and concerns of others as well, and in particular the need to avoid being influenced by our respected vested interests, or by our personal priorities or eccentricities or prejudices.It can broadly be seen as a demand for impartiality.

Sen, A. (2009) The Idea of Justice, p. 54

For more see Amartya Sen on Justice (3) - Rawls and Beyond (a). 

We can go back to Magna Charta and even further into the past to find evidence that people and their thinkers had a grasp of the features of fairness that the theory and practice of justice ought to take account of. To suggest that Rawls somehow made a seminal difference in our awareness of the aspects of fairness in our moral and legal reasoning is - well, disingenuous.

Sen's Constructive Turn

At the same time, I am glad to report that in his chapter on Rawls, besides inordinately and wrongly upgrading Rawls' poor philosophical base and output, Amartya Sen delivers a number of perceptive and fruitful insights of his own. Sen is an excellent fabulator, but he ruins his knack for apt formulations through a penchant for meandering narration. But then, among his lengthy expositions, suddenly one chances on a protruding piece of incisiveness.

All emphases below are mine.

Rawls's method of investigation invokes 'contractarian' reasoning, involving the question: what 'social contract' would be accepted by everyone unanimously in the original position? The contractarian method of reasoning is broadly in the Kantian tradition [...]

Justice as fairness, as a theory, is situated by Rawls broadly within that tradition, and he describes his theory, as was noted in the Introduction, as an attempt 'to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant'. 

Heavens, even higher a level of abstraction! The problem with those three is that they already operate on too high a level of abstraction.

Rawls compares this mode of reasoning that yields a social contract with the utilitarian tradition that focuses on producing 'the most good summed over all its members, where this good is a complete good specified by a comprehensive doctrine'.

This is an interesting and important comparison, and yet Rawls's exclusive focus on this particular contrast allows him to neglect the exploration of other approaches that are neither contractarian nor utilitarian.

[...] Adam Smith [...] invokes the device of what he calls 'the impartial spectator' to base judgements of justice on the demands of fairness.

This is neither a model of social contract, nor one of maximization of the sum-total of utilities (or indeed the maximization of any other aggregate indicator of the 'complete good').

Rephrasing basically the same idea, the next two paragraphs offer an example of Sen's penchant for repetition and loquacious exposition, to be followed by a third paragraph that I had in mind when I wrote above about a sudden protuberance of incisiveness.

The idea of addressing the issue of fairness through the device of the Smithian impartial spectator allows some possibilities  that are not readily available in the contractarian line of reasoning used by Rawls.

We need to examine the respects in which the Smithian line of reasoning, involving the impartial spectator, may be able to take note of  possibilities that the social contract approach cannot easily accommodate, including [...]

And here finally the adumbrated firework of incisiveness:

(1) dealing with comparative assessment  and not merely identifying a transcendental solution;

(2) taking note of social realizations and not only the demands of institutions and rules;

(3) allowing incompleteness in social assessment, but still providing guidance in important problems of social justice, including the urgency of removing manifest cases of injustice; and

(4) taking notice of voices beyond the membership of the contractarian group, either to take note of their interests, or to avoid our being trapped in local parochialism. 

p. 70

Sen is introducing very important ideas and new perspectives: incremental and comparative considerations of justice - (1) -, the need to corroborate judgements of justice by confronting them with their consequences effected in the real world - (2) -, advocating trust in a regime of justice that is not perfect but nevertheless effective - (3) -.

As for the last point - (4) -, I am a little confused: what hinders Rawls from imagining his denuded souls to be representative of mankind at large? What is it in the original position that weds them to a place like Guatemala, Switzerland or the USA? I thought they they peep into the world from behind the 'veil of ignorance' cleansed of all such identity-building idiosyncrasies.

So, what Sen is effectively doing is that he throws out THE essential pivot of Rawls's philosophy, reintroducing real people with real identities and interests as they act in real environments polluted by the real possibilities, limits and weaknesses of a real human community.

After all that adulation, to me, the less palatable effect of these valuable findings is to make Sen look like an assassin fawning upon his dead master with a palsy-walsy smile.