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| The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen Steven Poole enjoys a rigorous examination of an abstract notionHumans are often misled by abstract nouns of their own making, and sometimes the bamboozlement can last centuries or more. Because one can say the word "justice", one might conclude that a singular thing or essence called "justice" actually exists. And so one could spend a life trying to figure out what this abstract animal called "justice" really is, and fail to pay much attention to problems of justice in the world.The eminent professor and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has chosen for his deeply interesting synthesis of political philosophy, economics and "social choice theory" a title that might at first appear rather bland, but it is holding two opposing ideas in a kind of dynamic stasis. Half the implication is indeed that it is possible to spend too much time on justice-as-a-mere-idea. But the other half is an insistence that justice-the-idea could be re-engineered to work better as a basis for "practical reasoning", such that it might improve the world.For Schopenhauer, injustice was the analytically primary term: justice was merely the absence of injustice. (There seems to be a primordial sense of injustice: animal researchers have observed chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys showing a keen sense of when treats are distributedly unfairly.) Schopenhauer does not make an appearance in this book, but Sen's approach is arguably Schopenhauerian to this extent: "[A] theory of justice that can serve as the basis of practical reasoning," he writes, "must include ways of judging how to reduce injustice and advance justice, rather than aiming only at the characterisation of perfectly just societies."This might seem obvious to some. Aid workers, lawyers, or humanitarian NGOs might understandably have little time for perfectionist justice-talk as they go about their business. Sen argues that philosophy could help, were it not that too much talk of justice in modern political philosophy has, by contrast, been concerned with interrogating an otherworldly ideal of the perfectly just society constructed ab ovo. His main target in this tradition is John Rawls, who published his monumental A Theory of Justice in 1975. Sen calls Rawls's method "transcendental institutionism", in contrast to his own "comparative" approach.By "comparative", Sen means first that we can compare the justice of two different situations, X and Y, without needing a perfect theory of justice, and we can also make good use of partial rankings: if X is better than Y and Z, we can choose X without waiting to know which of Y or Z is better. Secondly, the term "comparative" acknowledges that different reasonable principles of justice exist, which Sen illustrates with a beautiful parable. Suppose three children are quarrelling over a flute. Anna says she is the only one who can play the flute, so obviously we should give it to her. But then Bob says that he is the only child who has no toys at all, so surely he ought at least to have a flute to play with? Suddenly the question does not look so easy. And finally Carla points out that she spent months actually making the flute. So who should get it? For Sen, any theory of justice must begin in recognition of such clashing principles.The contrast between "transcendental" and "comparative" theories is just one of the clarifying and useful distinctions that Sen goes on to draw, in a long argument that can at times seem slow-moving, and perhaps generously repetitive, but is also enlivened with many asides of twinkling humour. Thinkers of all political hues agree that justice means equality of some kind – the question is: equality of what? Sen's preferred answer appears to be equality of freedom: though he warns, near the end of the book, of the quixotic nature of any attempt to translate all possible values into one commensurable measure, he does do this to some extent himself: "sustainable development" becomes "sustainable freedom", and a defence of the idea of human rights near the end of the book essentially translates rights into freedoms too.Sen is exquisitely civilised in his disagreements with other thinkers, even while he is elegantly trashing whole schools of economic and social thought. He dismisses reliance on GDP as a measure of "the enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience"; and notes that the use of income as a comparative measure of wellbeing is flawed because there are differences in the rates at which people can convert wealth into other things. (This latter point is an example of his insistence that justice-thinking must take account of the lives people can actually lead, rather than the static bureaucratic situations in which they are placed.) Refreshingly, his terms of reference are not limited to western politics: he borrows an illuminating distinction from classical Indian thought, and demolishes the prejudice that democracy, if understood broadly as government by public reasoning, is an exclusively western tradition.The very inclusiveness and generosity of Sen's thinking might invite criticism on the basis that his "capacious theory" is indeed so capacious, so concerned to be "open" rather than "closed", that there is nothing that could not, with a little tweaking, fit in it. The less a theory excludes, the more work is left up to the post-theoretical "practical reasoning". But Sen provides enough brilliant examples of such reasoning (with regard to famine, disability, disease and so on) that this comes to seem, on balance, a virtue. A second, tougher criticism might point to the apparent assumption throughout that the argument is essentially taking place between well-meaning liberals. He writes: "To argue that we do not really owe anything to others who are not in our neighbourhood, even though it would be very virtuous if we were to be kind and charitable to them, would make the limits of