Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice G.A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality

...At first, there was the highly individualist framing of human motivation in Freud's work, where the problem was a psychoanalytic version of how to impose order on a world of fundamental conflict...

...First, they must be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity...

...Historically, famines were mainly the consequence of failures of social organization, notably of the free exchange of information, and of effective markets, and of entitlements to resources (notably money)—not of the supply of food per se...

...But the idea that scarcity could be transcended overlooked the reality that sufficiency and insufficiency are culturally constructed notions, not objective circumstances...

...Once again, what seems to be a principle that objectively determines a relatively definite outcome is largely dependent on the ethos that informs it...

...The European thinkers whom Sen cites as belonging to his own comparativist and pragmatic tradition hold rather different views of what constitutes a good society...

...He is author of The Good Society and the Inner World...

...In this review I will address only one of the book's major arguments, but it is the one that I think is most fundamental and far-reaching...

...One would have liked its author to write a shorter version of his book for a popular audience...

...I am reminded, though, of a deep change that has taken place over recent decades in psychoanalytic thought...

...Deeply as both authors admire Rawls as a philosopher and a person, they each argue for a significant move away from his theory...

...The aim of removing manifest injustice characterizes much of Sen's own work...

...The libertarian would give the flute to the child who had actually made it...

...In any more "social" way of thinking, the claims and limits of individuals' rights and obligations should of course figure substantially, as one crucial value...

...They] were often interested primarily in the removal of manifest injustice from the world that they saw...

...If information were available, if deficits in purchasing power (which did indeed arise from crop failures) were remedied, and if markets were enabled to function, famines could be avoided...

...Amartya Sen's book is dedicated to Rawls's memory (he died in 2002...

...But what scale of incentives is needed, and how is this to be justified...

...Cohen argues that in Rawls's model of justice this responsibility is assigned solely to governments, and that the failure of Rawls's difference principle to constrain inequality in any effective way stems from this decision...

...Only if goods are conceived to be in part social or relational in character can the problems of inequality be resolved...

...it goes to the heart of the contradictions within the democratic capitalist system for which Rawls sought to achieve a principled resolution...

...if they are altruistic, the levels will be low...

...But its synoptic quality and its theoretical disunity leave one admiring the great work that has contributed to it, more than the book itself...

...His fable of three children disputing over which of them should possess a single flute illustrates his view...

...In other words, outcomes with very different degrees of inequality can satisfy Rawls's difference principle, which therefore fails as a regulatory norm...

...it holds that the quest for a single value by which to model a good society is mistaken—even if it does enable some forms of injustice to be recognized and contested...

...Thus, in Rawls's theory, if the most highly productive individuals hold to a self-centered morality, levels of inequality will be high...

...Or, it partially fails, since the weaker version of the principle that inequalities must serve the interests of the least fortunate, does figure, however feebly, as an implicit criterion in public debates about appropriate levels of taxation and welfare...

...Cohen Harvard University Press, 2008, 448pp., $47.50 Contemporary political philosophy starts from John Rawls's theory of justice...

...Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in the last years of British rule, in which these conditions did not obtain...

...Sen's disagreement derives from his commitment to the diversity of values...

...Rawls doesn't require that individual citizens should be moved in their own economic behavior by concern for the values of justice and equality...

...One of these is the search for unifying transcendental principles, of which contractarian thinking (such as that of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant) is an example...

...Sen and Cohen agree that Rawls's theory of justice holds a central place in the social theory of democratic capitalism, and each sets out to criticize and surpass its worldview...

...If the default position, as in capitalist and liberal philosophies generally, is that they are primarily decided by and for individuals, then the problem arises of how these individual goods are to be shared out, and how competing or conflicting individual preferences are to be reconciled...

...The valuable outcome of this rethinking has been to change how human well-being is measured in global comparisons...

...The importance of Sen's and Nussbaum's work in this field is greater than its revival of holistic Aristotelian conceptions of human and social well-being in opposition to the atomistic individualism of utilitarianism...

