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Sen returns to many of the themes of The Idea of Justice in the final chapter. He begins by noting that people respond to injustice with anger and indignation, but that justice requires reasoned scrutiny of these sentiments (Chapter 1). Public reasoning is central to justice, since “there is a clear connection between the objectivity of a judgment and its ability to withstand public scrutiny” (394; c.f., Chapter 5, 15-17). Decisions need to be seen as just not only for instrumental reasons, but because those that cannot be made public are likely unsound. (388-94)Justice involves the comparison of a plurality of impartial reasons which may conflict (Chapter 9). There is a tendency in moral and political thought to search for a single value that encompasses all others (e.g., pleasure), but reason doesn’t support this reduction. Happily, non-commensurability and incompleteness don’t inhibit our ability to reason objectively about justice. Though we may need to accept “an unresolvable diversity of views,” this is usually “a last resort”. (397, footnote) In many cases, we can identity shared partial rankings to guide our decisions even if our personal reasons behind these rankings are different. (394-401; c.f., Chapter 4)

According to Sen, reasoning about justice should not be confined to a single state or community, but rather be global and cosmopolitan. Justice requires “open impartiality” (Chapters 5-9). Non-compatriots’ interests are relevant to justice, as are their perspectives; these may help correct our parochial biases. Our actions at the level of the state affect people outside its boundaries, so we should consider their interests before acting. For example, the US reaction to the global recession has far reaching consequences to the global and hence most local economies. Also, our values may have their basis in ignorance and exposure to people outside of our circle may give use more adequate information for assessing them. Sen cites Adam Smith’s discussion of infanticide here. (404)

Sen refers loosely to “global democracy”. Unlike many cosmopolitans, he doesn’t reject a global state outright, but rather points to its current infeasibility. He connects the rejection of cosmopolitan accounts of justice with Rawls and Nagel’s view that justice primarily concerns institutional arrangements. If global institutions are necessary for justice, this may support justice’s limited scope. Instead, Sen relies on his conception of democracy as public reasoning and the role of governmental bodies (e.g., the United Nations and its different bodies), citizens’ organizations, “many NGOs, and parts of the news media”. (409) Instead of working toward a global state, we should work to strengthen global public reason. (401-9)

Fourth, Sen’s theory of justice has its roots in social choice theory, not on the social contract. (Chapters 2-6, 9) His theory of justice “concentrates, as the discipline of social choice does, on making evaluative comparisons over distinct social realizations.” (410) This leads to a concern with comparative justice and a focus on actual outcomes, rather than “perfect justice” that primarily examines institutions. (410-2) Sen returns to the distinction between niti and nyaya and reiterates the importance of taking into account actual outcomes instead of concentrating on just institutions or principles. (413)

The role of philosophy in justice is to “play a part in bringing more discipline and greater reach to reflections on values and priorities as well as on the denials, subjugations and humiliations from which human beings suffer across the world.” (413)

Questions and thoughts:

1) Since this is the final chapter, I think it’s worth asking what Sen hoped to accomplish in The Idea of Justice. Is The Idea of Justice a culmination of Sen’s work in political philosophy the way Theory of Justice incorporates and refines the papers that led up to it or is it a summary where the reader must consult Sen’s references to journal publications to fully evaluate his considered views?
I’m inclined to think that The Idea of Justice is not a definitive statement of Sen’s views. (Blaine mentioned that chapter 1 is not really aimed at professional philosophers or political theorists; the same could be said of the book.) First, most of the chapters are far too short on detail and discussion of the literature to satisfy a philosophical audience. Second, most of the discussion is non-technical and accessible in its general outlines to a non-philosophical audience (as the mainly favorable reviews in the mainstream press suggest). Third, Sen gives many references to his journal publications, suggesting that they are relevant to evaluating his fully formed position.

2) If I am right here, then it’s worth asking about the value of Sen’s approach. Who ought a theory of justice to address? One possibility is that it ought to speak to political philosophers and theorists immersed in the most recent scholarly discussions. My impression is that most of the people who have participated in this reading group find Sen’s book unsatisfactory on this account.

Another possibility is that a theory of justice ought to be accessible to a wide range of academics, including economists, sociologists, law, geography, education etc. I suspect that it may be better received by people who aren’t immersed in philosophy, particularly economists. One reason is that if we follow Sen, we can largely bypass the philosophical literature on justice, a plus for people in other disciplines who work on the topic. A third is that the theory should seem relevant to academics in general, politicians, and the reflective public.

Obviously, different work can engage each of these three audiences, but I think we need to ask this question for two reasons. First, how do we fairly evaluate a work? For example, should we assess Sen’s book based on how well it engages recent philosophical literature on justice? Second, the choice of audience is central to political philosophy’s ends. Presumably, political philosophy should have some indirect influence on policy. If Sen had tried to satisfy his philosophical critics, his book would need to be at least twice as long and would have a much smaller audience.

3) Social choice perspective plays a central role in Sen’s theory. In fact, it may be fair to claim that his theory of justice treats political philosophy as a sophisticated branch of normative economics. I believe a fair assessment of Sen’s book would require delving into his work on rationality and social choice. Social choice theory grounds his pluralism and informs his basic “comparative” framework. Sen starts with individual preferences, but subjects them to standards of rationality and public reason and asks how they can be aggregated in a morally salient way. The result is that quite a bit of substantial political theorizing is outside of the hands of political philosophers and left to public reasoning (where political philosophers can weigh in but have no special authority).

Political philosophers have reason to worry on two fronts: economics and the general public have a greater role in determining the just society. Should they accept this?

In chapter 17, Sen outlines a theory of human rights. He acknowledges that many human rights activists have little patience for philosophical discussions on the nature (and indeed existence) of human rights. He also discusses Jeremy Bentham’s quip that the natural rights are “nonsense on stilts”. Sen insists that if “the idea of human rights … is to command reasoned and sustained loyalty” (356), we must address the skeptics and cynics.

Sen analyzes human rights in terms of their content and their justification (their “viability”) (358). With regard to their content, human rights are moral rights that protect important freedoms and entail social obligations that people promote these freedoms. First, Sen stresses that human rights are moral rights - “really strong ethical pronouncements as to what should be done”. (357) They are not legal rights, though they are often enshrined in legal documents and institutions. (363) Law plays a central role in guaranteeing human rights, but other activities such as education, public monitoring, debate, and protest are also crucial. Indeed, there are cases under which giving human rights legal status may be counterproductive. Fining or jailing men who deny their wives an effective voice in family decisions is probably not the best way to promote women’s equality. (365)

Second, the purpose of human rights is to protect important freedoms. (376-9) As we have seen, Sen’s analysis of freedom includes an “opportunity aspect” and a “process aspect”. The capabilities approach captures the opportunity aspect (capabilities are real opportunities to achieve valuable functionings). (371) But human rights go beyond the capabilities approach in protecting the process according to which achieve these functionings. Two people with access to an identical set of functionings may be in a quite different situation with regard to human rights. For example, the rule of law may guarantee person A’s access valuable functionings, whereas person B may rely on the whim of a benevolent dictator. Leaving aside the fact that dictators generally do a poor job of guaranteeing human rights, many of us also care about how rights are guaranteed.

Sen objects to interest-based accounts of human rights because he thinks they interfere with our intuitions about the importance of freedom. His objection rests on the distinction between people’s “real” interests and the interests they perceive themselves as having. For example, we generally want to protect the human right to free political association, even if people choose to associate with political parties that do not promote their real interests. Sen admits that some interpretations of “interest” incorporate freedom, so some freedom-based and interest-based accounts of human rights converge.

Third, human rights do not protect all freedoms. Rather, they must meet “threshold conditions” of “sufficient social importance to be included as a part of the human rights of that person and correspondingly to generate obligations for others to see how they can help the person to realize those freedoms…” (367) Impartial discussion is needed to determine which rights meet this threshold.

Fourth, human rights entail social obligations. (360) Human rights impose universal ethical reasons for people to prevent their violation, but these reasons do not automatically entail specific actions. Obligations may be perfect, but they are often imperfect and diffuse. We need to ask about the agents’ other obligations, their ability to effectively prevent the violation of the human right, their agent-relative prerogatives, etc.

How does Sen justify a list of human rights and identify the obligations that they entail? On his account, human rights are justified like other ethical claims. To assert a human right is to presume that these claims will meet the standard of “open impartiality” discussed in Chapter 6. Human rights claims that “survive open and informed scrutiny” (385) and “unobstructed discussion” (386) deserve their status - at least until contrary arguments surface. Even if there is widespread agreement about which rights count as human rights, people are bound to disagree about their comparative weight, how they mesh with other ethical considerations, and the structure of the obligations they impose.

