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[Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2009); ISBN: 9780674060470; 496 pp; $22.95; Paperback]

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Michael Da Silva

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German Law Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 1: Symposium on Human Rights , January 2012 , pp. 54 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 Nussbaum, Martha, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2007).Google Scholar

2 Sandel, Michael J., Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (2009).Google Scholar

3 Sen formally commented on A Theory of Justice for Harvard University Press before its publication and wrote his Collective Choice and Social Welfare at the same time as Rawls's famous text; see Sen, Amartya, The Idea of Justice 52–53 (2009).Google Scholar

4 Id. at xi.Google Scholar

5 Id. at xi & xxii.Google Scholar

6 He presented parts of The Idea of Justice at Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, Cardozo and Washington Law Schools and has been an interlocutor of the likes of H.L.A. Hart, Tony Honore, Joseph Raz and Jeremy Waldron. He cotaught a class at Oxford with Ronald Dworkin; id. at 264.Google Scholar

7 Id. at 40–41.Google Scholar

8 Id. at 45.Google Scholar

9 Id. at 53.Google Scholar

10 Id. at 68. (“[I]f the justice of what happens to a society depends on a combination of institutional features and actual behavioral characteristics … then is it possible to identify ‘just’ institutions for a society without making them contingent on actual behavior … “)Google Scholar

11 He advocates Adam Smith's impartial spectator approach as preferable to the contractarian approach of Kant and Rawls.Google Scholar

12 Sen, supra note 3, at 71.Google Scholar

13 Id. at 82.Google Scholar

14 Id. at 95.Google Scholar

15 Id. at 117.Google Scholar

16 Although Kantian impartiality is more widely accepted, Sen states that it faces fundamental limitations and problems for international justice. He seeks to overcome these problems using Smith's open impartiality, which has been partially realized in the involvement of NGOs, trade unions, et. al. in global affairs; id. at 151.Google Scholar

17 Id. at 168.Google Scholar

18 Id. at 169.Google Scholar

19 Id. at 174.Google Scholar

20 Id. at 179.Google Scholar

21 Id. at 191.Google Scholar

22 Id. at 183. (“The possibility of plurality of sustainable reasons is not only important in giving rationality its due, it also distances the idea of rational choice from its putative role as a simple predicator of actual choice, as it has widely been used in mainstream economics. Even if every actual choice happens to be invariably rational in the sense of being sustainable by critical scrutiny, the plurality of rational choice makes it hard to obtain a unique prediction about a person's actual choice from the idea of rationality alone.”)Google Scholar

23 Id. at 206.Google Scholar

24 Id. at 208–217.Google Scholar

25 Id. at 225.Google Scholar

26 Id. at 231; Martha Nussbaum also uses a capability approach (Nussbaum, supra note 1, at 232).Google Scholar

27 Sen, supra note 3, at 235.Google Scholar

28 Id. at 253. Cohen has critiqued the capabilities approach and Sen deals with Cohen's criticisms in the text (Sen, supra note 3, at 235).Google Scholar

29 Id. at 260–263. To read about primary goods, see Rawls, John, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement 57–61 (2001) or John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition 78–81 (1999).Google Scholar

30 Sen, supra note 3, at 234.Google Scholar

31 Id. at 235.Google Scholar

32 Id. at 253.Google Scholar

33 Id. at 259.Google Scholar

34 Id. at 276Google Scholar

35 Id. at 293.Google Scholar

36 Id. at 295.Google Scholar

37 Id. at 299.Google Scholar

38 Id. at 317.Google Scholar

39 Id. at 322.Google Scholar

40 I.e. Mughal emperor Akbar, Buddha and the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata; Id. at 37, 205, 208.Google Scholar

41 Sen, supra note 3, at xiii.Google Scholar

42 Id. at 322, 328.Google Scholar

43 Id. at 333.Google Scholar

44 Id. at 338.Google Scholar

45 Id. at 355–358. He later problematizes Bentham's views; id. at 362–364.Google Scholar

46 Id. at 360, 258.Google Scholar

47 Id. at 362.Google Scholar

48 Id. at 363.Google Scholar

49 Id. at 365.Google Scholar

50 Williams, Bernard, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moral Argument in Political Argument 72 (2007) (“Whether it is a matter of philosophical good sense to treat a certain practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions”).Google Scholar

51 Sen, supra note 3, at 385–387.Google Scholar

52 Id. at xi.Google Scholar

53 Id. at 392.Google Scholar

54 Id. at 294.Google Scholar

55 Id. at 8.Google Scholar

56 Id. at ix (“[A] theory of justice that can serve as the basis of practical reasoning must include ways of judging how to reduce injustice and advance justice, rather than aiming only at the characterization of perfectly just societies”).Google Scholar

57 Id. at 4 (“Arbitrary reduction of multiple and potentially conflicting principles to one solitary survivor, guillotining all the other evaluative criteria is not, in fact, a perquisite for getting useful and robust conclusions on what should be done. This applies as much to the theory of justice as it does to any other part of the discipline of practical reason”).Google Scholar

58 Id. at x (“[T]he presence of remedial injustice may well be connected with behavioral transgressions rather than institutional shortcomings …. Justice is ultimately connected with the way people's lives go, and not merely with the nature of the institutions surrounding them”).Google Scholar

59 Id. at 5–6.Google Scholar

60 Id. at xvi.Google Scholar

61 Id. at 7.Google Scholar

62 Id. at 5–6.Google Scholar

63 Id. at 413.Google Scholar

64 Id. at xxi.Google Scholar

65 Id. at xvi.Google Scholar

66 Id. at 74.Google Scholar

67 Id. at 62.Google Scholar

68 Id. at 62–65.Google Scholar

69 Id. at 207.Google Scholar

70 Id. at 85.Google Scholar

71 Id. at 12.Google Scholar

72 Rawls, John, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement 13 (2001); his society only needs to be reasonably just as opposed to ideal, 4.Google Scholar

73 Id. at 10.Google Scholar

74 For Rawls's major statement on public reason, see Rawls, John, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition 212–254, 440–490 (2005). The former lecture appeared in the original 1993 edition of the book and the latter revisits the original concepts therein. The former was included as a “Major Statement” on the idea of deliberative democracy in James Bohman & William Rehg (eds.), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics 92 (1997). Iris Marion Young's work was also included in that volume at 383. For a robust understanding of Young's deliberative democracy see Young, Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy (2002).Google Scholar

75 Sen, supra note 3, at 97.Google Scholar

76 Id. at 231.Google Scholar

77 Rawls, supra note 73, at 11–12.Google Scholar

78 The capability approach demands consideration of responsibility towards the future of other species that are threatened with destruction, but Sen does not focus on future generations; Sen, supra note 3, at 251.Google Scholar

79 Id. at 101.Google Scholar

80 Id. at 97.Google Scholar

81 Id. at xxvii.Google Scholar

82 Scanlon, Tim, When Does Equality Matter?, presented at a legal theory workshop at the University of Toronto on 22 October 2010.Google Scholar

83 Sen, supra note 3, at 413.Google Scholar