Review of the Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen

Book Reviews 1251 Individuals may then be not a collection of static their potential in healthy and satisfying ways. preferences, but a collection, in Davis’s view, of This reflects something of an Aristotelian cast of individual capabilities responding to evolution- mind, at least with respect to Sen’s picture of the ary forces. Stated in this way, the individual again structure of human psychology. Whereas utilitar- disperses into multiple selves, leaving the atom- ians tend to focus on preference-satisfaction and istic definition of individuation unsatisfactory. egalitarians typically traffic in arguments about The question then becomes can a self-organized the distribution of resources, Sen operates with individual be recovered? Perhaps not if different a more fully rounded idea of human well-being. capabilities pull individuals in different direc- But, as with other neo-Aristotelians like Alasdair tions. As such, an individual may be pulled by MacIntyre (1984), Sen resists Aristotle’s view that different potential capabilities or different iden- there is a fixed list of human purposes or virtues. tities in different situations leading to trade-offs. Rather, he thinks that justice is to a considerable In this way, Davis makes the link to identity eco- extent about enabling people to develop and fulfill nomics, social issues of race discrimination, and their own capabilities. This means that, although normative analysis. On this last avenue, the point he has strong egalitarian impulses and often is made clear that without a clear notion of the recommends antielitist policies, Sen is strongly individual, or a clear notion of which utility to committed to the idea that human freedom lies favor, policy prescriptions and welfare statements at the core of justice. Despite his antipathy for are deeply complicated. preference-satisfaction as a moral yardstick, he The reading of this text provides the reader resists appeals to externally identified “interests” with a novel look into the philosophy of economic that might trump an agent’s sense of his or her constructions and their relationship with recent priorities and purposes (pp. 376–79). developments in behavioral economics. The Sen’s vision of a better world is one in which author clearly demonstrates a depth of reasoning more people have the freedom and wherewithal and care for the subject that should make the text to achieve their best potential, and he thinks that of interest to a broad audience. The most compel- a large part of the task of a theory of justice is to ling portion of the text, however, is often between identify obstacles to realizing that vision—and to the lines. Welfare statements for nonatomistic point the way to their removal. He has two main individuals are wrought with pitfalls and many goals in this book. The first is to provide a syn- constructions of individualism face nonatomism thetic account of arguments about justice that he in the view of Davis. Recognizing this challenge, has been developing over several decades. The how then to move forward? Recent work dem- second is to establish this view as superior to John onstrates that welfare statements can potentially Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which Sen rightly be made with choice data alone, obviating some judges (pp. 52–53) to be the most important work concerns. Of course, even with this caveat, the on the subject in a generation.1 The two projects ability to parse definitions of individuation and are inextricably linked because many of Sen’s individuals generates an important foundation for major claims are defined as alternatives to—or at understanding the new economics of identity. least against the backdrop of—Rawlsian claims Charles Sprenger that he finds wanting. My own philosophical pri- Stanford University ors and views about justice are closer to Sen’s than they are to Rawls’s, but I nonetheless think that The Idea of Justice. By Amartya Sen. Cambridge: Sen fails on both counts. His arguments against Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, Rawls are less than telling and, given what he has 2009. Pp. xxviii, 467. $22.95, paper. ISBN 978– said elsewhere, Sen’s defense of his own account 0–674–03613–0, cloth; 978–0–674–06047–0, 1 pbk. JEL 2011–0483 Rawls originally published A Theory of Justice in 1971, but he had been developing the central ideas in journal articles for over a decade before that. He con- Amartya Sen’s vision of justice is agreeably tinued refining—and indeed revising—them in articles humane. He sees people as developmental crea- and lectures, leading to the publication of a substantially tures whose well-being depends on achieving revamped second and final edition in 1999. 