Very helpful Amazon reviews on Sen's latest book "The Idea of Justice"

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48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
What is old is very good. What is new is disappointing., September 5, 2009
By Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews


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Amartya Sen, recipient of the Nobel prize in Economics in 1998, is a very special economist. He has first-rate technical skills, he is a fine interpreter of the empirical evidence on the causes of famine and poverty around the world, he has a deep commitment to egalitarian social change, and he is a looming figure in modern political philosophy. Sen is a key contributor to the current movement towards integrating the insights of the various social sciences towards better understanding of society and increasing our capacity to improve social policy interventions in to economic and political life.

The Idea of Justice is a large, meandering book that is accessible to the novice in social theory and political philosophy, and includes most of the ideas Sen has championed in his long and productive career, plus a new idea that leads him beyond such established contemporary political philosophers as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.

In much the same way as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, Sen's commitment to freedom and democracy is based not on distributional issues, but rather on a deep understanding of the importance of communicative discourse and public debate in making the good society. This commitment fits well with Sen's major contribution to welfare economics, which is providing an alternative to the selfish and materialistic Homo Economicus of standard neoclassical economics. For traditional economics, well-being is a function of the goods and services and individual enjoys. For Sen, well-being is a function of how fully and vigorously an individual exercises his human capabilities. Democracy, then, is less about who gets what, and more about how people come to craft both their personal life-meaning and their collective destiny through political participation and discourse.

As an indication of the power of Sen's reasoning, he shows clearly how a commitment to a capabilities orientation to human welfare helps understand why income and welfare are conceptually and factually distinct and only somewhat correlated. Sen treats poverty as an inability to develop and exercise one's personal capacities. Thus, a family in the United States can have much higher income than another in a third world country and yet suffer from poverty while its third world counterpart does not. This is because the US family may be socially dysfunctional, or may live in a community that fails to provide the social relations and cooperative institutions that allow people to develop their capacities even though lacking in income.

Sen's innovation in this book is to critique the "transcendental institutionalism" of such traditional moral philosophers as Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Dworkin and Rawls, who seek to define a set of social institutions that foster "perfect justice," Sen argues that perfect justice is not capable of attainment, and it is better to focus on how society can be improved from its current state, give its actual pattern of injustices.

I have two major criticisms of this book. The first is that Sen has not updated his model of the individual or his critique of the neoclassical model of economic man since his important contributions of thirty or forty years ago. You would not discover by reading this book that there has been a virtual revolution in economic thought concerning human nature starting in the 1980's with behavioral game theory, experimental economics, and more recently, neuroeconomics. We can now go far beyond Sen's rather diffident and anemic argument that people are not always completely selfish. Perhaps Sen considers this new research deficient in some way. Or, perhaps such empirical findings do not belong in the same league as the venerable Western and Indian philosophers he quotes so liberally. We simply do not know what Sen thinks about this, or what his motives were to ignore this rich vein of research of obvious relevance to his argument.

My second problem is a bit more fundamental. I am extremely skeptical concerning the whole approach to justice that has dominated analytical philosophy since Rawls' seminal A Theory of Justice. Sen critiques John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, G. A. Cohen and other left-liberal thinkers on grounds of the impossibility of perfect justice. However, the real problem with these thinkers is that they believe justice is a matter of the distribution of wealth and income. This is not at all what justice means to most voters and citizens, who rather follow Robert Nozick in believing that justice consists in individuals getting that to which they are entitled by virtue of legitimate production, exchange, and inheritance. Serious thinkers must find the idea that ideal justice consists of complete social equality to be deeply repugnant.

In this view, justice is not fairness at all. Nevertheless, we can accept an entitlement view of justice and yet recognize that poverty, not some abstract inequality of income and wealth, is a real enemy of social wellbeing, not because it is unfair but because it is a preventable disease, like malaria, that we should not permit to inflict the young and innocent. Full social equality, then, is not a lamentable unattainable ideal state, but rather a thankfully unattainable monstrosity because it presupposes the absence of personal accountability and effectivity.

Sen's critique of the Rawlsian tradition is anemic and trivial. For this reason I find this book deeply disappointing. It is altogether too genteel in dealing with a philosophical tradition that deserves to be bitterly criticized, not gently reproached for its excessive zeal in the pursuit of an unattainable ideal.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
Improving justice by ranking alternatives, August 28, 2009
By l. van den muyzenberg "laurens" (Vallauris France) - See all my reviews

Amartya Sen presents the remarkable conclusion that justice is a process that never becomes absolutely perfect. He presents very convincingly the view that you need to compare many alternatives "social choice" and discuss them widely with many people from different categories, also considering what other countries have done and rank these alternatives. In ranking you should not fall in the trap of mathematical optimization procedures. It requires common sense.
This does not mean you need ranking for gross injustices like racial discrimination. Sen rejects the Rawls idea of Justice as Fairness as it is one, may be the best one, of the absolute just systems. In fact all thinkers or politicians that claim to have developed an absolutely perfect system are wrong. Very important is to look not only at a system from a theoretical justice point of view but also equally important what is the reality of application at the level of all citizens.
He also makes a very interesting review of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. His view is that the "rights" are not rights in the sense that they are legal rights to be enforced. They are however very important as aspects to be considered in the ranking of alternatives.
Those that might have hoped to find a system of justice that is absolutely right will be disappointed, those are looking ways to improve justice will be very enthusiastic about this book Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Can we reason our way to justice?, September 24, 2009
By Jay C. Smith (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews


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The Idea of Justice
Amartya Sen is a very smart and distinguished man, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, an eminent political theorist, and an effective advocate of global human rights. I came to this book familiar with just some of his writing, only a small part of it, and I sought to refine my understanding of key contours of his thought. In spite of some shortcomings, I found The Idea of Justice satisfying in that regard. It is reflective of the scope and depth of his interests cultivated over the past 50 plus years. It is one book where the "Acknowledgements" section (a full eight pages) alone is instructive, suggesting how his thinking has been shaped through collaboration with dozens of other intellectual high achievers at the finest of the world's universities.

Here Sen inquires why we need a theory of justice and asks what such a theory might do. He criticizes certain notable theories and outlines his own. His chief target is contract theories, what he calls "arrangement-focused" conceptions of justice. According to Sen such theories are not an especially useful guide to practical reasoning, they do not help much to resolve the claims of competing values, and they focus exclusively on institutions and not on actual behavior.

He faults John Rawls' theory of justice as fairness for these and other reasons. He considers Rawls' ideal to be "transcendental," the specification of a perfect world based on a fiction. In contrast, Sen argues that we do not need an answer to the question of "what is a just society" in order to have a systematic theory of comparative justice.

He advocates a "realization-focused" approach to justice, one which stresses actual behavior and comparative choices among ways to live. He relies on certain core concepts drawn from his lifetime body of work, notably social choice theory and the human capabilities perspective on desired outcomes.

The capabilities perspective, as Sen frames it, differs from utilitarianism because it considers people's freedoms and obligations, not just the utilities they enjoy. People have agency interests and values, he says -- the ability to reason, appraise, choose, participate, and act -- not just needs for well-being.

While Sen describes these and other features of his desired theory of justice, he does not pull them together here into a rigorous comprehensive statement in the manner that we find in Rawls, for example. Instead, he seems to suggest that the details in any given circumstance might be worked out through reasoned discussion. Human rights are ethical claims that hold up to unobstructed public scrutiny, he contends. He recognizes that in many cases conflicts among competing values will remain after considering all of the arguments, but proposes that many cases will also lead to resolution.

I was left with the sense that Sen has spent too many years in seminar rooms too little exposed to the level of public policy debates portrayed in the popular media, that he himself has a transcendental expectation. It may be revealing of his unfounded confidence in open public debate that he offers universal health care as the example of where we can make progress even though there is disagreement on the means to achieve it.

