Amartya Sen on Justice (8) - Voice and Social Choice

Image credit. Continued from Amartya Sen on Justice (7) - Institutions and Persons (b) - Institutional Fundamentalism

Ich sitze am Straßenhang.
Der Fahrer wechselt das Rad.
Ich bin nicht gern, wo ich herkomme.
Ich bin nicht gern, wo ich hinfahre.
Warum sehe ich den Radwechsel
mit Ungeduld?

Bertolt Brecht
(B.B.: Werke. Bd. 12. Gedichte. Bd. 2. 1988. S. 310) 

 ★

In chapter 4 "Voice and Social Choice," Amartya Sen again contrasts 

• transcendental theories of (perfect) justice, such as John Rawls', with 

• comparative approaches to ascertaining (imperfect but useful or improved forms of) justice. 

In turning to the modern theory of social choice pioneered by Kenneth Arrow, Sen highlights the "sins of omission" of which transcendental theories of justice are guilty. In their search for some sort of theoretical perfection and closure, these theories are unconcerned with or ill-equipped to take on the real issues of justice we face in reality.

The quest for perfection blinds out insights from comparing imperfect but real issues of justice. Moreover, choosing institutions as their focal point in determining an ideal system of justice, no attention is being paid to the manifold manifestations of justice under real life conditions, including the incidence of deviance.

The transcendental theories cut out the real processes of deliberation, negotiation, and other types of human interaction that bring forth conditions of justice in reality.

This is where social choice comes in, which takes up the enlightenment concern for rational and efficient public reasoning. Social choice addresses the practical question of how democracy works, and how well it works.

In order to contribute to our understanding of how we work together within a political infrastructure, amongst other things to determine justice, social choice theory formalises 

... the problem of arriving at aggregate assessments based on individual priorities ...

p. 91

Sen also notes that transcendental theories of justice do not qualify as "conglomerate theories," by which he means a fruitful conjunction of ideal-seeking theory with a query into alternatives among feasible conditions of justice. More specifically, he argues that a theory of perfect justice is not needed for nor does it help us in assessing differences in alternative scenarios of real or feasible justice.

There would be something deeply odd in a general belief that a comparison of any two alternatives cannot be sensibly made without a prior identification of a superior alternative. 

p. 103

Finally, Sen dismisses the need and use of transcendental theories of perfect justice on the compelling ground that

Incompleteness may be of the lasting kind, for several different reasons, including unbridgeable gaps in information, and judgemental unresolvability involving disparate considerations that cannot be entirely eliminated, even with full information.

p. 103

For a more detailed and independent analysis of the problem of "incompleteness," as Sen calls it, compare my posts on Agonistic Liberalism (1/2) and (2/2).