Sen is particularly concerned about the justification of second-generation economic and social rights such as the right to subsistence, medical care, and education. (379-85) He discusses two philosophical criticisms of human rights, the “institutionalization critique” and the “feasibility critique”. Onora O’Neill has argued that social, economic, and cultural rights must be institutionalized in a way that clearly identifies obligation-bearers. Human rights without obligation-bearers are not human rights at all. In response, Sen argues that first-generation rights also impose imperfect obligations. For example, citizens have obligations to notify the police when witnessing a crime and the international community has an obligation to act to prevent genocide. Furthermore, O’Neill’s condition that human rights economic, social, and cultural rights must be institutionalized undermines their ability to motivate institutional change.

Similarly, Maurice Cranston argues in his “feasibility” critique that economic and social rights require considerable government action for their realization, something that often cannot be achieved with some countries’ infrastructure and resources. Sen responds by noting that Cranston is mistaken in thinking that first-generation rights simply require that governments and people “leave a man alone.” (384) Maintaining rule of law and social stability is also beyond the means of quite a few governments, but few hold that this discredits their moral force. The proper response to the inability to meet the requirements imposed by a human right is social action.

Like most of the preceding chapters, there are many issues that could be raised, including whether Sen adequately addresses interest-based human rights accounts, fairly rebuts O’Neill and Cranston (and other critics), etc. I’ll conclude with two general questions.

1) Will Sen’s account of human rights satisfy either skeptics or activists? Skeptics are unlikely to be moved by the appeal to reasoned scrutiny and discussion and will still decry the impotence of human rights in the face of realpolitik. Moreover, Sen’s broad treatment of human rights is deflationary, arguably reducing them to important moral rights that have special rhetorical force. His metaphysical modesty and non-committal approach to the actual list of rights may play into the skeptics’ hands who will deny that there is anything particularly special about human rights that lack the sanction of positive law. Sen is a long way from the natural law tradition he discusses in the first part of the chapter. He holds not only that there is a trade-off between human rights - sometimes human rights conflict - but that sometimes other ethical prerogatives or obligations can take precedent over obligations stemming from them.

Similarly, activists will ask how his account supplements their work. We can return to the Preface and ask how the Parisians storming the Bastille, Gandhi or Martin Luther King would view Sen’s account of human rights. Does it help with “the identification of redressable injustice”? (vii) Does it “clarify how we can proceed to address questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice”? (ix) Sen’s account of human rights is in many ways refined common sense. Activists may complain that this doesn’t add much moral clarification or force to their causes.

2) There is a tension between Sen’s pluralism and “assertive incompleteness” and his account of human rights. Recall that Sen argues that impartial discussion may not lead to agreement about just social arrangements, including agreement on the list of human rights and their content. Human rights are moral claims of sufficient social importance that their guarantee entails social duties. Presumably, they should be subject to “plural grounding”. (2) If a human right is sufficiently disputed by reasonable people from a perspective of “open impartiality”, then it should be (tentatively) struck from the pantheon.

My worry is that Sen’s theory of justice may commit him to minimalism about human rights. For example, in the example of the children deciding who receives the flute, Sen seems to consider a libertarian distribution of property reasonable. This would cast doubt on the status of the second-generation rights he defends.

This chapter covers three empirical issues relating to democracy: 1) the connection between democracy (or public reasoning—Sen seems to use these terms interchangeably) and famine, 2) the connection between democracy and economic development and 3) the promotion of tolerance toward minorities. In what follows, I will first restate Sen’s account of democracy (given in the previous chapter), as this is relevant to his interpretation of the data he provides in chapter 16. Second, I will outline his discussions of each of the three topics he takes up, and, third, I will raise a few questions about the causal connections he proposes in the discussion of famine.

Democracy

Sen views democracy as not merely the presence of elections and ballots, but as “government by discussion,” which includes “political participation, dialogue and public interaction (326).” He believes that an unrestrained media is especially important to the functioning of democratic societies, for a number of reasons, one of which plays a central role in his discussion of famines: a free press, Sen tells us, contributes to human security by giving a voice to the vulnerable and disadvantaged and by subjecting the government to criticism. (More on this
below.)

Democracy and Famine

In 1982, in an article in The New York Review of Books, Sen made the observation that “no major famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy with regular elections, opposition parties, basic freedom of speech and a relatively free media (even when the country is very poor and in a seriously adverse food situation) (342).” Further, while India was under autocratic British rule, famines were regular occurrences; once India achieved democratic self-rule famines ceased. (Apparently, Sen’s observation about democracy and absence of famine was initially met with a fair amount of skepticism. Now it is widely accepted.) Sen infers from the observed correlation that democracy prevents famine. He offers two reasons in support of this inference. First, democratic governments are accountable to their citizens and subject to uncensored criticism from the media. So, in order to maintain power, democratic governments have a strong incentive to eradicate famines. (Indeed Sen argues later in the chapter that the famine case is really an instance of a broader phenomenon whereby democracy advances human security by giving political incentive to rulers to respond to vulnerable citizens.) Second, because of the informational role of the free press, democratic governments are likely to know about the plight of citizens and therefore about the need for amelioration. By contrast, authoritarian regimes, which suppress public discussion, may be simply uninformed about the severity or extent of a famine and fail to provide assistance for that reason.

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In chapter 15 of The Idea of Justice, “Democracy as Public Reason,” Sen defends the idea that democracy is a universal value. Can democracy flourish outside the west? One reason for thinking it can’t is that it (supposedly) has never done so before. To answer this charge, Sen distinguishes between the “institutional structure of the contemporary practice of democracy,” which is “largely the product of European and American experience over the last few centuries” (pp. 322-323), and the political ideals that underlie it. By the former, Sen seems to have in mind the institutions of electoral conflict (competitive elections, secret ballots, political parties, etc.). But these institutions, Sen argues, are simply the latest effort to institutionalize certain fundamental ideals, ideals of “political participation, dialogue and public interaction” (p. 326). These ideals, Sen suggests, are well-nigh universal in their appeal. But once one sees that the institutions are of use primarily as means to the realization of deeper ideals, then one has reason to avoid running the former and the latter together. In particular, one should not assume that because a certain type of institutional structure is up and running (i.e., there are elections, the votes are counted properly, the loser concedes power to the winner) that a satisfactory level of democracy has been achieved. This has been done by many comparativists, such as Sam Huntington. To do this is to focus (once again) on niti to the exclusion of nyaya.

Sen believes that an overly-institutional focus on democracy has caused particular trouble at the global level. John Rawls and Thomas Nagel may be right that there are no democratic global institutions–indeed, no institutions at all comparable to states. But this need not mean that there is no way to realize democratic ideals such as public discussion internationally. There already exist tentative practices of global deliberation, and they are worthy of support and encouragement, whatever the proper scope and limits of international institutions.

Of course, globalized public deliberation is only conceivable if the ideal of public dialogue has universal appeal. Sen believes that this ideal does have deep roots all around the world, including in areas that have little experience with popular elections. Of course, Sen also suggests that the divide between western and nonwestern experiences with democratic institutions is not as clearcut as the democracy-is-a-western-value story would have it. India was inspired by ancient Greece to experiment with formal democratic institutions (at least on a local level) long before the barbarian tribes of northern Europe. But societies have undeniably assigned value to public reason–the ideal underlying these institutions–for a very long time, and virtually everywhere. Sen illustrates this point using the Indian experience. He also discusses the Middle East in this context.

Sen concludes the chapter with a few words about the role of the media in a democratic society. (The transition to this topic is a bit abrupt.) Obviously, to the extent that the idea of public reason underlies and democratic practice, the media matters quite a lot. Sen argues that a well-functioning free press 1) enables the free expression of ideas, which is intrinsically valuable; 2) spreads information and subjects it to critical scrutiny; 3) protects the weak by subjecting the strong to the gaze of the public eye; 4) facilitates the formation of common values by the public; and 5) contributes to the pursuit of justice (though this last contribution is not clearly specified).

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Let me first start by apologizing for the late delivery of this comment, which unfortunately messed up Blain Neufeld’s carefully drafted schedule. Apologies to Blain and readers for this.

In Chapter 14, Sen elaborates on the relationship between equality and liberty (or freedom) in relation to the capability approach. A number of issues covered in this chapter have become classics in the literature, and will likely be familiar to readers. But Sen also spends some time discussing the distinction between his approach and that of Philip Pettit – an issue that raises some interesting questions I would like to reflect on in this comment. But let me first briefly review the main points covered in this chapter of The Idea of Justice.

Sen begins the discussion in this chapter by rehearsing the idea (famously expressed in his Tanner Lectures) that all plausible theories of justice have some place for equality, reflecting the fundamental insight that, at some basic level, people must be seen (and treated) as equals. The real question to be answered, Sen concludes, is that of the precise metric of equality underlying competing theories. Sen’s own answer to the “equality of what” debate, as readers know, is to advance capability as the appropriate metric of advantage. However, Sen also insists that an egalitarian perspective informed by the capability approach is not committed to strict equality of capability. He gives us several reasons to resist this strong form of capability egalitarianism, affirming the “multiple dimensions in which equality matters” (p. 297). One important point is that capability only affects what Sen calls the opportunity aspect of freedom and is incapable (pun unintended) to fully capture its process aspect. For Sen capability-based considerations are a crucial but not comprehensive part of a general theory of justice.