So, while many elements of Sen's ideas about justice have appeal, do not expect a tidy and fully persuasive theory of his own to emerge. You will also need to tolerate repetition (introduction of an idea, later development of it, and then further references back to it) and either have some willingness to be side-tracked by substantive footnotes or possess the ability to remain oblivious to them. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The Idea of Justice, October 18, 2009
By Adnan M. S. Fakir - See all my reviews


Within the past month I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Amartya Sen thrice; at a conference, at a discussion and signing of his new book "The Idea of Justice," and at a dinner where I was honored to be able to hold a long discussion with him. Here I will draw on my understanding of him and his subject to give a brief review of his new book, "The Idea of Justice."

One of the carried misconceptions that I would like to point out in the beginning is that Sen is not a quote-and-quote hard boiled economist. Rather he is more of a philosopher of economic thought. As such most of his work carries inherent philosophies which can shake off the first readers. "The Idea of Justice" is entirely a building of philosophical ideologies as he draws on economic reasoning, current policies, laws and politics. One of the introductory examples Sen provides involves taking three kids and a flute. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because it is the fruit of her own labor. How do we decide between these three legitimate claims?

Sen argues that with the current system which follows policies and laws based on a search of a "just society" as put forth by English Enlightenment Philosopher Thomas Hobbes and followed on by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and the contemporary most influential figure John Rawls (thereby often being referred to as the Rawlsian project; much of Sen's critique is towards Rawls' 1971 book, "A Theory of Justice"), there is no arrangement that can help us resolve this dispute in a universally accepted just manner. What really enables us to resolve the dispute between the three children is the value we attach to the pursuit of human fulfillment, removal of poverty, and the entitlement to enjoy the products of one's own labor.

Who gets the flute depends on your philosophy of justice. Bob, the poorest, will have the immediate support of the economic egalitarian. The libertarian would opt for Carla. The utilitarian hedonist will bicker a bit but will eventually settle for Anne because she will get the maximum pleasure, as she can actually play the instrument. While all three decisions are based on rational arguments and correct within their own perspective, they lead to totally different resolutions.

The current system, Sen argues, revolves around an imaginary "social contract" where we are trying to make ideally just institutions assuming that people will comply with it. Sen identifies two major problems with this "arrangement focused" or "transcendental institutionalism" approach. The first is a feasibility problem of coming to an agreement on the characteristics of a "just society;" the second a redundancy problem of trying to repeatedly identify a "just society."

What Sen proposes is a "realization-focused" approach that "concentrates on the actual behavior of people, rather than presuming compliance by all with ideal behavior." Instead of focusing on an ideally just society which is influencing much of the recent political economy, Sen's alternative focuses more on the removal of manifesting injustice on which we all rationally agree and the advancement of justice from the world as we see, instead of looking for perfection, which Sen points out, can never be attained.

What makes Sen's writing more appealing to me is how he correlates many previously almost sadly unnoticed eastern ideologies with the western approaches, including those of Kautliya, the Indian political economy and strategy writer now claimed to be the Indian Machiavelli (which is funny because Kautliya was from the 4th century BC being compared to Machiavelli from the 15th century) and from early Indian Jurisprudence, namely the niti and the nyaya, to mention a few. Although Amartya Sen touches on these eastern topics as inspirational matters, I would be more satisfied if he had gone into more detail of their analysis in his book, "The Idea of Justice."
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
seeds of further work to be done, October 20, 2009
By Arjun Menon (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews


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This is an accessible yet dense book. Sen essentially argues that it is extremely difficult and likely past the ability of people to start axiomatically about how a justice system should be formed and deduce the practical results. This stems from the fact that the elements that people define as the parameters of their freedom are multidimensional versus something reducible to say utility, or even a ranking system of priorities that Rawls prioritized on. The repurcussion of this lack of strict relationships between the various degrees of "freedom" that people live under he reasons (along the lines of mathematical economists) there dont exist strict "optimal" solutions. He makes the point clear by referring to self referential utility and the fact that in such systems and especially the real world, our freedoms are all interconnected and thus there are sometimes no way to go about ranking justice from a bottom up perspective.

