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Sen and the art of justice by Kancha Ilaiah

It is well known that Amartya Sen is the greatest economist that India has ever produced. His credentials were well established even before he got the Nobel Prize. With his latest book — The Idea of Justice — he has also established himself as a world-class moral philosopher who could come up with great abstractions and generalisations that no other Indian thinker could achieve earlier.

The Indian academia, so far, has not produced any thinker who could write a political philosophical book that the global universities could use as text that throws light on new modes of thinking. But Sen’s new book has the potential to be used across the world as a major political philosophy work after that of John Rawls’ The Theory of Justice.

Sen’s The Idea of Justice is written as a positive critique of already existing general theories of justice, especially Rawls’ The Theory of Justice.

The theory of justice emerged as part of the European social contractualism and institutionalism. The first school, starting with Thomas Hobbes, produced thinkers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. According to Sen, these thinkers produced a theory of justice by adopting "the contractarian approach". John Rawls too proceeded in that approach.

In contrast to this approach, Adam Smith, Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill adopted a comparative reasoning approach to reduce injustices in the lives of people. Sen too proceeds on the lines of this second school to contest several main arguments of John Rawls.

If one looks at justice from the point of the second school, unlike the theoretical formulations of John Rawls’ notion of justice (which sees justice as fairness), the scope of removal of all forms of exploitation increases.

The second major way Sen expands the theory of justice is by examining the non-Euro-American theoretical formulations — particularly drawing arguments about justice that evolved in India and other Asian countries. He, thus, has made a whole discourse on justice that could appeal to the global readership.

Sen’s achievement shows that it was not just colonialism that was responsible for the lack of growth of philosophy in contemporary India, but also the lack of evolution of writers of great quality of abstraction. That was one reason why political thought in India and in other Asian countries remained poor.

The Euro-American centered view, in many theoretical discourses, was confined to their own societal experiences and arguments, of course with very able generalisations. But what Western thinkers missed out were the experiences and arguments that evolved in other ancient, medieval and modern societies.

The main problem of the Asian societies, however, was that they have had very ancient, even medieval and modern institutional structures that dealt with justice but did not produce moral and social thinkers who could mould their experiences and arguments into a theory that could appeal to the global readership. Sen, fortunately, acquired a quality of theoretical mind that could generalise the Indian experiences and arguments.

In his book The Idea of Justice, he draws on the ideas and arguments of many Indian thinkers — particularly those of Buddha, Ashoka and Akbar, and weaves them into a larger theoretical discourse on social justice. In terms of ideas he tries to use two Sanskrit (now they exist in many regional languages) moral justice concepts, niti and nyaya, as two distinct concepts that delivered justice in different modes. He says, "The former idea of niti relates to organisational propriety as well as behavioural correctness, whereas the latter, nyaya, is concerned with what emerges and how, and in particular the lives that people are actually able to lead".

Along with these two concepts, Sen should have also probed into the Buddhist concept of Dhamma which has much deeper basis for positive justice than nyaya. The Sanskritic concept of nyaya was never free from caste bias while delivering justice to people, whereas the notion of Dhamma repeatedly demands justice — social, economic, spiritual and political — equally being made available to everyone, irrespective of one’s birth in any caste.

Buddha raises the moral basis of justice more categorically than what Plato (based on Socrates’ arguments) did in Republic. Somehow Sen missed out on that score, may be because he did not look at recent literature on the Buddhist notion of Dhamma.

However, Sen draws a good example from Buddha’s teachings that justice based on love (Dhamma always invokes justice based on love and compassion and not merely based on compulsion) between mother and child is far superior and long lasting, than the justice that gets expressed between two individuals based on a contract.

The just and human relationship between the mother and child (till the child grows to a stage of autonomous life) is not based on institutional bondage (like institutional justice) but on human bonds.

It cannot be explained through the concept of nyaya, which gave enough scope for caste inequalities, but the Buddhist Dhamma never gave such a scope for caste inequities. Quite rightly Sen locates positive welfarism in Ashoka’s Buddhist period that could be compared with that of many of the "Enlightenment rulers" of Europe. However, his understanding of Kautilya and Manu falls short of the dalit-bahujan perceptions of justice.

According to Sen, "reasoned comparative approach" to justice with a global perspective would give us a far more creative understanding of justice than the one based on "transcendental institutional approach" that John Rawls adopted. Since competing plurality of principles is a reality of life, there are multiple experiments with the notion of justice in the whole world. In order to have a just society Akbar experimented to create a secular concept of justice, even by going out of the framework of his religion — Islam. Sen says that when Akbar was making serious attempts to take the state out of the controls of religion, "the inquisitions were in full swing and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600".

But the problem was the later development of many kinds of fundamentalist schools in India, combined with caste fragmentations and lack of open education for all castes and communities. This made India an uncreative country. In that sense Sen’s book makes us proud. Writing the book became possible as he was educated in English-medium and got exposed to global knowledge systems. Such an opportunity must be given to all children of India so that many such moral philosophers emerge.