In the remainder of the chapter Sen shifts his attention to liberty or freedom, in which he wants to bring home the point that freedom too should be considered a complex and multi-dimensional (or plural) value. Sen suggests personal liberty should be given a good deal of priority, because “it touches our lives at a very basic level” (p. 299), but equally cautions against the extreme view of giving freedom absolute priority (such that it would trump any other concern, no matter how important or urgent). But now the question arises how we should conceive of this freedom that takes priority among the long list of factors that affect how well our lives go. Here Sen makes three distinct points, each of which are controversial and allow for considerable disagreement:

1. When freedom is viewed as “effective preference” we should appreciate the importance of the distinction between direct control, indirect control and luck, for the simple reason that there are many ways in which I may get what I want without having a direct say in how I get it. For Sen the mere fact that I have a preference satisfied implies a type of freedom that matters to how well my life is going (“a freedom of some importance”, p. 304).

2. Relatedly, the plural conception of freedom admits of several ways in which freedom is threatened or impeded: through a lack of capability, through genuine interventions, or through a lack of independence (making one’s preference satisfaction “favor-dependent” in one formulation). Sen spends a whole section arguing about the precise relationship between Pettit’s republicanism and his own capability approach, a point to which I return below.

3. Finally, the proper understanding of freedom (individual or collective) must take account of the outcomes of actions in addition to whether they are properly deemed to be free. This insight relates to Sen’s “impossibility of the Paretian liberal”, a theorem that has spawned a cottage industry of technical literature – a topic I’m happy to leave to more qualified readers.

In the remainder of my comment I want to say a few words on what I personally believe is the more interesting contribution of this chapter, the discussion between Sen and Pettit.

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In Chapter 13, Happiness, Well-being, and Capabilities, Sen concentrates on three issues.  The first is the success of economics as a discipline in accounting for happiness and its importance.  The second is the relationship between happiness and capability. The third is the relationship between capability and well-being.

Turning to the first issue, welfare economics is the discipline devoted to the assessment of the goodness of states of affairs and policies.  According to Sen, it has been and largely remains utilitarian in character.  Happiness is often understood as the sole determinant of human well-being/advantage and as the sole criterion for evaluating societies and policies.  Well-being/advantage is usually defined in terms of utility.  Utility is defined as happiness.  Happiness is understood as desire-fulfillment.  Policy evaluations are based on a comparison of the “sum total of individual welfares.”  Many economists hold that interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible.

Sen advances three criticisms of welfare economics.  First, Sen argues that the new welfare economists are mistaken to think that interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible.  We can, Sen argues, get general agreement on partial orderings of the joy and pain in different lives.  Second, the informational basis of well-being/advantage in welfare economics is incomplete.  It should be broadened to include factors such as substantive opportunities, negative freedoms, and human rights.  Omitting this information prevents us from making important distinctions in our judgments of the relative advantage of individuals who enjoy the same level of happiness, but differ dramatically along these other dimensions.  Omitting this information also leads to distorted assessments.  Individuals who are persistently deprived may adapt to their circumstances to make life tolerable, learning to “take pleasure in small mercies” and refusing to desire or hope for change in their circumstances.  If we assess the well-being/advantage of such individuals on the basis of their happiness alone, then we would fail to get an accurate picture of their actual disadvantage.  Third, Sen argues that contemporary welfare economists fail to sufficiently recognize the limits of using a monetary metric to gauge utility or happiness.  Sen references empirical evidence suggesting that there is not a direct correlation between increasing wealth and increasing happiness and the joylessness of the lives of individuals in prosperous economies.

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Chapter 12, Capabilities and Resources, begins with the well-known contrasts between capabilities (as what opportunities people actually have) and resourcist views. Sen then outlines four kinds of contingencies that figure importantly into the conversion of resources into the lives people can actually lead. These are: personal “heterogeneities,” differences in the physical environment, differences in the social climate, and differences in relational perspectives. Variations in the social climate refer to social structural differences—for example, the availability of publicly funded health care. Differences in “relational perspectives” refer to difference in social norms that may affect the need for resource expenditure to achieve desired goals; for example, in one society, the clothes required to command social respect may be far more expensive than in another. These types of contingencies may be interconnected; an example would be how a physical environment in which there is a great deal of snow interacts with mobility impairments in affecting how people can get around in society.Sen places particular emphasis on the interrelationship between disability and the opportunities provided by resources. He cites familiar data about the interrelationship between disability and poverty, and notes that much disability is preventable (e.g. disabilities that result from preventable infectious diseases such as polio or measles) and that this is a particularly important matter for social justice. Overall, Sen emphasizes both the conceptual and the normative importance of disability for theorizing about justice.

The remainder of the chapter is devoted to criticizing Rawlsian primary goods and Dworkinian hypothetical insurance markets. Sen commends Rawls for paying attention to “special needs,” but contends that the Rawlsian structure mistakenly downplays human difference. Pace Rawls, human variations in conversion capacities should not be seen as derivative matters for attention at the legislative stage. Rather, in Sen’s view they are ubiquitous to how social structures should be organized and analyzed. Sen recognizes that the capabilities approach will not be able to give a complete or even a linear ordering of social states, but contends that it directs us to make the important comparisons about justice.

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Chapter 11, the first chapter in a part of the book entitled « The Materials of Justice”, presents us with Sen’s well-known theory of capabilities. The main focus of the chapter is to emphasize that the capability approach is essentially a theory about human freedom, or more precisely, a theory about how freedom should be factored into the assessment of advantage and disadvantage. As against welfarist construals, Sen points out that we care not just that we achieve what we want, but also how we achieve what we want. Whether what we achieve results from our own agency, and whether we were able to exercise our agency on a range of valuable “functionings”, matters to an assessment of how well we do just as much, if not more, as does the result of our activity. We should be interested in “comprehensive outcomes”, not just “culmination outcomes”.

Two aspects of the capability approach are emphasized by Sen. First, the theory has an “informational focus”. As opposed to the approach developed by Martha Nussbaum, Sen’s just tells us what we should be concerned with in the measurement of advantage and disadvantage. He does not tell us what we should do with that information once we achieve it. Nor does he fill in the detail about what, precisely, we have reason to care about. The theory is thus neutral, at least on its face, as between different approaches to distributive justice – egalitarian, sufficientarian, prioritarian, and so on, as it is between various ways of filling out the detail of what we have reason to care about.

Second, the theory is pluralistic. There are a range of things that we have reason to value, that cannot be reduced to one metric. Bundles of desirable functionings will reflect this.

Sen deflects two worries about the capability approach. The first comes from welfarists like Arneson and Cohen who argue, on Sen’s way of putting their arguments, that we should be concerned with what people actually achieve, rather than with what they can achieve. Sen’s response to this is that the capability approach includes the welfarist approach because the functionings realized by an individual are part of the set of functionings that he could achieve. Making this broader set the index of his advantage provides us with better information about advantage because it includes freedom to achieve a range of bundles as an ingredient.

The other worry has to do with commensurability. How can we evaluate options given the irreducible pluralism of reasons to value that Sen affirms? Sen responds by stating, in line with much of the recent literature on evaluation, that incommensurability makes evaluation harder, but not impossible.

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In this chapter Sen explains in more detail the idea of a “realization-focused” approach to justice.  As discussed in earlier posts, Sen’s book is organized around a contrast between “transcendental institutionalism” and “realization-focused comparison” (p.7).  Earlier chapters dealt with the transcendental - comparative contrast.  This chapter explores the rule - realization contrast.  I will begin by reviewing what the Introduction (Ch.1) had to say about this issue.  Sen’s general point was that justice must be concerned with the lives people end up leading, the experiences and development of capacities that these lives involve, not just the institutions and rules within which people make choices.  He also made two more specific points about this realization-focused approach, one about liberty, the other about responsibility and agency, both of which can be framed as responses to objections.  

One natural objection to the focus on realized human capacities is that if just institutions are in place, then whatever happens as a result of the decisions people make within this framework (consistent with the preservation of this framework over time) is neither just nor unjust, since it is the product of voluntary choice under fair conditions.  According to this line of reasoning, any attempt to correct realization-outcomes given a just background structure would involve disrespect for people as autonomous agents.  I think Sen’s response to this objection would be that his focus on realization includes the freedom to choose, as a significant component of well-being (pp.18-19), and so doesn’t involve forcing people to flourish.

A second objection would be that the focus on outcomes ignores the important distinction between what happens and what one does.  The focus on outcomes assumes that the only relationship one can have to a value is to promote its maximal realization (by whatever actions lead to this result) rather than to honour or respect the value in one’s own conduct (e.g. by a commitment not to perform at least some morally objectionable actions no matter their expected result).  I think Sen’s response to this objection would be to assert that a focus on realizations permits assigning signficance to the processes through which states of affairs come about.  His realization-based approach considers the “comprehensive outcome,” not simply the “culmination outcome” (pp.22, 215-217).  As an example, Sen cites the real moral difference between people dying of starvation due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control and people being intentionally starved (p.23).  However, we can acknowledge the moral difference between me starving people and nature starving people while still taking a consequentialist view of morality.  Since the intentional starvation of others is so horrible, one could argue that we should do whatever we can to prevent its occurrence, even if - invent your own outlandish seminar scenario here - we have to starve some people in order to prevent a third party from starving many more people.  Sen would I think respond that a realization-focused approach can assign disvalue to the individual’s doing something bad (for each individual but only for that individual), over and above the disvalue of the bad thing happening.  

