• Book Reviews
  • Slideshow Reviews
  • About Silash
  • Lessons from Fiction
  • Twitter Pics
  • Contact
  • Join Mailing List
Silash Ruparell

Amartya Sen – The Idea of Justice (2009)

2/3/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
Kautilya (alias Chanakya). An early dispenser of Justice. Think Machiavelli. But a bit more hardcore.
Amartya Sen - The Idea of Justice (2009)

My one liner:
Nobel Prize winning economist.  A comprehensive survey of the great theorists' competing notions of justice, concluding that a system based on Social Realism (or taking society as it is) is preferable to constructing institutions of justice in a vacuum (“Transcendental Justice”).  
 
Framing the debate on the nature of justice, Amartya Sen provides a practical illustration, which he calls Three Children and a Flute, in the Introduction of the book: Imagine which of three children Anne, Bob and Carla should get a flute about which they are quarrelling.  Anne claims the flute on the grounds that she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob, on the other claims the flute because he says that he is the only one of the three who is so poor that he has no toys of his own, so the flute would give him something to play with. Carla then intervenes and says that it was she who made the flute with her own painstaking labour, and just as she finishes her work “these expropriators came along to try to grab the flute away from me.”
 
It is clear that theorists of different persuasions would give the flute to different
candidate.  The economic egalitarian would give it to Bob, on the basis that poverty and inequality should be reduced.  The utilitarian hedonist “would face the hardest challenge”, but would be persuaded to give it to Anne, as her pleasure would be greatest from owning and playing it (though he would recognise that Bob’s incremental pleasure in owning it may outweigh this).  The libertarian would of course have no hesitation in awarding it to Carla.  
 
Amartya Sen’s credentials in leading us towards new theories of justice are of course impeccable, so this is a book that we have to pay attention to.  “Transcendental Justice” is the term he gives to the theories, which seek
to prescribe an institutional framework to the ideal form of justice, a sort of
build-it-and-they-will-come approach. Sen uses the work of John Rawls as his "departure point".  Sen was a student of Rawls, and whilst he acknowledge Rawls’ contribution to modern thinking on justice, he also considers it to be too rigid.  Rawls’ concept of “Justice as Fairness” is centered on a requirement of  “primordial equality”, namely that the “parties involved have no knowledge of their personal identities, or their respective vested interests, within the group as a whole.  Their representatives have to choose under this ‘veil of ignorance’”.  The primordial equality requirement then goes on through a chain of reasoning to determine the types of institutions that would be required to deliver it.

 Sen is more drawn to the “Social Realisation” school of justice. This is more concerned with justice as resulting from “actual institutions, actual behaviour and other influences.”  These concepts are to found in Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Mill. In Sen’s words all of these thinkers, though having very different ideas about the demands of justice were “all involved in comparisons of societies that already existed or could feasibly
emerge”
.
 
Sen is able to draw on Indian notions of justice, both from Sanskrit texts on jurisprudence and also from the Hindu epics of the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata. So in Sanskrit literature, niti and nyaya both stand for justice.  Niti  signifies organisational propriety (and hence more akin to the transcendental institutionalism) and Nyaya which stands for a comprehensive
concept of realised justice.  And  he draws on examples of Eastern emperors who have come to symbolise one or the other.  Contrast the practical, societally relevant forms of justice practised by both Ashoka (a Hindu) and Akbar (a Muslim) on the one hand, with the much more prescriptive format expounded by Kautilya (a must-read by the way, if you want do a compare and contrast with Machiavelli), the latter having little faith in the ability of his  subjects to make such decisions for  themselves.
 
The arguments that Sen draws us towards are those of Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.  Smith invokes the concept of an “impartial observer” who can adjudicate on fairness given the world as it is, and who can take into account factors and opinions which are not merely present within the immediate community but which are geographically distant, but nevertheless relevant.  Sen believes that this is a more relevant way to approach justice in an interconnected world in which we grapple issues such as global terrorism and the financial crisis.

 Overall, there is as you would expect real intellectual substance in this book.  But it is highly readable, and more importantly highly relevant for how we think about what constitutes realistic justice.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the book.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Silash Ruparell

    Reviews of books that I read in my spare time.  Enjoy.

    Archives

    November 2015
     - Ferdinand von Schirach: Crime & Guilt (2012) 

    October 2015
    - Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi: The Systems View of Life - A Unifying Vision (2014)

    September 2015
     - Danny King: School for Scumbags (2012)

    August 2015 
    - Erich Maria Remarque: Arch of Triumph (1945)

    July 2015
     - W. Somerset Maugham - The Painted Veil

    June 2015
     - John Julius Norwich: Byzantium, The Early Centuries (1988)

    May 2015
     - Anthony Price: Other Paths to Glory (1975)

    April 2015
    - Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley: The Emotional Life of Your Brain (2012)

    February 2015
    - Charles Neider (Ed): The Autobiography of Mark Twain

    January 2015
    - Paul Torday: The Girl on the Landing (2009)

    November 2014
    - David Eagleman: Sum - Forty Tales of the Afterlife (2009)

    August 2014
    - Simon Winchester: Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (2008)

    May 2014
    - Steven Strange & Jack Zupko (Eds): Stoicism - Traditions and Tranformations (2004)

    March 2014
      - Michael Dibdin: Vendetta (1990)

    January 2014
     - Matt Sinclair (Ed): The Fall - Tales from the Apocalypse (2012)

    September 2013
     - Edward Jay Epstein: Have you ever tried to sell a Diamond ? (And other
    investigations of the diamond trade) (2011)


    August 2013
     - Lessons from Fiction Part 3: The role of institutions in alleviating the poverty trap 

    April 2013
    - Emile Zola: L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den) 1877, Translation by Robin Buss (2004)