our obligations very narrow indeed." For Sen, that appears to suffice as a dismissal, on the grounds of implausibility, of such a view; yet it appears to be the principle behind Republican efforts to stymie universal healthcare in the US, or Conservative hopes to offload more social provision on to charities.Perhaps, then, Sen's magisterial summation of his thought suffers from an excess of niceness; but this is surely preferable to its opposite. There is something quietly inspiring about his final chapter on the increasing reach and quality of "global reasoning", via institutions and less formal methods, which for him already constitute a kind of global democracy in embryo, and he ends on a delicately pitched note of calm optimism: "The general pursuit of justice might be hard to eradicate in human society." We can hope so.PhilosophyPoliticsSocietySteven PooleAmartya Senguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of The Times: The Voice That Helped Remake Culture Terry Teachout’s biography restores Louis Armstrong to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists. feeds.nytimes.com |
Oxford Institutes a New Election Process for Its Poetry Post On Tuesday, Oxford announced that it was rewriting the rules for the election of its Professor of Poetry. feeds.nytimes.com |
Books of The Times: Any Relation to Biography Is Pure Fiction (in a Way) In this twist on an autobiographical novel, J. M. Coetzee presents notebooks from a deceased version of himself alongside interviews conducted by an imagined, future biographer. feeds.nytimes.com |
The Convent by Panos Karnezis Ursula K Le Guin finds that convent life offers more than it delivers in Panos Karnezis's novelPanos Karnezis's fourth novel is written with the aplomb of a recognised novelist and the canniness of an ambitious one. Like many good storytellers, this author is a bit of a trickster. The narrative flows along with pleasant, almost old-fashioned straightforwardness, but belies its apparent directness by withholding information from the reader.Acclaimed for Little Infamies, The Maze and The Birthday Party, Karnezis has been spoken of as a magical realist, and there are hints of a supernatural dimension to the tale, but seemingly mysterious events find commonplace explanations in the end. Were it not for this prosaic strain, I'd compare Karnezis with Isabel Allende, a similarly fluent and attractive spellbinder; but her novels, though shallow, really are magical realism. The South American novelists, after all, hit upon the mode as a means of describing the improbable reality of their lives and politics. There is no serious historical or political dimension to The Convent; it's just a lively story, and its improbabilities are inconsequential.The setting is a 16th-century nunnery in the mountains of southern Spain. Only six nuns are left there by the early 1920s. Their bishop visits from the city once a month and has given them a car so they can go for their provisions. Otherwise they live in absolute isolation, and with a degree of self-determination surely rather uncommon in Spanish convents.The mother superior, Maria Ines, is the central character, and her ordeal begins with the appearance of an infant in a suitcase on the convent steps. This infant ranks high among the many unconvincing babies in literature. He cries twice in 200 pages. Newborn, he drinks milk from a bowl. He is undescribed, unseen; even the two nuns who adore him never notice the colour of his eyes, the scent of his hair, his responses, actions, gazing, smiles – the vivid physicality of a young baby, an intensely and almost solely bodily presence to those who look after it. This is a stage baby: a bodiless bundle of cloth. A plot device.Maria Ines, on the other hand, promises considerable character interest. As a young woman, she had a love affair with a naval cadet which led to pregnancy and abortion, soon after which the young man died; after a year of vaguely suicidal thoughts she became a nun "to wait for the inevitable day when God would decide her punishment". A stint in Africa deepened her experience of human suffering and also brought an offer of marriage and escape from her self-imposed penance, which she refused, determined not to be let off easily. As mother superior, her only real pleasure is in tinkering with the car engine. When the baby appears she sees it as her aborted foetus miraculously given back to her. Can she accept this sign of unearned redemption? Can she refuse it? This potentially fascinating moral quandary is weakened by conventional and unexamined religious terminology and by Maria Ines's rapid slide from responsible judgment into self-delusion and irrationality.The other principal characters are the bishop of the unnamed city, who visits the convent regularly as the nuns' confessor; and Sister Ana, who dreams and schemes of replacing Maria Ines as mother superior. But I must admit that I kept confusing Sister Ana with Sister Carlota, or Sister Teresa, or Sister Beatriz: for the nuns all resemble the stage baby in being not much beyond bundles of cloth, nuns' habits uninhabited by distinct personalities. Characters reduced to plot-functions might best be named after their roles, like minor parts in a play: Old Nun, Ambitious Nun . . .This lack of distinction in character-drawing extends to the language, though at least it has the great virtue of clarity. As for the plot, it is surprising mostly in its conventionality. The self-assurance of the narrative leads one to expect more than it offers; the novel seems to be setting out to do what great novels do. Yet in fact it does very little, and what it does is so expectable that the reader is taken off guard – You mean, that's it? That's all?However, it has to be said that what it does is well done. It entertains; and the scene in which the mother superior poisons the dogs is, in its calm and grisly way, superb.Ursula K Le Guin's Lavinia is published by Gollancz.FictionUrsula K Le Guinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |