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The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Nov 07, 2009

Summary

Steven Poole enjoys a rigorous examination of an abstract notion

Humans 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 anal

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