    March 2013
    - Margaret Atwood:Oryx & Crake  (2003)

    February 2013
     - Paul Auster: Sunset Park (2010)

    January 2013
     - Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea (1951)

    December 2012
     - Lessons from Fiction Part 2 - How Societies adapt to Disruptive Change

    November 2012
     - James Barr: A Line in the Sand (2011). And a nod to "Information is Beautiful"

    October 2012
     - Voltaire (1749 translation): Zadig or the Book of Fate (1747)

    September 2012
     - Leigh Skene: The Impoverishment of Nations (2009)

    August 2012
     - Steven Roger Fischer: A History of Language (1999)

    July 2012
     - John Dickson Carr: He Who Whispers (1946)

    June 2012
     - Matthew May: The Shibumi Strategy (2011)
     - Trevanian: Shibumi (1979)

    May 2012
     - Lessons from Fiction: Part 1 - A beginner's guide to convicting an innocent man

    April 2012
     - H. Woody Brock: American Gridlock (Why the Right and Left are Both Wrong, Commonsense 101 Solutions for the Economic Crises) (2012)
    March 2012
      - Jane Jensen: Dante's Equation (2003)
    February 2012
    - Amartya Sen: The Idea of Justice (2009)
    January 2012
    - Ian Morris: Why the West Rules...For Now (2010)

    Categories

    All
    Actus Reus
    Adam Smith
    Afterlife
    Alcohol
    Amartya Sen
    American Literature
    Anthony Price
    Apocalypse
    Attila The Hun
    Aurelio Zen
    Autobiography
    Babylonia
    Balfour Declaration
    Basque Country
    Brad Pitt
    Brain
    Buddhism
    Byzantine Empire
    Calouste Gulbenkian
    Carl Gustav Jung
    Cartel
    Charlemagne
    Charles Darwin
    China
    Cholera
    Cicero
    Constantine The Great
    Constantinople
    Criminal Law
    Cuba
    Dalai Lama
    Danny King
    David Eagleman
    David Lloyd-George
    David Mccandless
    De Beers
    Decimation
    Descartes
    Destiny
    Detective
    Dialogue Of The Deaf
    Diamonds
    Donation Of Constantine
    Dr David Audley
    Dr Gideon Fell
    Economics
    Ecosystems
    Edward J Epstein
    Emile Zola
    Energy
    Epictetus
    Erich Maria Remarque
    Ernest Hemingway
    Fat Boy
    Fate
    Ferdinand Von Schirach
    Fiction
    Financial Crisis
    Fiscal Deficit
    Fishing
    Flanders
    Fractal Mathematics
    François-Marie Arouet
    Franz Bopp
    Freeman Dyson
    French Literature
    Fritjoft Capra
    Gafin Principle
    Gaia Theory
    Game Of Go
    Genomics
    Geo Politics
    Geo-politics
    German Literature
    Giallo
    Great Wyrley
    Happiness
    Havana
    Healthcare
    Herbert Henry Asquith
    Hindenburg Line
    History
    Holistics
    Huckleberry Finn
    Huguenot
    Humility
    H. Woody Brock
    Ian Morris
    Identity
    Infographics
    Information Is Beautiful
    International Relations
    International Space Station
    Investment
    Iraq
    Isaac Newton
    Israel
    Jack Zupko
    James Barr
    Jane Jensen
    Japan
    Japanese Aesthetics
    Jean De La Bruyère
    Joe Dimaggio
    John Dickson Carr
    John Julius Norwich
    John Maynard Keynes
    John Rawls
    Joseph Needham
    Julian Barnes
    Julian The Apostate
    Justice
    Kabbalah
    Karl Marx
    Kenneth Arrow
    King Feisal 1st
    Language
    Lawrence Becker
    Lebanon
    Leigh Skene
    Leverage
    Life Outcomes
    Linguistics
    Locked Room Mystery
    London
    Margaret Atwood
    Mark Twain
    Martha Nussbaum
    Martial Arts
    Matthew May
    Matt Sinclair
    Max Brooks
    Meditation
    Mens Rea
    Mesopotamia
    Michael Arditti
    Michael Dibdin
    Middle East
    Migration
    Miscarriage Of Justice
    Moliere
    Mordecai Kurz
    Mother Company
    Mr Five Percent
    Murder
    National Patrimony
    Natural Resources
    Neuroscience
    New York
    Non Fiction
    Non-Fiction
    Oil And Energy
    Oprah Winfrey
    Palestine
    Parcae
    Paris
    Parsi
    Paul Auster
    Paul Torday
    Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Persia
    Philippines
    Philosophy
    Pia De' Tolomei
    Pier Luigi Luisi
    Plato
    Pont De L'Alma
    Population
    Poverty
    Proto Indo-European
    Psychology
    Purgatorio
    Qalys
    Quantitative Easing
    Quantum Mechanics
    Recession
    Religion
    Richard Davidson
    Richard Easterlin
    Rodney William Whittaker
    Roman Empire
    Sanskrit
    Sardegna
    Satellites
    Science
    Science Fiction
    Sharon Begley
    Shibumi
    Short Stories
    Silash Ruparell
    Simon Winchester
    Sin
    Snooker; Pool; & Billiards
    Social Realisation
    Sociology
    Socrates
    Spy Novel
    Steven Roger Fischer
    Steven Strange
    Stoicism
    Supernatural
    Sykes-Picot Agreement
    Syria
    Systems View
    Terrorism
    The Somme
    Thomas Malthus
    Thriller
    Trevanian
    Vampires
    Voltaire
    Water
    What Can We Learn From Fiction
    Winston Churchill
    World War I
    World War II
    W. Somerset Maugham
    Yin And Yang
    Zionism
    Zombie Banks
    Zombies

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.