Chapter 10 uses Arjuna’s debate with Krishna to develop this idea of a comprehensive or inclusive realization-focused approach to justice.  Arjuna the great warrior is about to fight a major battle.  His cause is just, because his brother is legitimate heir to the throne, but their cousins the Kauravas have usurped the throne.  Arjuna’s duty, conventionally understood, is to lead his side to victory, as his adviser Krishna argues.  Yet Arjuna expresses doubts, because (a) a great many people will die, many of them guilty of nothing more than agreeing to support their friends and kin, and (b) Arjuna will himself have to kill members of his extended kin group, for some of whom he has real affection.  Sen emphasizes three aspects of Arjuna’s thinking.  First, he does not focus only on the suitability of his actions based on past events and existing rules or norms; he also considers what will actually happen to the world (p.212).  However, second, Arjuna is not concerned only with what happens but also with what he himself does (pp.213-4).  Third, in assessing what he himself does, the special relationships he has with specific others matter (pp.214).  Arjuna’s mode of reasoning is thus a good example of the sophisticated, inclusive, “informationally rich” (pp.216-7) consequentialism Sen is advocating.  Sen dislikes the label “consequentialist” (pp.217-8), but seems prepared to tolerate its use in a suitably general sense, as the notes on p.217 and p.210 suggest.  The p.17 note accepts Pettit’s definition of consequentialism, so long as the “consequences” of a decision are taken to include “agencies, processes, [and] relations”.  The p.210 note uses “consequentialism” as part of the definition of utilitarianism as welfarist, sum-ranking consequentialism.  Sen claims that some of the “deontological dilemmas” (p.219) generally presented to discredit narrow consequentialist reasoning (the “colourful counterexamples” from p.217) do not arise for a realization-focused approach that takes a broad view of the consequences that follow from a decision.  A broad view would include “the nature of the agencies involved, the processes used, and the relationships of people” (219).

I have one main concern about this chapter.  It seems to me that Sen’s defense of sophisticated or inclusive consequentialism succeeds only by watering down the distinctiveness of the view.  The claim that we should adopt a realization-focused approach to justice initially seems to be a significant thesis, since it appears to rule out some deontological views.  Yet the defense of the realization-focused approach against deontological objections involves expanding the notion of a “consequence” so that deontological intuitions can be formulated in terms of consequence-based modes of reasoning (e.g. by assigning extra disvalue to my torturing someone that is not for you a similar disvalue).  This move simply relocates the debate between consequentialists and deontologists.  Instead of disagreeing about the form moral reasoning should take, the two sides disagree about the extent to which the function to be maximized must or may include agent-relative components.  I’m not sure it illuminates the debate to cast it as a dispute about whether value functions should have this indexical aspect (or as a question about the exact weight to be assigned to the indexical aspect of value functions).  I can see how standard deontological views can be rendered in this way, so as to be consistent with an account of rational action as choosing the option that maximizes the value of the expected consequences.  The problem is that this broad definition of outcomes would make even the most rule-obsessed view count as a realization-focused theory.  On this account, there would be no purely institutional or rule-focused approaches to justice, but simply realization-focused approaches that place heavier weights, on “agencies, processes [and] relations.”  Presumably Sen wants to argue for an approach to justice that is realization-focused in the more specific sense of placing less weight on processes, etc., but this chapter does not provide an argument for such an approach.  No doubt the rest of the book will speak to this question.  What I suppose I would have liked to see in this chapter is an explanation of why it is preferable to understand the debate between deontology and consequentialism as a dispute about the weighting of the indexical elements of value functions, as opposed to a debate about the form moral reasoning should take.

This chapter continues in the vein of the preceding ones by using Rawls as a foil in order to lay out some general concepts that presumably will be developed in the second half of the book.  Accordingly, many of my concerns end up being somewhat duplicative with those raised in earlier comments: namely, that Sen has failed (so far) to really lay out a plan for thinking through justice in a rigorous fashion and that he has a strangely shallow reading of Rawls.Sen begins the chapter by referencing the arguments in chapter 8 about the possibility for rational reasons to take forms that different from the model of purely egoistic actors.  Given that there was no comment on that chapter people might like to take up those questions though I doubt many will find his claims there to be particularly controversial.

The goal of this chapter seems to be the need to reconcile the plurality of impartial reasons (the fact that two people might makes completely opposite choices, without either being irrational) with the need to desire to articulate some standard of objectivity.  In situations where multiple decisions may be rational, how may we still make judgments about what course of action is just? In Rawlsian terms, he is interested here in what it would be reasonable to ask of people, not just what they might rationally choose for themselves.  This is an important effort, and something that has been sorely missing from the book so far.  Unfortunately, I don’t think this chapter really takes us very far down that road.

I am skeptical for two reasons. First, I find the distinction between contractualism and contractarianism to be far less clear than he asserts.  To the extent that the two are dissimilar, I don’t see the value added by Scanlon’s approach that can’t be found elsewhere.  Second, even if we were to accept that significant differences exist between Rawls and Scanlon they seem to be more a matter of the sphere of emphasis.  Scanlon’s approach appears designed to produce judgments about what it would be just to morally ask of someone, while Rawls is more concerned with the question of how to build a politically viable and normatively acceptable basic structure.  Clearly, it is difficult if not impossible to fully detach moral and political philosophy but it would also be a mistake to treat them as synonymous.

On the first point, I find Sen’s characterization of the parties who have standing in the original position to be slightly off.  To me, this reflects a larger problem with the book, that Sen insists on treating the original position literally rather than accepting Rawls’ insistence that it should be understood only a device of representation.  If the original position is understood as a means of thinking through what sorts of exclusions or impositions we ought to be willing to allow, then I find it hard to distinguish this from contractualism.  Yes, it retains a commitment to “advantage-based reasoning” but it does so by insisting that justification must operate under the burden of ignorance about particular position.  To lump this in with other theories guided by a sense of rational advantage doesn’t seem all that helpful.  It is accurate, but not particularly illuminating.

At this point, I will admit to knowing very little about Scanlon’s work, so my statements here are based on Sen’s reading.  I’d welcome comments from those who are more familiar with contractualism, who might be able to elaborate on distinctions that are not clear to me in Sen’s text.  That said, Sen’s efforts to distinguish Scanlon’s approach promise more than they deliver.  To the extent that he does establish are differences, I find it difficult to see how they generate much purchase.

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Dear Public Reasoners,

As some of you may have noticed already, the comment for chapter 8 has not been posted yet.  I regret that I did not notice this myself until today (I have been preoccupied with some unexpected difficulties over the past month, which have made my visits to this blog rather sporadic).

In addition, the commentator for chapter 12 has had to withdraw from the group.  Please contact me if you are interested in stepping in and commenting on chapter 12 (which is scheduled to be posted on May 17).

My own view is that we should continue on schedule despite these developments.  Consequently, if possible, the comment on chapter 9 should be posted on Monday (April  26).  If the comment on chapter 8 is posted later, that should be fine.

Likewise, if no one can comment on chapter 12, then that simply will be one week in which there is, well, no comment.  (This would be somewhat unfortunate, I think, as the chapter looks quite interesting.  Normally I would be happy to write the comment myself, but my schedule in May is simply too hectic to make this commitment.)

I hope that this strategy strikes people as reasonable.  Such glitches are pretty much inevitable, I suspect, in a reading group like this, and I would regret if the project did not continue more-or-less intact because of them.  Please let me know if you think there are any problems with this approach.

Many thanks for your patience and participation.

Blain

In this chapter, which is the first of four in the “Forms of Reasoning” section, Sen develops what might be called, for lack of a better term, an ethical epistemology. That is, he aims for a middle way between the objectivity of what he calls “transcendental institutionalism” and which Nagel pilloried as requiring “the view from nowhere” and the subjectivism of normative judgment that (as Hume writes) “resides in the mind” and which is therefore thought to reduce to forms of cultural relativism about which philosophers can say little of interest. Of course, democratic theorists have likewise sought a third way through deliberation and intersubjectivity, but what Sen has in mind here is rather more abstract–it is a form of moral reasoning rather than a political procedure–and is related to the “open impartiality” discussed in ch. 6. Here, I shall attempt to unpack the role that positionality might play in developing a comparative rather than transcendental theory of justice. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are two questions that strike me as worth thinking about.

