Amartya Sen: The Idea of Justice. Belknap Press, 2009. ISBN 9780674036130. Publisher website
Justice and injustice seem like the most basic of concepts, yet they unfold with labyrinthine complexity.
Take the problem with which the Nobel-prize winning and philosophically-minded economist Amartya Sen opens his book The Idea of Justice: three children squabble over a flute. Carla has worked diligently to make the flute; Anne is the only one who can actually play it; but poverty-stricken Bob has no toys or instruments at all.
A utilitarian, aiming to maximise the best possible usage would favour Anne; an egalitarian, toyless Bob; a libertarian would favour Carla, because she actually made the flute. Depending on your 'theory' of justice — utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian — each of them has a claim to the goods. You end in stalemate.
This thought-problem is a barb aimed at a particular way of doing political and moral philosophy which has been dominant ever since the American political philosopher John Rawls published his famous wrist-breaker, A Theory of Justice (1971).
Rawls was concerned with the question of political justice. He identified justice as fairness. Fair procedures were identified with justice. Rawls invented a hypothetical state called the 'original position'. In this state nobody would know their gender, race, social position or wealth. Rawls argued that people there would opt to follow two principles. They would extend freedom as widely as possible without infringing on the freedom of others. And they would ensure that any inequalities in income tended to benefit society's worst off.
A society governed by these principles, Rawls said, would be just.
The literary critic Harold Bloom once said of Sigmund Freud that his influence was so pervasive as to be inescapable — you could be a Freudian or an anti-Freudian, but you could not be un-Freudian. The same applies to Rawls' grand theory — it set the terms of debate for philosophers of political justice.
But this discussion, Sen maintains, has become mired in an approach he calls 'transcendent institutionalism' which seeks to devise a set of perfect institutions to achieve justice. Rawls and his followers define justice as whatever results from following these principles. They not only cannot escape theoretical dead ends like the flute example but, more importantly, their absolutism makes them incapable of dealing with the ramshackle world of practical justice.
Sen concludes elegantly: 'If a theory of justice is to