07_BookReviews494.indd 1251 11/22/11 4:12 PM 1252 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XLIX (December 2011) of justice is surprisingly undeveloped in The Idea theorists like John Locke had construed political of Justice. institutions as the result of a foundational agree- Sen has long—and rightly in my view—been ment made by people in order to protect natural concerned to get political theorists to focus on rights that were believed to be rooted in natural important questions of justice in the real world. law. Individuals were seen as having abandoned Part of why he resists what he describes as Rawls’s the state of nature to avoid the costs of protect- “search for transcendental justice” (p. 101) is that ing those rights themselves, thereby enhancing it can divert attention to difficult (perhaps unan- their freedom and security. Rawls was writing in swerable) questions that are irrelevant to identi- a different age, when agreement on the existence fying severe injustices and deciding what to do of natural law and natural rights could no longer about them. He captured this vividly in a lecture be assumed and in which decades of mordant (Sen 2009) with the pithy image of a man locked criticism had dispatched the idea of a prepoliti- in an unbearably hot sauna who calls urgently to cal state of nature from serious consideration by a friend outside to lower the temperature, but theorists of justice. elicits the response that he must be told the ideal Rawls’s Kant-inspired move was intended to temperature before acting on the request. A neo- revive the social contract tradition while eliding phyte might wonder whether Sen was making a these well-known difficulties. Conceding that point about poor judgment in choice of friends, there had never been a social contract, he none- but anyone who has been raised on the steady diet theless asked what contract people might buy into of abstruse meta-debates, thought experiments, if they were in a position to do so. And, rather and contrived examples that make up so much than prepolitical people, he asked actual peo- professional political philosophy will know what ple—his readers—to consider what they thought he was getting at. people would choose behind a veil of ignorance This review mirrors the geography of Sen’s that shielded them from knowledge of their age, book. I start with his critique of transcendental sex, race, IQ, physical prowess, aspirations, and political theory and the comparative approach other specific facts that would allow them to bias that he proposes in its stead. I contend that he things in their favor. Stripped of such knowledge, overstates his differences with Rawls on mat- people would be constrained to reason in gen- ters of both method and substance, and that his eral terms. In this way, universalizability would alternative appeal to a comparative outlook can- replace natural law as the standard for evaluating not do the philosophical work that is needed to political institutions. sustain his vision of justice. Really his argument Sen is skeptical that people could ever be depends heavily on his appeals to a version of induced to agree on a theory of justice in this Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, but Sen fails to way. Moreover, he thinks it is unnecessary for deal with obvious criticisms of it and he deploys them to try to do so in order to tackle some of it selectively to legitimate positions that he finds the most pressing matters of justice in the real congenial. Last I turn to his claim that democracy world. He observes that being persuaded that the is an important vehicle for advancing the cause Mona Lisa is the best painting in the world, or of justice. This is a significant contribution, but that Mount Everest the highest mountain, is nei- Sen’s account is marred by lack of attention to the ther necessary nor perhaps even helpful in adju- dynamics of democratic politics. As a result, he dicating the relative merits of a Van Gogh and a misses opportunities to advance our understand- Picasso, or the relative heights of Kilimanjaro and ing of when and how democracy is likely to serve Mount McKinley (pp. 101–02). These are, to be the cause of justice. sure, vivid cautions; and Sen’s impulse to focus our critical energy on serious injustice is deeply Against Transcendental Theory congenial—at least to me. But how do Sen’s observations capture what differentiates his proj- Rawls did not use the term “transcendental” to ect from Rawls’s? describe his enterprise, but Sen deploys it to cap- Rawls’s commitment to ideal theory, as he called ture its Kantian flavor. Traditional social contract it, had three distinctive features: he thought that 07_BookReviews494.indd 1252 11/22/11 4:12 PM Book Reviews 1253 we should reason about justice under relatively by this observation to opine that humans might favorable conditions; he thought that we should recognize obligations to weaker people and other mostly ignore enforcement problems until we are species “because of the asymmetry between us,” clear about what justice requires; and he thought rather than from some expectation of benefit.

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