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Amartya Sen on his idea of justice out of london

— FILE PHOTO: S.R. RAGHUNATHAN

AMARTYA SEN: Arguing for a new way of looking at justice.

For those who might like to test their sense of justice, here’s a little quiz that Amartya Sen tried on his audience at the London Literature Festival the other day and had them struggling until he came to their rescue with, well, a sort of an answer. He used it to illustrate his alternative approach to mainstream theories of justice that he challenges in his new book The Idea of Justice published this month.

Three children — Anne, Bob and Carla — are quarrelling over a flute: Anne claims the flute on the ground that she is the only one of the three who knows how to play it; Bob demands it on the basis that he is so poor that — unlike others — he has no other toys to play with and it would therefore mean a lot to him if the flute were given to him; and Carla says that it belongs to her because she has made it with her own labour.

The important thing to note here is that none of the claimants questions their rival’s argument but claims that his or hers is the most persuasive. So, who deserves the flute?

Should it go to the child for whom it represents the only source of entertainment as he has no other toys to play with? Or to the one who can actually make practical use of it; or to the child to whom it must belong by virtue of her ``right” to the fruits of her labour?

The answer, according to Prof. Sen, is that there is actually no one “right” answer. In his scheme of things that he elaborates persuasively over more than 400 pages in his book, it is not possible in any situation to have an “impartial” agreement as to what offers a “perfect” resolution to a problem — and that applies to the dilemma posed by the children’s competing claims.

Nor, indeed, is there one perfect process to arrive at a conclusion that would be acceptable to all. The question as to who really deserves the flute can be decided in many ways — through a process of ideological reasoning ; on compassionate grounds such as charity (for example the poorest of the three children should get it); by majority opinion; and even by an arbitrary method like tossing the coin.

Prof. Sen argued that the story of “Three Children and a Flute,” which also features in his book, showed that there was no such thing as “perfect” justice; that justice was relative to a given situation; and that rather than searching for “ideal” justice the stress should be on removing the more manifest forms of injustice.

“The idea of justice demands comparisons of actual lives that people can lead rather than a remote search for ideal institutions. That is what makes the idea of justice relevant as well as exciting in practical reasoning,” Prof. Sen said.

Again and again while discussing the book with broadcaster Jon Snow and answering questions from the audience, the Nobel Laureate warned against the idea of a “perfectly just society” and said, instead, the question we needed to ask was: how “remedial injustices” could be rectified. It was more important to address such obvious forms of injustices as oppression of minority groups, subjugation of women or extreme exploitation of workers through a reasoned debate than splitting hair over whether a “40 per cent top tax rate is more just or less just than a 41 per cent top rate.”

This was also the theme of his Southbank Centre Lecture he delivered on the occasion.

In his alternative approach to existing theories of justice, the point is not about imagining “what a perfectly just society would look like.” Rather it is about identifying remediable injustices “on the removal of which there would be a reasoned agreement.”

“What moves us is not the realisation that the world falls short of being completely just, which few of us expect, but that there are remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate,”, Prof. Sen said pointing out that his quarrel with contemporary political philosophy was its rigid insistence there could only be one precise combination of principles that could serve as the basis of ideal social justice.

But what is justice? Is it right to go on harping on the injustices of the past such as colonialism in order to deliver justice? For example, does “justice” demand that developing countries should be allowed to pollute the atmosphere to the same degree that the industrialised world did before they agree to move on climate change? Can “retribution” be regarded as a form of justice? Are any means legitimate in pursuit of a perceived “just” goal?

These were some of the issues Prof. Sen dealt with as he argued for a new way of looking at justice. A point he repeatedly emphasised was that harking back to the past in search for justice would not do. The starting point for any discussion should take into account the reality that “we’re where we are today” and then ask: where do we go from here and how?

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