...In his work, the politics of liberal (in the American sense) democracy, and social (in the European sense) democracy rises to consciousness of itself...

...Cohen's pluralism leads him to argue against Rawls that insofar as inequalities have to be tolerated, this is not, as Rawls says, because they are just, but because there is more than one principle to consider...

...A key implication of the measurement of well-being by human capabilities is the recognition that social progress comes in different forms, which may embody different value preferences...

...In broader terms, as Cohen explains, the chief contradiction that capitalism displays is between equality and utility...

...An economic egalitarian would give the flute to the child who has no other toys...

...The advocacy of a pluralism of values and methods is central to Sen's Idea of Justice...

...It is a common argument for inequality that incentives are needed to maximize the overall economic product...

...Restoring a more "social" way of thinking about well-being in capitalist societies is a long-term and challenging task...

...His books on the understanding of famines, to give one example, are among the finest works of applied political thinking...

...It may have been a case, however, of grasping the false consciousness of the age as well, since this influential theory that appeared to apply such stringent criteria to the justification of inequality has in fact exercised little constraint on the actual, and rising, level of inequality...

...In his earlier work, Cohen was one of the foremost philosophical defenders of historical materialism, but here he observes that Marx's overriding commitment to the overcoming of material scarcity arose from his own pessimism about human nature— which carried the implication that only if there were enough goods for everyone could people be expected to behave toward one another in egalitarian ways...

...Is it a responsibility of governments alone, leaving individual citizens free to pursue their interests and preferences as long as they remain within the system of rules democratically decided upon...

...He has been a notably practical political thinker, and his work has had unusually large effects in changing public attitudes about critical issues...

...It is a work of political philosophy that develops its arguments in sophisticated technical detail, though it is also at times witty and amusing...

...Their ideas have shaped the public measurement of economic and social progress itself, through the annual publication of the United Nations Human Development Reports, and have greatly influenced recent government policies regarding aid and development...

...Sen's second contribution to contemporary political thought and practice was made in collaboration with Martha Nussbaum: they redefined well-being in terms of human "capabilities" rather than of material income and wealth...

...He sets out two different Enlightenment conceptions of political philosophy...

...Cohen's argument is that a consistent theory of justice would require that all members of society, including the most productive members, should themselves be morally committed to a just distribution...

...Rescuing Justice and Equality shows that culture has to be brought into consideration if we are to understand the circumstances under which more egalitarian interpretations of social justice can flourish...

...He believes that a good (more egalitarian) society will only come about if human beings become morally and perhaps emotionally committed to it...

...Winnicott famously wrote...

...If, on the other hand, the most productive citizens were altruistic in their own preferences, and were willing to be motivated in their work by only minimal differentials of reward (that is, just those differentials necessary to make their additional efforts worthwhile), a much more egalitarian distribution of resources would ensue...

...This was the age of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and it was the high point of Scandinavian social democracy...

...Rawls's first principle of justice, "Each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of basic liberties for all," gives effect to the ideal of equality, seen as equal freedom...

...The standard liberal metric has been (and for the most part remains) per capita income...

...The first, embodied in the idea of democracy and universal rights under the law, is that individuals should count as equals...

...But debates about the good society are not only about how individual liberties and interests are to be furthered...

...The other conception, whose advocates, according to Sen, include Adam Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Mill, is comparativist...

...Nevertheless, in Cohen's case, this seems to be more a matter of philosophical method than of moral and political conviction...

...Cohen suggests that Rawls's theory of justice concedes too much to the capitalist ethic to be ultimately serviceable as the basis for a more egalitarian society...

...The outcomes that arise from the hypothetical "original position," in which the men and women negotiating the social contract don't know their future location on the social scale, depend on how risk-averse the negotiators are...

...one can also say that there is no such thing as an individual, only individuals in relationship to others...

...Rawls's theory of justice belongs in this tradition...

...In a meticulous comparative analysis of the circumstances of recent famines and threats of famine, Sen and his co-author, Jean Drèze, demonstrated that the general belief that they are caused by material scarcities (and are therefore in a sense unavoidable) is false...

...But the temporalities of political theory and political reality are not always closely aligned...

...Rawls's theory of justice aims to reconcile a fundamental contradiction within capitalist democracies—a contradiction between two ideals...

...His capabilities theory has been underpinned by a critique of utility theory in philosophy and economics...

...Or should responsibility for justice be expected of the individual citizens themselves, in deciding upon their own actions...

...A founda-tional commitment to the well-being of others (what used to be called fraternity) needs to be part of the social design from day one, not merely brought in later as a regulatory principle...

...They need also, as Charles Taylor has argued, be about how these are defined in relation to different moral and social ends...

...Michael Rustin is a professor of sociology at the University of East London...

...he seeks to rescue the egalitarian commitment implicit in Rawls's own position...

...In a more risk-averse community, such as Rawls may have himself envisaged in the more sedate welfarist age in which his work was begun, fewer chances might be taken, and a more egalitarian outcome would emerge...

...This argument, rooted in Sen's own experience, pragmatically brought together a recognition of the efficacy of markets and a recognition of the fundamental needs and entitlement of people, to address a particular kind of human catastrophe...

...It is because they generally have obtained after Independence that India has managed to avoid famines (even though much of its population remains trapped in poverty), while China suffered the disastrous famine of 1958-1961...

...If the most productive citizens happened to be ruthlessly self-interested, and highly inegalitarian in their preferences (as they have often been), then the economic output necessary for the well-being of everyone, including the worst-off, would only be produced in a society with steep inequalities...

...Sen's disagreement with Rawls is more a methodological one: he argues that the hypothesis of an "original position" takes too little account of value differences in the world and of the different views of justice to which different peoples might agree...

...Sen values such differences...

...This is not only to constrain the self-centeredness of the most productive members of society, to protect the well-being of everyone else, as Cohen argues in this book, but also so that debates about possible good societies can begin in the right place—in discussion of the alternative goals and priorities that underlie different ways of life...

...Sen's argument does not suggest an alternative to Rawls's monistic conception of justice...

...The materialist teleology of capitalism (and of some forms of socialism too) is criticized in this view, in which the achievement of one value, material production and consumption, trumps all others...

...The utilitarian would give it to the child who could actually play it, and so enhance the sum of pleasure among his listeners...

...The fundamental question, which both Sen and Cohen in their different ways address, is how social "goods" are to be decided upon...

...These authors "were all involved in comparisons of societies that had already existed or could feasibly emerge, rather than confining their analyses to transcendental searches for a perfectly just society...

...and second, they must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society...

...The question that these two books explore is whether the fundamental framing of the issue of justice by Rawls is flawed...

...Justice, in his account, becomes little more than an assessment from a position of impartiality of what constitutes a better arrangement, recognizing that there might be more than one defensible conception of this...

...Isaiah Berlin's commitment to the plurality of values is one recent version of "Englishness" that may have influenced Cohen's outlook...

...Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions...

...Cohen's own position has become, over the years, a more ethically centered one...

...Given his pluralist presuppositions, it's not surprising that Sen's Idea of Justice isn't a deductive, systematic treatise...

...This approach contrasts an imagined ideal society to the state of nature or war of all against all that might otherwise obtain...

...The second, embodied in the norms and practices of market societies, is that individuals should be free to pursue their own interests in competition with others...

...Sen and Nussbaum argued that human capabilities—levels of mortality (including infant mortality) and of education (including the education of women), the prevalence of malnutrition and disease, the existence of political freedom, and the availability of employment and economic opportunity— provided a more satisfactory measure of well-being than aggregate or average income alone...

...In a society whose members are habituated to high risks, they might well tolerate a considerable danger of economic failure in exchange for the possibility of great success...

...Thus his argument on famine broadly endorses the contribution of capitalist markets to well-being, while the capabilities approach to human development challenges the measure of progress employed in neoliberal economic theory...

