When i returned back to my room after term 5 vacations, i found this book, freshly still wrapped in its polythene cover lying on the table and i remembered Paul’s words that i could freely open it and read it. I was wondering about, Amartya Sen, it is a heard name and later i realized he won Nobel prize in Economics and I was reading Justice, it is more like Social Sciences and went on to do a Wiki on him. A book by a scorpio, possibly a Bharani or Krittika, 76 years old and he won his Nobel prize when he was 65 years old. He must be a great great grandpa. So here is the review:
IntroductionLord Mansfield, the powerful English judge in the 18th century, famously advised a newly appointed colonial governor: ‘
consider what you think justice requires and decide accordingly. But never give your reasons; for your judgement will probably be right, but your reason will certainly be wrong’. The argument for tactful reason vs. doing right things made me wonder, do people ponder so much over reasoning and justice to write a book on this. Why can’t people just be sensitive to the people sitting next to them, the poor people around them while doing anything, justice will be then inherent in everything else that they do once they have that thought in their mind. How is my studying going to help the poorest of the poor lady i saw begging on the way to the railway station? Well that thought will make me study with sincerity, because, i know i have the privilege to change lives in ways feasible sometime down in future.
After two years of reading economics where professors give the ideal demand supply curve for one product and based on explain stuff, the fact that Sen ponders about why to have the concept of ideal
justice, when actuality is not so, is seriously worth pondering.
“The distance between transcendental institutionalism, on the one hand, and realization-focussed comparison, on the other is quite momentous.” Why bother about “the characterization of perfectly just institutions has become the central exercise in the modern theories of justice” when reality is sky earth distance apart.
An illustration of how difficult things can get with the three children and a flute, gave a different benefactor every time I analyzed. If Anna had to get the flute, what if Carla and Bob learnt to play it with equal or more dedication than Anna later or were already in the process of learning to play the flute and possibly become more expert than Anna. Then Bob or Carla would get it. What if Bob had petitioned that he was poor to many and others were willing to give him not just a flute but other toys as well, and bob was not keen, then Carla would get. If the labourer who constructed the building claimed that he built it with great love and care and hence it should be his, then what would the home owners do who paid for it all?
Sen’s obsession with rather stressing on plural reasons for any of the competing principles is just enough. “
If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choices of policies, strategies or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient” strikes a chord.
“It is of course possible to have a theory that does both comparative assessments between pairs of alternatives, and a transcendental identification (when that is not made impossible through the surviving plurality of impartial reasons that have claims on our attention). That would be a ‘conglomerate’ theory, but neither of the two different types of judgements follows from each other.” The analogy of selecting a painting and having Monalisa as the perfect picture made me recollect of Oscar Wilde’s “
All art is quite useless.” (Not that I consider art as useless, on the contrary am quite an admirer of such mesmerizing creations.) Nevertheless, Sen’s explanations with such examples drives home the point with such lucidity unlike his usage of jargons like comparative justice and transcendental theory that can be interpreted in as many ways as there are thoughts fleeting in a split second in one’s mind.
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The need for an accomplishment-based understanding of justice is linked with the argument that justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actually live. The importance of human lives, experiences, and realizations cannot be supplanted by information about institutions that exist and the rules that operate.”
True, quite often we have rules all made in the best of the intentions by the law makers and we find people to smartly find loop holes to do exactly opposite to the spirit of the law while strictly following the rules. What use of having justice, which obeys the letter, yet fails the very purpose and soul of justice?
“We may do the right thing and yet we may not succeed. Or, a good result may come about not because we aimed at it, but for some other, perhaps even an accidental, reason, and we may be deceived into thinking that justice has been done.” Processes and outcomes, the never ending debate and the role of dumb luck, well, has always been a never ending deliberation.
PART 1: THE DEMANDS OF JUSTICE
1. Reason and Objectivity
Lack of smartness can certainly be one source of moral failing in good behaviours. Reflecting on what would really be a smart thing to do can sometimes help one act better towards others. Made me remember one of the panchathanthra tales which expostulates that it is better to have a wise enemy than to have a foolish friend. True indeed, if everyone were to think of others as self, find oneself in others and find others in self, then the world would be a better place. Today the politicians are talking of imposing GST and contention over it, while all the politicians want to do is get more for their share while the masses in the villages anguish over the exorbitantly raising prices of basic commodities.
“Indeed, one of the main points in favour of reason is that it helps us to scrutinize ideology and blind belief.” Am yet to meet a single person in this world, who does not have even one single blind belief. It could be wearing a particular shirt for interview or why even believing in god. If one were to reason out everything, there would not be this thing of falling in love. Does everything have a reason. Vivekananda might say, reason out and only then you ought to believe in even your own teachers. However, we do have numerous instances of miraculous healing due to sheer blind faith and belief. Now we could understand the distinction between faith and belief. One says faith healing and not belief healing.
For those who are eternally optimistic and believing in fluke success - a very dubious procedure accidentally giving a more correct answer than extremely rigorous reasoning compared with a stopped watch giving the correct time 2 times a day was simple yet profound.
The seemingly simple case of redistributing food during preventable famines made me remember P. Sainath’s lecture. He surely has a way of speaking that makes an everlasting impression. Having queens feast while millions were dying of starvation outside, having a feast in Nero’s time while convicted criminals were burnt alive to provide light for the feasters still sends a shiver down my spine.