Say you wanted to teach a liberal arts-style freshman seminar that introduced students to the idea of reflecting on politics and society, but you didn’t want to turn it into yet another Applied Ethics or Introduction to Political Philosophy class that crammed in all the essential philosophical problems and texts: Capital Punishment, the Duty to Obey the Law, Abortion, Euthanasia, etc., on the one hand, and Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Mill, etc., on the other. Instead, you’d much rather just use plain old essays — well-crafted, accessible, insightful, evocative, memorable essays — written by people who may or may not be academics or part of the academic tradition.

The kind of essay I’m thinking of would be one that didn’t so much need to be explained as experienced, that presents a viewpoint that seizes your imagination in some way, rather than an argument or conceptual apparatus that needs to be taken apart, dusted a little by a qualified technician, and then put back together in sound working order. These would be essays that have a force that can’t really be conveyed to someone who has not read them, and that become part of the background framework of your way of thinking about the political and social world and the stuff in it that matters. They would ideally be long enough to be a substantial read, worth assigning as a text, but not too long to be a task that requires the threat of academic sanctions to be completed. Above all, they must not be difficult to read or boring to think about. They should be the sort of thing people mean when they talk about the art of the essay.

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Hello all,

I’ve just edited a textbook on “Ethics and World Politics” for Oxford University Press, which may be of interest to those teaching global justice or cognate areas.

The book is aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in political theory/philosophy and international relations. It aims to cover a broad range of issues and approaches, and it is accompanied by a website with assorted pedagogical features (lecture powerpoints, glossary, etc.).

The OUP UK webpage for the volume is here. The OUP US webpage is here.

I hope it proves useful for those teaching the subject,

Best wishes,

Duncan Bell

Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge

In this chapter Sen presents a distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ impartiality. He argues that closed impartiality suffers from a number of significant limitations which ought to lead us to favour open impartiality. In this post I will briefly summarize the main claims Sen makes (sect. 1), before offering a few of my own comments (sects. 2-3).

1.
Sen offers Adam Smith’s device of the impartial spectator as an exemplar of what he calls open impartiality. Smith encourages us to imagine our conduct as we think it would be seen by some impartial and fair observer. A fair and impartial observer, Sen suggests, might require considering ‘the judgements that would be made by disinterested people from other societies’ (p. 125). Sen associates closed impartiality with Rawls’s device of the original position, where the aim is to evaluate rules and institutions from the point of view of each person who would be bound by them (suitably constrained behind the veil of ignorance). On this view of impartiality the perspective of outsiders (i.e. those not bound the rules and institutions) is not considered relevant.
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In this chapter, Sen weaves together three different lines of thought: Wollstonecraft’s critique of Burke, impartiality as a minimalist basis for evaluative objectivity, and the role of convention in the relations among facts and values.

1. Sen identifies two features of objectivity. First, our evaluative language must give us the ability to communicate our beliefs to one another, and second, those beliefs must involve commitment to sufficiently overlapping standards to allow us to debate their correctness. But, as Wittgenstein learned from Gramsci and Sraffa, the common ground required for such communication and engagement is always dependent upon linguistic and social conventions.

Out of this intersection of objectivity and convention, Sen identifies a “dual task” for social reformers. They must communicate using language, imagery, and rules grounded in existing social practice and values. But within those confines, they must find the critical distance needed to advocate change.

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This chapter tells us more about Sen’s understanding of the ‘transcendental’/comparative distinction. I’m not going to cover all (or even most) of the points he raises in this chapter. Instead, I want to raise a question that builds on a few comments about justification from the discussion of the Introduction (e.g., Cynthia #2, Colin #5/7, Charles #15, David W. #16, Blain #17, Aaron #18). Here is my question: Is Sen’s theory of justice ‘political in the wrong way’? I’m going to suggest that (i) Sen seems to be saying ‘yes’, (ii) he ought to say ‘no’, and (iii) if he says ‘no’, the difference between his approach and ‘transcendental’ ones is greatly diminished (or perhaps removed).

What does Rawls mean by ‘political in the wrong way’? In Part V of the Restatement, he says that political liberalism seeks a kind of consensus that is different from ‘consensus politics’. The latter aims to identify a particular policy that can gain sufficient political support in a particular time and place, without seeking agreement concerning the justification of the policy (and allowing the balance of power between various groups to influence the decision). For example, one might hope to reach agreement on the ‘diagnosis’ that X is unjust, without first (or ever) identifying why X is unjust. Read the rest of this entry »

Sen’s purpose in this comparatively short chapter seems to be to draw a distinction between principles of justice that focus on institutions and those that focus on behaviour and so on consequences, and then condemn “institutionally fundamentalist” principles for failing to take account of what actually happens. This distinction is supposed to be illuminated or perhaps even typified by a contrast Sen begins the chapter with, between the policies of two figures from Indian history, Ashoka and Kautilya. Ashoka, having seen at firsthand the horrors of coercion and violence during a campaign to extend his empire, apparently renounced the normal means of exercising power and instead exhorted his subjects to behave virtuously in a way that Sen reads as showing that he equated moral knowledge and moral motivation in a rather simplistic way. Indeed, as Sen notes, part of the reason that the political order did not totally collapse once Ashoka gave up on enforcing his will through force seems to have been that the administrative reforms implemented by his grandfather’s advisor, Kautilya, had a life of their own. The idea appears to be that focussing on institutions exhibits Ashoka’s utopian idealism about the possibility of spontaneous moral reform whereas focussing on behaviour and its consequences is more like Kautilya’s pragmatic acceptance of human fallibility.

This contrast though, is a different one from the one between institutions and consequences as the relevant units of moral assessment. Since, as Sen makes clear, Kautilya’s reforms were institutional reforms, it could hardly be the same one. The reason for this is that what one thinks are the relevant units of moral assessment and how one thinks about the possibilities for human motivation are two, perhaps related, but nonetheless clearly distinct questions. Blain I think has already mentioned that Sen’s reading of Rawls in this kind of area may not be entirely sympathetic, but there seem to me other cases where this claim borders on the bizarre. Hobbes, for example, is in Sen’s typology an institutionally-focused theorist, as his focus on the figure of the Sovereign presumably justifies. Yet Hobbes is clearly not of the view that human moral motivation can be improved by moral education in anything like the way that Sen presents Ashoka as being. A focus on institutions rather than behaviour or consequences in stating principles of justice may be for a number of reasons. One is that institutions provide and in a certain sense are stable patterns of coordinated behaviour enforced through sanctions, and so can constrain human behaviour in ways that ensure that it remains within at least an acceptable set of outcomes. This, for example, seems to be Hobbes’ reasoning. Not only does that depend on views of human behaviour that Sen at least implies are anathema to institutionally-focussed theorists and so demonstrate the failure of his attempt to align views of human behaviour with the focus of principles of justice, but it also casts doubt on the way that Sen wants to exclude institutional theorists from having a concern with consequences.

This is, on Sen’s account, not a symmetrical exclusion. Theories which focus on realization may take account of the ways in which the consequences they are supposed to be focussing on are produced; the means to these ends can be incorporated into their assessment. The effect of this definition is to make the struggle that institutionally-focussed theories face more difficult by allowing their opponents access to all the resources they can draw on without any parallel expansion of the tools they can make use of. The way Hobbes, though, thinks about the value of institutions is clearly dependent on their consequences. It is not clear that the consequences have any existence independent of the institutions - part of Hobbes’ case is clearly that the only way out of the State of Nature is through a near-absolute sovereign - but neither is it as if the institutions have virtues independent of the production of those consequences.

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As its title suggests, this chapter is a critical discussion of Rawls’s political philosophy.  However, the chapter is not Sen’s only critical treatment of Rawls’s ideas in the book: some criticisms noted in the ‘Introduction’ are not developed here but elsewhere, and some criticisms mentioned here are developed further later in the book.  Moreover, the chapter is not entirely critical: Sen begins by recounting his long friendship with Rawls, and about halfway through the chapter Sen identifies seven ‘positive lessons’ from Rawls’s political philosophy.  Nonetheless, the bulk of the chapter is critical of Rawls’s views.

The following three criticisms especially struck me as I was reading the chapter:

1. Sen’s claim that if Rawls acknowledges that unanimity on a conception of justice cannot be achieved, then it follows that Rawls’s entire theory of justice is ‘devastated.’
2. Sen’s claim that Rawls simply assumes that citizens will “spontaneously do what they agreed to do in the original position” (61).
3. Sen’s worry that ‘parochial beliefs’ might adversely affect the selection of principles of justice by the parties within the original position.

I found all three criticisms unconvincing.

1.

Sen restates his pluralism with respect to conceptions of justice: “There are genuinely plural, and sometimes conflicting, general concerns that bear on our understanding of justice” (56-7).  Consequently, he does not think that rational agents invariably will converge on a unique set of principles of justice within the original position.  Sen goes on to note that Rawls, in his later writings, acknowledges that alternative conceptions of justice might be selected by the parties in the original position.

(The picture is actually more complicated than Sen presents.  Not only does Rawls acknowledge that the original position device does not necessitate the selection of the two principles of justice as fairness, given the many different considerations to which the parties might appeal in their deliberations [JF, 133-4], he also claims that the original position device itself is only one way to satisfy the ‘criterion of reciprocity,’ and that other liberal theories might employ different justificatory strategies for arriving at principles of justice that satisfy the criterion of reciprocity [PL, xlviii-xlix].)

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The main point of this chapter is to defend a conception of objectivity in our normative thinking about justice.  Against critics of the ‘Enlightenment tradition,’ Sen defends the idea that we should understand reason as the “ultimate arbitrator of ethical beliefs.”  This is not because “reasoned scrutiny” can provide us with “any sure-fire way of getting things exactly right,” but rather because ethical thinking requires us to be “as objective as we reasonably can,” and reason is our only reliable way of doing this (p. 39).  This role for reason is compatible, Sen points out, with recognizing the dangers of ‘overselling reason,’ or in being overconfident in the conclusions of our own reasoning.  Sen also makes the point that our emotions pose no threat to, and should not be understood as hostile towards, our capacity for reason, despite the fact that historically many Enlightenment thinkers may have ignored or downplayed the cognitive role of the emotions (here Sen mentions, unsurprisingly, Smith and Hume as important exceptions).  Nonetheless, “the need for reasoned scrutiny of psychological attitudes does not disappear even after the power of emotions is recognized” (p. 50).  These general claims all strike me as correct and not especially controversial.

Sen also sketches some of the main elements of his account of ‘ethical objectivity’ in this chapter.  One element is Adam Smith’s device of the ‘impartial spectator.’  Another is Rawlsian public reason.  Public reason provides a ‘public framework of thought’ by means of which arguments can be made in a transparent and mutually justifiable way.  Despite the differences amongst the different accounts of ethical objectivity mentioned in this chapter, Sen notes that “there is an essential similarity in their respective approaches to objectivity to the extent that objectivity is linked…by each of them to the ability to survive challenges from informed scrutiny coming from diverse quarters.”  Despite appropriating Rawlsian public reason to his account of ethical objectivity, though, Sen asserts that “the principles that survive such scrutiny need not be a unique set,” (p.45) and that this marks a significant difference between his position and Rawls’s.  (I don’t think that this is a fair interpretation of Rawls’s position in his later writings, but will postpone this discussion until next week.)

One potentially controversial claim is Sen’s assertion that Rawls’s and Habermas’s respective approaches to public justification ultimately do not differ much.  “If people are capable of being reasonable in taking note of other people’s points of view and in welcoming information,” Sen writes, “then the gap between the two approaches would tend to be not necessarily momentous” (p. 43).  I think that Sen is correct here (at least I think I do – I found his discussion in this section at times to be somewhat opaque), but then I haven’t read Habermas in years.  I’d be curious to know what anyone better informed of Habermas’s criticisms of Rawls thinks.

Sen makes another comment that some readers of a Kantian persuasion might find debateable.  He states: “Since reasoned support can hardly be in itself a value-giving quality, we have to ask: why, precisely, is reasoned support so critical?” (Pp. 39-40.)  I suspect that some Kantians (especially those influenced by Korsgaard’s interpretation of Kant’s theory of value) would disagree.  (Although the comment by Sen is so brief, perhaps I am reading too much into it?)

I found Sen’s comment on Rawls’s idea of ‘reasonable persons’ on the bottom of page 43 somewhat puzzling.  After noting his overall sympathy with the idea of Rawlsian public reason, he writes: “I will not make a big distinction between those whom Rawls categorizes as ‘reasonable persons’ and other human beings… I have tried to argue elsewhere that, by and large, all of us are capable of being reasonable” (p. 43).  He then goes on to remark that his own view is instead similar to Rawls’s idea of ‘free and equal citizens,’ according to which all persons have ‘two moral powers’ (a capacity for a sense of justice, and a capacity to form, revise, and pursue a conception of the good).

Sen does not seem to appreciate that Rawls’s idea of ‘reasonable persons’ is a very specific one in political liberalism, and one related directly to the idea of citizens as ‘free and equal.’  The first feature of reasonable persons is that they acknowledge the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ (i.e., they manifest a “willingness to recognize the burdens of judgement and to accept their consequences for the use of public reason in directing the legitimate exercise of political power” [PL, p. 54]).  The second feature of reasonable persons is that they hold the ‘criterion of reciprocity’ to be a prescriptive norm for the public political relations of citizens (“reasonable persons are ready to propose, or to acknowledge when proposed by others, the principles needed to specify what can be seen by all as fair terms of cooperation” [JaF, pp. 6-7]).  Finally, reasonable persons honour these principles, even at some cost to their own interests.  These features of reasonable persons correspond to citizens’ capacity for a sense of justice, just as the rationality of persons corresponds to citizens’ capacity for a conception of the good.  So the idea of ‘free and equal citizens’ with ‘two moral powers’ is not wholly distinct from the idea of persons understood as ‘rational and reasonable’ in Rawlsian political liberalism.  Moreover, I see nothing in Rawls’s conception of ‘reasonable persons’ that rules out the possibility that ‘all of us’ are capable of being ‘reasonable’ in the relevant sense.

This is obviously a relatively minor criticism.  However, I think that Sen’s comments here are indicative of a problem that becomes more marked in the next chapter, namely, an apparent failure on the part of Sen to address adequately key features of Rawlsian political liberalism.  This problem is well illustrated, I think, by the very label ‘transcendental institutionalism.’  I’ll have more to say about this next week.

Hi All,
This is the first post to kick off the reading group on Sen’s new book The Idea of Justice. I want to thank Blain for organizing this and I look forward to participating in it.

I have to admit it is with much anticipation that I begin to read Sen’s book. A few years ago I heard him give this talk which outlined the basics of the arguments he advances in the book. His project struck me as one that I (as a critic of ideal theory) would be very sympathetic with and I hope this book can helpfully advance the methodological debates the discipline is now engaged in. So I have high hopes for this book and look forward to reading it together with the group.

OK, so down to the business at hand. Keeping Blain’s advice about word count (I’m a bit over, sorry!) in mind, I thought I would begin by drawing attention to a crucial passage in the Preface, and then link that with a few of the central issues that follow in the Introduction itself (issues which will, I suspect, play an important role in the overall argument of the book).

In the Preface Sen explicitly states that the theory of justice he seeks to advance “aims to clarify how we can proceed to address questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice, rather than to offer resolutions of questions about the nature of perfect justice” (ix).

The issue of what we want a theory of justice to deliver is arguably one of the most interesting, and hotly debated, topics in the field today. Some obvious examples that immediately come to my mind are David Schmidtz’s analogy between theories and maps in The Elements of Justice, Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of luck egalitarianism, and G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality where he distinguishes principles of regulation from principles of justice and maintains that the latter are “fact-free”.

The contrast between Cohen’s position and Sen’s is very stark and worth considering. The vision of political philosophy Sen is invoking, at least in this early chapter of The Idea of Justice, is one primarily concerned with the question “How should be done?”. Whereas for Cohen the primary concern of the philosopher is: “what we should think, even when what we should think makes no practical difference”. I myself come down on the side of Sen on this issue. Those partial to Cohen’s approach might maintain that we ought to privilege deliberating about perfect justice for it is only once we comprehend the ideal that we can properly undertake the practical task of trying to realize justice in the “real world”. Sen notes that he will address this kind of challenge in Chapter 4, so I look forward to seeing how he addresses that concern.

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I just wanted to announce the publication of my book with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty.

It’s something of an unusual book for philosophers, because it’s as much a genuine history (and economics, psychology, law, and sociology) book as it is a philosophy book. I’d summarize our motivation for the project as follows: Dave and I note that historically, philosophers and regular people have used the word “liberty” to refer to a wide range of related things. When philosophers debate what the word “liberty” refers to, or which kind of liberty is most important, they often have a background assumption that liberty, whatever that is, is to be promoted by government in a particular way. But that’s not a good assumption. What role government, or any institution, ought to play in promoting a particular kind of liberty is determined not by conceptual analysis, but by investigating (empirically) what government and other institutions are likely to accomplish. What value any kind of liberty has is also for the most part contingent—we need to see what having certain kinds of liberties does to people, and what happens to people when those liberties are absent. Again, this goes beyond philosophy and requires empirical work. Also, what relationship different kinds of liberty with one another requires empirical work. For instance, while people might debate whether negative or positive liberty is more important, we instead note that empirically, it looks like protecting negative liberty has a long and non-accidental historical track record of promoting positive liberty.

Here’s the table of contents:

Introduction: Conceptions of Freedom.

1. A Prehistory of Liberty: Forty Thousand Years Ago.

2. The Rule of Law: AD 1075.

3. Religious Freedom: 1517.

4. Freedom of Commerce: 1776.

5. Civil Liberty: 1954.

6. Psychological Freedom, the Last Frontier: 1963.

Speaking of non-ideal theory (or ideal theory in less than ideal contexts)… I am curious to hear whether my fellow public reasoners believe that the recent US Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance should have any impact on our work as political philosophers.  To be clear, I don’t mean to start a debate over whether or not the Supreme Court ruled correctly, or whether campaign donations are speech, or even whether corporations are people who have rights like you and me (though I do have opinions on such matters).  Instead, I want to consider whether the American legal landscape should guide our work on theories justice or democracy.