...But then came the development of the theory of object relations and, in the United States, of "relational analysis," which argued that for human beings attachment to and identification with others is a primordial fact of life...

...Cohen's disagreement derives from his own commitment to equality...

...Sen's point is that such differences of value are unavoidable and cannot be resolved by any single transcendental principle...

...Amartya Sen's book is more a retrospective gathering together of his previous contributions to political thought than a systematic philosophical treatise...

...The crucial question posed by Cohen is the following: Whose responsibility is it to ensure that a just and ethical allocation of resources is maintained...

...The implication is that nations with higher average incomes are more successful than those with lower average incomes—thus translating onto the scale of national competition a familiar way of measuring individual success...

...It is characteristic of Sen's work that its major contributions are somewhat divergent in their focus...

...sadly, Jerry Cohen died last August...

...One can see why Cohen describes Rawls's theory of justice "as having grasped one large reality of his age, in thought...

...Decisions would be taken unanimously...

...The book makes many references to his own intellectual history and to the various professional and personal contexts in which his ideas were developed...

...He describes his cast of thought as that of an Oxford man, in contrast to Rawls's as a Harvard man—referring by this to a contrast between a deductive rationalism, Cartesian and Kantian in its inspiration, and the more particularistic and inductive spirit of English social thought...

...To give effect to this "difference principle," Rawls imagines an "original position" in which all individuals together decide on the distribution of resources in society—and none of them know where in the social hierarchy they would stand in the future...

...Rawls first began to publish on justice in the late 1950s, and A Theory of Justice came out in 1971, in a period when a relatively egalitarian welfare capitalism seemed within the realm of political possibility...

...A nation whose average income is comparatively low but which nevertheless ensures, on average, long lives, good health, education, and political freedom to its members, is doing better than one that is materially rich but fails according to many of these qualitative indices...

...He prefers the evaluation of what actually happens to the search for perfectly just arrangements and institutions...

...Thus, any inequalities that were agreed upon would not only (by definition) be in the interest of those who finished up worst-off, but would have been agreed to by them...

...In these terms, one can not only say that there is "no such thing as a baby, but only a mother and baby couple," as D.W...

...Justification for the beneficence of the global capitalist system is sought in evidence that per capita income increases...

...There is another way in which what appears to be an objective principle of just allocation turns out to depend on culturally and ideologically determined preferences...

...Cohen believes "that at most two books in the history of Western political thought have a claim to be regarded as greater than A Theory of Justice: Plato's Republic and Hobbes's Leviathan...

...Its rhetoric endorses both, but its reality sacrifices equality to utility: it relies on injustice to produce human happiness...

...Thinking of the work of Geertz, Hirschman, and Walzer, one might say that "Princeton man" belongs on the particularist-pluralist side of this divide...

...He asserts, in Hegelian terms, that "Rawls grasped his age, or more precisely one large reality of his age, in thought...

...Rescuing Justice and Equality is a sustained and systematic critique of Rawls's theory of justice, and the ancillary theories developed by legions of Rawlsians over the years since Rawls began writing...

...Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level demonstrates that inegalitarian societies are generally worse on most indices of well-being, including those of health and the incidence of crime...

...His book seeks to "rescue" the value of equality, above all others, and because of this commitment his work seems to lie, with Rawls, on the monistic side of this philosophical divide rather than in Sen's pluralist camp...

...This issue is fundamental because our judgment of what levels of inequality are necessary to secure the well-being of the worst-off depends on what rewards the most productive members of society demand as the condition of contributing their labor...

...Cohen's book also takes issue with Rawls's philosophical monism...

...His second principle of justice takes account of the inequalities to which freedom in market situations gives rise...

...Its influence will be felt in the teaching of political philosophy over a long period, and like Cohen's earlier work will be of great value in sustaining the cause of equality...

...The reason for this, they argue, is that inequality has relational meaning, which demeans and disrespects those members of society who are low down in the hierarchy of rewards, and disrespects them more severely the steeper the slope of the hierarchy...