Episode 16: Amartya Sen discusses justice
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Who is Amartya Sen and what is his connection to Rawls’s theory of justice?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman.
And I'm Mark Hopwood.
With us today is Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, and he is here to talk with us about justice. Amartya Sen, welcome.
Thank
you. A lot of your work has developed in response to the work of the influential political philosopher John Rawls. So I thought maybe we could begin by just asking you to tell us a bit about those aspects of Rawls's political philosophy that you've responded to in your work.
Well thank you. Rawls is of course, I think, um, almost certainly the most important political philosopher of our time, the dominant figure who has changed the course of political philosophy from his early publications in the late fifties onwards and his book A Theory of Justice, published in nineteen seventy one, is a kind of definitive statement of a theory of justice based on the idea of of a contract, of a social contract, an approach originally introduced by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century and pursued in different ways by John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. And there's a whole lot of people doing it, but it's I think with the Rawls's theory of justice that contractarian approach reaches a level of completion which we don't get elsewhere.
Yeah. And the other series of justice that we primarily get today, like that of Ronald Walkin or Robert Nozick, David Gauthier, they may differ from roles in many different ways, but they are all based on the idea of a social contract. And I think the essential idea there is that you think of a society in which people in the Rolsian form, people yet don't know who they are. are going to be as it were, and the draw of the principles that should have priority and which should determine the basic institutions of society on the basis of that veil of ignorance when you're not guided by your vested interests, but you are choosing the institutions on the basis of what would be fair without knowing whether you're going to be rich or poor or
with a beautiful face and a good singing voice or not and and other qualities. And I think this is a remarkably important exercise. My approach is not a contractarian approach and it's very strongly influenced by Rawls, who was a close friend, big influence, and and a teacher too. I met him long time ago in the sixties and in nineteen sixty eight, sixty-nine. Uh actually I when I was in Delhi University, but I came to Harvard to teach for a year as a visiting professor. And jointly with John Rawls and Kenneth Arrow, a great economist, uh we offered there was an Arrow Rawls and Sen course offered in sixty eight, sixty nine. Quite an interesting course. enjoyed it and I was influenced by it. We had a number of um very exciting students, including Alan Gibbard and so on.
They have made their own marks in that course. following the work that they were doing when they were John Roll, they have um pursued philosophy and and really changed the contour of the subject. So he's a big influence and he's a big influence on me. Well where do I disagree with him?
How does Sen critique Rawls’s contractarian “veil of ignorance” approach?
I think the first thing is that I don't think the pursuit of justice is really concerned with looking for the perfectly just world because
and many of them are extremely undernourished in a way that is completely unnecessary. There's a c issue of injustice there. But the removal of these injustices will not make the world perfectly just. They are comparison between one situation which is unjust with another which unjust, but they're not unjust in the same way. That is, one of them has eliminated some identifiable injustice. So I think in my um exercise as I see the theory of justice is mainly concerned with the removal of injustices. And even when all the ones that you identify on which on the basis of reasoning you could have an agreement with people as to which of them must go. And which of them should be seen as intolerable injustice.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Amartya Sen and what is his connection to Rawls’s theory of justice?
0:19–3:47
2
How does Sen critique Rawls’s contractarian “veil of ignorance” approach?
3:47–9:36
3
Why does Sen argue that removing specific injustices is more important than modeling a perfectly just world?
9:36–13:40
4
What historical examples (slavery, women’s rights) illustrate Sen’s focus on eliminating injustices?
13:40–18:36
5
How does Sen distinguish between perfectly just institutions and a perfectly just society?
18:36–24:00
6
Why does Sen say that institutions cannot be evaluated without considering human behavior?
24:00–26:51
7
What does Sen mean by a “plurality of reasons” for justice instead of a single hierarchy?
26:51–27:07
8
How can we reach practical agreements on reducing injustice without an ideal theory of justice?
27:07–27:15
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