Here’s what I have in mind. Liberal political thought, to this point, has largely ignored a set of concerns that were central to many Labor movements, which might be called concerns over “workplace democracy” or what is sometimes called “democratic corporatism.”  With some notable exceptions (Pateman, Gould, Mansbridge), frequently offered by those operating in a Marxist framework, political philosophers have instead focused on issues of distribution or issues of legitimacy in terms of public reasons or political dialogue.  Relatively little attention has been paid to whether a society with profound inequalities in wealth, where corporations are dominant players in the political landscape, can be meaningfully democratic. There are a number of reasons for this omission, I think, including the assumptions that (1) if distribution problems are taken care of the rest will take care of itself or (2) the ideal society will have stringent campaign finance laws, public election financing, or some other way of insulating the political sphere from the economic sphere.  Given the economic and, following the Supreme Court Ruling, political-legal realities in the US for the indefinite future, I no longer believe that such assumptions will do.

Instead, I believe that if corporations are going to be dominant players in the political landscape for the indefnite future, more work needs to be done to consider whether such organizations need to be more democratic.  Are CEOs or Boards of Directors the “free speakers” for corporations, at liberty to use corporate money to influence election outcomes and policy debates?  Do campaign contributions require the approval of the majority of shareholders?  Do they require the approval of employees? There are of course reasons to favor discretionary decision making by executives - taking a vote for all decisions may leave firms unable to respond efficiently to market demands. Nonetheless, there are also substantial reasons to provide protections for workers or stockholders from what may be arbitrary or self-servingly indefensible decisions made by a board of directors. Also, the need for such rapid, discretionary decision-making with regard to political contributions is far from clear.  Treating corporations, in theory or in practice, as individuals with a right to free speech completely ignores these issues.

Later in his career Rawls himself more clearly distinguishes a property-owning democracy from the idea of a welfare state. A recent symposium in the Journal of Social Philosophy considers the implications of this distinction, in a way that is frequently relevant to the issue at hand. Given Citizens v. FEC, however, I believe that more work on the moral and political implications of corporate involvement in contemporary politics, and the ways in which workplace democracy can further democratic equality without unduly sacrificing market competitiveness, is necessary.  It is no longer plausible (if it ever was) in the American context, to believe that campaign finance law will insulate the political sphere from the economic sphere, such that inequalities in one need not entail inequalities in the other.

Any thoughts?

Many of you have probably seen Simmons’ article just out in PPA on ideal and non-ideal theory. Simmons defends Rawls’ account of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and his paper is a must read. That said, I have been ruminating over a slightly different take on the debate over the nature of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and so thought I’d throw an idea out there.

Drawing on John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice many have suggested that the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is akin to the full/partial compliance distinction. In creating his ideal theory, Rawls assumes that people will comply (almost) perfectly with the requirements of justice. He then uses his original position argument to conclude that his first principle of justice should have priority over his second. Next, Rawls weakens his ideal theory assumptions, adding the constraint that people may not abide by the requirements of justice. He concludes that we should only embrace his general conception of justice in non-ideal theory.

Unfortunately, the canonical examples of ideal and non-ideal theories cannot be fully characterized as full and partial compliance theories respectively. As Simmons and others note, even Rawls says ideal theory requires more than perfect compliance. In creating his ideal theory he assumes, for instance, that the circumstances do not prevent justice from being secured. Furthermore, others have more recently provided ideal and non-ideal theories that are not full and partial compliance theories (respectively). The main thing that distinguishes Allen Buchanan’s and Michael Blake’s non-ideal theories from their ideal theories, for instance, is that their non-ideal theories assume that there will be states and consider what we should do given that we are confined to a statist system. Similarly, the main thing that distinguishes Ronald Dworkin’s non-ideal theory from his ideal theory is that he assumes that people only have different talents and disabilities in his ideal theory. Blake’s, Buchanan’s, and Dworkin’s ideal theories do not require perfect compliance. Assuming that there is something to the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and these authors are not just using the terms in completely different ways, the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction cannot just be the full/partial compliance distinction.

Reflecting on the many ways people seem to use the terms, one might despair at the thought of trying to unify such disparate ideal and non-ideal theories. In the draft of his book manuscript Michael Blake suggests, for instance, that the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is not that useful because it can mean many different things. He implores others to be careful to explain just what assumptions they are making in advancing any theory. Perhaps this is part of what drives Simmons and others to argue for one or another of these ways of thinking about the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction.

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According to the BBC, in the latest twist in l’affaire du foulard/voile, a French parliamentary committee has recommended a ban on women wearing Islamic face veils in public [Correction: the proposal applies to public facilities, such as hospitals and mass transit, and not walking about the street]. The reasoning behind the report seems to be that face veils are contrary to the values of the republic, as symbols of women’s repression and extremist fundamentalism.

The proposal strikes me as a very bad idea in a number of ways. I don’t see how the law liberates women from whatever social pressure there exists to wear a veil. Will wearing a balaclava in public be illegal too? If not, then won’t the law just force a change of attire? Nussbaum has some discussion of this general issue in her Liberty of Conscience, pp. 346-53, invoking the ability of Chicagoans (and the Dutch, and presumably the French) to conduct normal social interactions with their faces covered in winter.

What if feminists who believe that make-up is just a manifestation of the objectification of women in patriarchy, and hence symbolic of repression and degradation, are right? Is there a way to support the veil ban, but not think that this claim about make-up would justify a make-up ban?* How about t-shirts with sexist imagery and messages? Quite apart from dress codes, we can recognise prostitution as degrading, and hence contrary to the values of an egalitarian republic, without thinking it should be illegal, primarily because making it illegal may very well just make the lives of those women, so degraded, even worse.

So, a question: can anything be said in support of this proposal (from ideally a feminist perspective), that does not run into these and other problems?

*[I should add I think having to wear a burqa is worse than feeling compelled to wear make-up.]

So, another query: Should the US defend Google?  Why or why not?US to protest formally to China over Google ‘attacks’

Dear all,

I post here in pdf format a paper of mine in which I argue, well, that Rawls’s theory of justice implies the justification of slavery and genocide and is therefore an abysmal failure as far as reflective equilibrium is concerned. Comments are highly welcome

All the best, Uwe  Unsavory Implications of A Theory of Justice and The Law of Peoples

A question: do people think international humanitarian intervention (or any international intervention, for that matter; perhaps even any intervention at all) has to be coercive?  That is, as a conceptual issue, is intervention necessarily coercive?

Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Personality types as elements of the anthroposystem

The anthroposystem and the social system are two aspects of the same developed human society. Both of them represent humankind as a single whole and both of them are organized and structured. But their structural and organizational elements, and consequently the objects of their attention, are different. The social system’s constructive elements are social institutions, each performing their specific functions of maintaining and regulating economic, political, legal, moral and other relations. The anthroposystem’s “cells”, the “points of references”, are informal social-psychological groups of personality types. The anthroposystem and social system are closely tangled, so these two systems influence each other, but at the same time they still remain relatively independent.

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Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 1:

Preface

Creation of the concept of the social system

The social system in Marxist philosophy

Post-Marxist concepts of the social systems

Testing the social system theories

Into the fabric of social institutes

The basic personality types

Psychopath (sociopath)

Authoritarian personality

Machiavellian personality

“Technocratic”, “practical” or “hoarding” personality

Amiable, friendly or agreeable personality

Altruistic personality

Creative personality

Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Preface

It has always made me feel uneasy reading or hearing someone trying to explain people’s inhumane acts, and even brutish violence, by recourse to the concept of “human nature”. On this explanation, there are really only two possibilities: either one is a criminal (or at least a potential criminal) or one is simply not a human being. At the same time, I still find it bewildering that our primeval ancestors, the illiterate people of the stone and bronze ages (and our contemporaries, the Aborigines of Australia and the Americas), while poorly versed in the theory of nature’s laws, knew and expressed in their everyday lives closer kinship with nature than do even the most educated of us today. Their attitude to each and every part of nature was more humane and respectful than that of the majority of our contemporaries, despite the fact that these people burned trees for fire and killed animals for food. So what has happened to modern people, to society? Does civilization, indeed, spoil us? Why have we been breaking our contracts or mutual understanding with the animate natural world? What has been pitting us against each other and why do we degrade and eliminate other people? Is it true that mankind is a malignant tumor of the body that is earth? Are we, human beings, indeed evil from our very childhood? And who and what exactly are ‘we’?

These are the questions that the following discussion is concerned with.

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Jacob Levy has put up a link to the podcasts from the recent memorial colloquium on Jerry Cohen’s life and work organised by the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique at Montreal. The presentations are from Daniel Weinstock, William Clare Roberts, Joseph Carens, Jurgen De Wispelaere, and Jacob Levy.

