The Idea of Justice (review)

Although all struggles against oppression operate with an idea of justice, no struggle against oppression requires a comprehensive theory of justice. As Amartya Sen reminds us in his wide-ranging and refreshing book, The Idea of Justice, "When Condorcet and Smith argued that the abolition of slavery would make the world far less unjust, they were asserting the possibility of ranking the world with and without slavery, in favour of the latter . . . not also making the further claim that all the alternatives that can be generated by variations of institutions and policies can be fully ranked against each other" (398). Their fight against slavery needed a comparative assessment of different possible social outcomes, not a comprehensive, ideal theory of justice.

In The Idea of Justice, Sen develops this insight and presents it as an alternative to what he takes to be the dominant approach toward justice. The dominant approach, which Sen calls "transcendental institutionalism," has two features. First, it defends certain principles of justice as an ideal conception of justice by identifying "social characteristics that cannot be transcended in terms of justice." Second, it focuses on the basic institutions of society and is "not directly focused on the actual societies that would ultimately emerge" from those institutions (5-6). The paradigmatic example is John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, but Nozick, Gauthier, and Dworkin also fit the bill (411).

By contrast, Sen's approach begins with social realizations (with what actually happens or could feasible emerge) rather than institutional structures and concentrates on evaluative comparisons over distinct social realizations rather than a unique set of political principles (8, 410). He calls this the "realization-focused comparison" approach to justice and describes it as focusing on the "advancement or retreat of justice" rather than a perfect social order (7-8). Indeed, one way to frame the distinction is in terms of their respective questions. The dominant approach seeks to answer: What is a just society? Sen's approach answers the question: How might justice be advanced? (9).

One might think that the two questions are closely related. Rawls thought that ideal theory guides political action and therefore helps answer the second question. Sen thinks that the identification of a perfectly just social arrangement is not only "infeasible" but also "redundant" for issues of nonideal theory. It is infeasible because impartial critical scrutiny generates plausible rivals to any one ideal conception of justice (10-12). It is redundant because ideal theory is neither necessary nor sufficient for ranking alternative policies that might advance justice (98-102).

Each criticism is closely linked to his defense of a realization-focused approach. For example, ideal theory's insufficiency rests on the fact that it does not include within it the requisite weights or valuations for ranking alternatives. Yet these weights and valuations are "the basic ingredients of a 'comparative' rather than a 'transcendental' approach to justice" (99). Similarly, even in the absence of ideal theory "we may still be able to agree readily that there is a clear social failure involved in persistent famines or in widespread exclusions from medical access" (104).

The approach developed in The Idea of Justice is closely related to Sen's work on social choice theory and welfare economics, which won him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. At one point Sen characterizes social choice theory as focusing on "a ranking of alternative social realizations"— a nearly identical characterization of a realization-focused approach to justice (94). Yet it would be a mistake to conflate the two. Sen does not attempt to reduce justice to a mathematical proof. On the contrary, the mathematical results of social choice theory serve as inputs for public discussions about justice; they help clarify and sharpen debate (110, 314).

Among the more significant inputs are (1) the allowance of incomplete rankings among alternative arrangements and (2) recognition of the inescapable plurality of impartial reasons (106-8). As features of rationality, incompleteness and pluralism suggest...