I think its hard to not agree with that as a thesis. An obvious example of an incredibly difficult practical problem to solve via ranking individual freedoms would be something like the environment and global warming. Another current example is solving moral hazard problems, especially within finance- there are a MASS of perspectives of right and wrong depending on how one weighs aggregate policy repurcussions against the need to promote lesson learning. Sen argues that problems which involve large systems need to be looked at as a complex system and judged by the repurcussions of the social architecture and then the "wisdom of crowds" both local and global shed light on the greatest injustices which should then be dealt with. Sen takes a very practical approach to justice as the complexities of trying to actually define a system of justice in a philosophical axiomatic way is unlikely to yield the results that are hoped for due to the multitude of priorities and competing interests. He doubts the philosophical exercises that give weight to the conclusion that our measures of right and wrong are all on the same side of the scale that we define as right and wrong (ie right is right wrong is wrong under veil of ignorance) and articulates this with one of his opening example of the kids and what their rights/entitlements are. To be honest, i would doubt that justice philosophers dont readily acknowledge a lot of what Sen says, but defer to the fact that one cannot define justice in a philophical sense from the top down. That is what things like common law and political lawmaking have evolved from (one can debate whether this is effective but our institutions allow for bottom up modification based off top down repurcussions), our inherint understanding that as things evolve, so does the justice system. Things that shape judges and political opinions are often intellectual movements that originated via people doing thought experiments of how we might be biased and what are ways to remove that (veil of ignorance).

Im surprised at the dissillusionment in the theory of rawls. It has served an extremely valuable service, and i think those people who work on describing new social contract ideas have the potential to be very influential on institutional arragnement. Similarly so will social choice theorists as they will counterbalance some of the over deduction used from foundational exploration by philosophers. Its hard not to see how both are necessary places for people to be working. One reviewer critiques the lack of embracing behavioral economics and the leaning on more walrusian style actors. I personally dont get that at all, and see the whole thesis as evidence that people cant be reduced to agents operating under utility maximization. One cant start from a framework of behavioural finance because it has no assumption basis from which results follow, its primarily a results based field for which results are used to work out internal dynamics- which is what Sen is saying we need to adopt.

All in all, the book has a LOT of material and ideas, it gets you interested in more, but is really far from complete. I didnt get a sense of chapters following one another particularly, but perhaps there is no real way of doing that well either given the amount Sen was trying to cover. I plan on reading more on the subject. The mental prodding the book does is reason enough to buy it, but this book definately wont leave one feeling like, ah, this is the final chapter, not even close. This sort of book really should open up debate, in a constructive way, but is unable to make one feel like we have the tools to measure justice in a more fair way. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Democracy as Discussion - A Postmodern Theory of Justice, October 8, 2009
By T1818 - See all my reviews