PBS‘ Frontline this week aired an interesting episode on the credit card industry, which began with a discussion of some of the controversial practices initiated by Providian and soon adopted by the bulk of its competitors. I think the episode raises some interesting philosophical questions about the nature and moral force (to borrow Alan Wertheimer’s term) of exploitation.

For instance, one of the practices Providian is said to have developed involved substituting what they called “stealth pricing” for explicit annual fees. Instead of charging all its customers a flat fee of, say, $50 per year, Providian offered cards with zero annual fee but with steep penalties for late payments, going over your credit limit, etc. To many customers, Providian’s cards thus appeared to be free. But Providian knew that many of its customers - especially the low-income, high credit-risk customers it was targeting - would wind up paying much more in penalties than they would have with a flat annual fee, even if most customers (wrongly) believed the opposite to be true.

So, at least at first glance, it looks like Providian was exploiting several kinds of vulnerability on the part of these customers.  First, the customers were vulnerable insofar as they were likely to do the things that would incur penalties. And secondly, they were vulnerable insofar as they tended to underestimate the extent to which they would do this, and hence underestimate the true cost of the cards Providian was offering. Providian took advantage of these vulnerabilities to enhance its own profit (which, at its peak according to the documentary, were around $1 billion per year).

Is this a case of wrongful exploitation? It might be, but the story raises a few questions in my mind.

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Continuum Ethics
A series of books exploring key topics in contemporary ethics and moral philosophy.

Continuum Ethics presents a series of books that will bridge the gap between new research work and undergraduate textbooks. They will provide close examination of key concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Aimed largely at upper-level undergraduates and research students, they will also appeal to researchers in the field. Authors will be expected to combine philosophical sophistication with an accessible style that can engage the educated reader.
Each volume will introduce its subject within the context of recent developments in moral philosophy. Each book will cover the major thinkers and their key ideas, outline questions raised within the area of concern, and explore possible answers to those questions. Authors will be encouraged to argue for a particular view or views and each volume will present an original contribution to the field. Each book will explore - either throughout the text or in the final chapter(s) - the future of the topic in contemporary ethics and other research areas.

The authors of individual volumes will be experienced teachers of the subject, based in respected departments and will possess a good, accessible written style. Each volume will also feature a brief preface from the series editor.

The series will benefit from a coherent series look, a striking design and effective marketing.
Possible Topics:

Duty
Error Theory
Expressivism
Freedom and Morality
Global Justice
Just War
Moral Knowledge
Moral Motivation
Moral Narrative and Personality
Moral Psychology and Character
Moral Realism
Punishment
Reasons and Rationality
Rights
Utility
Virtue

Anyone interested in contributing to this series should contact the series editors:

Thom Brooks (Newcastle) (t.brooks@newcastle.ac.uk)

Simon Kirchin (Kent) (S.T.Kirchin@kent.ac.uk)

Announcing two new book series with Edinburgh University Press:

STUDIES IN GLOBAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Series Editor: Thom Brooks

“Global justice and human rights” is perhaps the hottest topic today. Studies in Global Justice and Human Rights is a new book series published by Edinburgh University Press. The series aims to publish groundbreaking work in this increasingly popular field. This series will publish leading monographs and edited collections on key topics in the area of global justice and human rights that will be of broad interest to theorists working in politics, international relations, philosophy, and related disciplines.

Topics of particular importance are democracy, global gender justice, global justice, global poverty, human rights, international environmental justice, and just war theory amongst others. This series aspires to publish the leading work in this area with broad interdisciplinary appeal.

TEXTBOOKS IN GLOBAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Series Editor: Thom Brooks

“Global justice and human rights” is perhaps the hottest topic today. Textbooks in Global Justice and Human Rights is a new book series published by Edinburgh University Press. The series aims to publish groundbreaking work in this increasingly popular field. This series will publish leading introductory textbooks on key topics in the area of global justice and human rights that will be of broad interest to both undergraduate and graduate students in politics, international relations, philosophy, and related disciplines.

We are particularly interested in publishing work in the fields of

• global justice
• human rights
• women and global justice
• global justice and global poverty
• international environmental philosophy

This series aspires to publish the leading textbooks in this area with broad interdisciplinary appeal.

Expressions of interest for BOTH series are most welcome and should be directed to the series editor, Thom Brooks (email: t.brooks@newcastle.ac.uk).

Edinburgh University Press website: http://www.eupjournals.com/
Global Justice and Human Rights Group: http://www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/glbljst/Glbjst.aspx

Via an email from CUP:

Columbia University Press is pleased to announce the publication of Sibyl Schwarzenbach’s On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State.

In this innovative new work Schwarzenbach argues that women have performed the vast majority of often unpaid friendship labor for centuries. Embodying the freedom, equality, and ideals of the Constitution, civic friendship emerges as a necessary condition for genuine justice. Through a critical examination of social and political relationships from ancient times to today, Sibyl Schwarzenbach develops a truly innovative, feminist theory of the democratic state.

You can find out more about the book here.

James P. Sterba at the University of Notre Dame praises the text:
“Sibyl Schwarzenbach’s attempt to show the importance of women’s experiences and feminist theory for the justification of the democratic state is the most successful I have seen. Its achievement should be widely recognized and commented upon by feminist political philosophers and, hopefully, by political philosophers more generally, attracting as much attention as Susan Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family.”

“Rawlsian Liberalism in Context(s)”

Date: February 26-27, 2010
Place:Toyota Auditorium, Baker Center for Public Policy, University of Tennessee

Over a period of fifty years, John Rawls developed and gave voice to the most powerful and systematic moral theory of constitutional liberal democracy since John Stuart Mill’s work a century earlier.  The recent publication of Rawls’s undergraduate thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith,” has encouraged a profitable re-reading of his political philosophy in the context and light of his personal and scholarly engagement with theological ethics and political theology in general and Christianity in particular.  Building on this development, “Rawlsian Liberalism in Context(s)” aims to shed further light on Rawls’s work by situating it within multiple disciplinary contexts.  Symposium speakers will address the relationships between Rawls’s thought and 20th century developments in economics and political economy, in analytic philosophy, in American pragmatist thought, in normative theorizing of American foreign policy and international relations, and in theological ethics and political theology.  Symposium speakers, each an expert on Rawls’s work, include:

• Jerry Gaus, James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona.
• Richard Miller, Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University.
• David Reidy, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Tennessee.
• Robert Talisse, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, Vanderbilt University.
• Paul Weithman, Professor of Philosophy, Notre Dame University.

Sessions are free and open to the public.  Schedule details will be available late fall 2009.  For further information, please contact David Reidy, Philosophy, University of Tennessee, dreidy [at] utk.edu or 865.974.7210.

The symposium is sponsored by the Office of Research, the School of Law, the Baker Center for Public Policy, the departments of Philosophy and Political Science, and the American Studies progam, all at the University of Tennessee.

A quick interruption to let PRers know that my book Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge University Press)  has just come out. Here are few endorsements from the back cover:

‘Talisse sees profound moral and religious conflict in our political life that threatens democracy, and makes impossible effective defenses by appeal to shared values. He advances an important alternative: our common commitment to sound beliefs should lead us all to endorse democratic politics. This is a fine work of public philosophy in the tradition of J. S. Mill and John Dewey.’ –Gerald Gaus, University of Arizona

‘Robert Talisse has provided us with a timely, original, and unapologetic defense of constitutional democracy. It is, he says, the only form of government suited to persons who are already committed in their everyday lives to giving reasons for their beliefs. Artfully blending careful philosophical analysis with contemporary illustrations and accessible prose, Democracy and Moral Conflict makes an authentically democratic and powerfully reasoned case for democracy.’ –John C. P. Goldberg, Harvard University

‘Robert Talisse argues that democracy comes closer than any other political system to instantiating the norms of the folk epistemology which all citizens share. Insofar as we care about the truth, we have a reason to remain committed to democracy, even when the stakes are highest. An engaging read, this book makes an important contribution to the growing discussion of democracy’s epistemic virtues.‘ –David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee

The Stanford political science department, in conjunction with the Ethics in Society Center and other campus programs, is hosting a special event on Friday, October 16 at 4pm.  It is open to the public.

The occasion is the release of a new edited book on the work of our late colleague Susan Moller Okin, Toward a Humanist Justice.

The event will also feature some brief remarks by Kavita Ramdas, the president of the Global Fund for Women, an organization Susan worked with and to which go all proceeds from the sale of the book.

Please feel free to share this invitation with others.

Okin Book Event

Some of you may be familiar with Richard Tuck’s recent book Free Riding. It’s a fascinating and valuable work, but I think much of the central argument, especially about the rationality of voting, is deeply flawed. Anyways, here’s a link to my short critical note on Tuck at JESP: Tuck on the Rationality of Voting: A Critical Note.

Would anyone here would be interested in taking part in a reading group on Amartya Sen’s new book, The Idea of Justice?  If so, I would be interested in starting it up in January 2010.