“Indeed, in celebrating reason, there is no particular ground for denying the far-reaching role of instinctive psychology and spontaneous responses” I believe that in addition to reason, one should ignore the gift of intuition and gut feeling.
2. Rawls and Beyond“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!”
Verses from Wordsworth’s and other poets here and there suddenly transported me to Hitler’s Mein Kampf where he talks about these elitists who use flowery words and things that are of no serious value to community at large and the art of talking to masses – public speaking, instigating them and inspiring them with plain common words and rousing them for collective action. And page 3 sequence where they show the masses crave for vulgar stuff and the class for finer.
Indeed, in his Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls notes that “there are indefinitely many consideration that may be appealed to in the original consideration and disfavoured by others, and also that ‘
the balance of reasons itself rest on judgement, thought judgement informed and guided by reasoning.’‘If the justice of what happens in a society depends on a combination of institutional features and actual behavioural characteristics, along with other influences that determine the social realisations, then is it possible to identify ‘just’ institutions for a society without making them contingent on actual behaviours?
Since no one has argued more powerfully and more elaborately than John Rawls for the need for ‘reasonable’ behaviours by individuals for a society to function well, he is clearly very aware of the difficulty in presuming any kind of spontaneous emergence of universal reasonable behaviour on the part of all members of a society.
3. Institutions and Persons
Ashoka says,
‘He who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sets of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect.
Social Justice – advancing the welfare and freedom of people in general is an important role for the state as well as of the individuals in society, but also that this social enrichment could be achieved through the voluntary good behaviour of the citizens themselves, without being compelled through force.
Ashoka’s nyaya vs. Kautilya’s nitiPaying attention to the purpose and consequence in interpreting a democratic constitution – Justice Stephen Bryer…
To ask how things are going and whether they can be improved is a constant and inescapable part of the pursuit of justice.
In the inclusive perspective of nyaya, we can never simply hand over the task of justice to some niti of social institutions and social rules that we see as exactly right, and then rest there, and be free from further social assessment (freedom from morality)
4. Voice and Social Choice5. Impartiality and ObjectivityClassical Utlititarian in disguise as Rawls puts or Smith's impartial spectator: - the strength of his approval is determined by the balance of satisfaction to which he has sympathetically responded.
The impartial spectator can work and enlighten without being either a social contractor,or a utilitarian in camouflage.
Impartiality need not always take the form of being linked with mutually gainful cooperation and can also accommodate unilateral obligations that we may acknowledge because of our power to achieve socailal results that we have reason to value (without bnecessarily benefiting from thsoe results).
Limitations
(1) Exclusionary neglect:
(Closed impartiality) this isse can be particularly problamtice for 'justice as fairness' in dealing with justice across border,s since the basic social structure chosen for a socitety can have an influence on the lives not only of memebers of that society, but also those of others (who are not accommmodate in the orignial position for that society). There can be much vexation without representation.
6. Closed and Open partialityWhy, then, the need for an agreement when there are no difference to negotiate? The answer is that reaching a unanimous agreement without a biding vote is not the same thing as everyone’s arriving at the same choice, or forming the same intention. That it is an undertaking that people are giving may similarly affect everyone’s deliberations so that the agreement that results is different from the choice everyone would have otherwise made.
Rawls shows with powerful reasoning why judgements of justice cannot be entirely private affair that is unfathomable to others, and the Rawlsian invoking of a ‘public framework of thought’, which does not in itself demand a ‘contract’, is a critically important move: ‘we look at our society and our place in it objectively: we share a common standpoint along with others and do not make our judgements form a personal slant.’International justice is simply not adequate for global justice. Again reiterates the inadequacy of institutional justice. The notion of human rights builds on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but are presumed to be claims or entitlements of every human being.
Indeed, when leave the world of locally confined ethics, and try to combine a procedure of closed impartiality with otherwise universalist intentions, procedural parochialism must be seen as a serious difficulty.
Even in a single classroom, with comprises of brilliant graspers and kind of tardy slow learners, the teacher is caught between going to higher levels for the benefit of top level students while the rest struggle or going slow and taking up easy tasks, while the super studs get impatient and bored.
There is nothing like equal equality. Even though the hand is one, the fingers are all different, each with its own strengths and weakness.
After this PZ returned from his Vipasanna meditation. He liked the dates and walnuts cake i had baked along with my friend in the microwave. When i told him, i still had half the book to complete, he rushed to bookstore to buy me another copy. Since he didn't accept the money i owed to him from thiruvannamalai trip, i was glad, the book shop was closed. I hurried for my yoga classes. After yoga, i asked PVS to come taste the cake i had baked. When he came, there was hardly any cake left, instead someone had kept groundnuts in black polythene cover.
Well, this was one book, that took quite some to read. Hope i get to read the rest sometime soon.
PART II: FORMS OF REASONING
7. Position, Relevance and Illusion
8. Rationality and Other people
9. Plurality of Impartial Reasons
10. Realizations, Consequences and Agency
PART III: THE MATERIAL OF JUSTICE
11. Lives, Freedoms and Capabilities
12. Capabilities and Resources
13. Happiness, Well-Being and Capabilities
14. Equality and Liberty
PART IV: PUBLIC REASONING AND DEMOCRACY
15. Democracy as Public Reason
16. The Practice of Democracy
17. Human Rights and Global Imperatives
18. Justice and the World