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Professor Sen attempts to base Democracy on sustained reasoning and attempts to start the sustained reasoing from a point at which there are only value free interests as for Professor Sen there are no universal values or truths. 'The Idea of Justice' is firmly in line with Lyotard's Postmodernism where there are no 'metanarratives'. The sustained reasoning of Sen is much different than what sustained reasoning is generally taken to be. With Sen sustained reasoning is admitting from the start that there is no answer and then adressing various hot button issues briefly. The sustained reasoning of Professor Sen is more akin to a free associating after a very wide ranging reading than the presentation of 'one long argument'. Professor Sen has 10 qualifications for every idea put forth. Strangely this book is more or less completely disconnected from the events and difficulties of the day. Basically there is free speech in the US and this has covered all groups since the 60's. The US still has lots and lots of problems. Who is going to undertake this sustained, reasoned discussion? How does Professor Sen intend to convince Rupert Murdoch, Glen Beck et al that is the way to go? Or Keith Olberman for that matter. Of course, Professor Sen isn't going to try. Of course this reasoned discussion isn't going to occur on TV or via the newspapers or the blogosphere. The only place this reasoned discussion could take place is in academia. So what does this all all add up to? 10 different liberal positions debated endlessly in academia where all sides admit that there is no grounding for the views put forth and while this is going in the neo-cons who basically live by 'Contingeny, Irony and Solidarity' march the nation to war, poverty and a cultural wasteland with 10,000 indidiviuals redescribing, under the sign of eternal veriities, events across the world and who do this becuase they have zip else to do because they created a cultural wasteland. 'The idea of Justice' is remarkably silent about the basis of Democracy which is of course balance of powers. Sen presents a theory of Democracy where Demoracy is run along the lines of a seminar which is clearly at best a very ivory tower view of Democracy. Of course the point of these discussions is not to get every one's opinions and intersts but it is to shape opinions and interests. Democracy as discussion is the opening gambit of an academic crowd control measure. 'The Idea of Justice' is grounded by inferentialism, that there is no Given. Reasons lay upon reasons lay upon reasons and on and on. Now neo-cons very likely hold that this is so, (I think this is clearly false) but neo-cons will shout eternal verities and those who keep moving debates back by coming up with new sets of reasons are going to loose all discussions, things just get more complicated and more arcane. Sen seems to be recommeding the baby be split in tenths and basically the baby is no one's baby so the baby is going to get split. 'A Theory of Justice' is totally secure from the 'The Idea of Justice'. At worst 'A Theory of Justice' is the premier example of real sustained reasoning, 'one long argument' in the last 50 years in political philosophy. Now of course free speech is important but the point here is that free speech allows the one best plan to emerge and then hopefully this plan is ratified by voting. There are facts and not just competing interests where everyone is basically on target. France has a better health system than the US and that is flat out fact, for example. Now Professor Sen is clearly a very civilized individual and clearly personally liberal but 'The Idea of Justice' is recipe for liberal disaster. Of course civility is called for and of course one has to live with the fact that sometimes the vote goes against one but one has to stand up for the Truth which is Present. A final point has to be added. 'The Idea of Justice' offers zip in the ways of Justice given that one is not actively engaged in public debate as I am not. All 'The Idea of Justice' tells indviduals standing by is to accept the blooming confusion. 'A Theory of Justice' far from being transcendental on the other hand is a book which one can read and which can guide one even if one is not involved in public discussion and, not to be scoffed at in any way, this is of course the main success of 'The Theory of Justice', to date. A final, final point. The 'Powers That Be' have always used the argument that the 'plebians' have to be kept down because doing menial tasks, working the fields etc is what is in line with the 'capabilities' of the 'plebians'. There is clearly zip inherently emancipatory about stressing cabablities. Down through all of history the argument has basically been used to repress. John Rawls stress on basic goods is, of course, emancipatory. 'The Idea of Justice' isn't really directed at assisting disavantaged groups except as an afterthought as the last chapter makes clear. Virtually 'The Idea of Justice' is directed at the capabiities of academics vis-a-vis a Common Good which would be dictated rather than agreed to happily, so to speak, bypassing Arrow's Impossiblity Theorem. Always with a Postmodernism such is offered here there is an exoteric anarchic 'freewheeling' component but always too there is an esoteric more totalitarian component which here would be service to a dictated Common Good. Always the 'Common Good' these days demands that the whole be hidden and actually assisting people isn't really required. On the 'plus' side one's ideas about the world can be false, one can be ironic about one's work, as the ideas are being put forward to hide the Whole but one must be clear that one has abandoned the scientific enterprise. People are addressed as unconcious automatons and this has to be as the Whole must be hidden. What of course happens is rather than the Good being effected noise is inserted into the system. That an attempt is ongoing to hide the whole is not that huge a leap. For example there is zip chance that Rupert Murdoch believes much of what Glen Beck or Bill O'Riley blather on about. At the limit the 'Common Good' becomes a Hegelian negation of the West. Redescriptions of the work of academics who fail to use capabilities for the 'Common Good' is the enforcement tool. The 'ideas' of the 'The Idea of Justice' are quite influential. Obama isn't adrift. Obama is in the grip of 'The Idea of Justice', whether willingly or unwillinging is unclear. Obama's Presidency is predicated on the Obama presidency, rather than being about fixing the banking system or healthcare or Afghanistan, as being about a build phase for neo-liberalism as described by 'The Idea of Justice'. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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