 |
|
We cut teacher's pal |
|
|
|
|
 |
| |
BOOK |
|
| |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Practical justice |
| |
|
|
| |
Santosh Kr. Singh |
|
| |
The Idea of Justice
By Amartya Sen
Published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books
Pages: 467
Price: Rs. 699
THE idea of a perfectly just society has been a chimera. It is in order to realise that ideal that elaborate structures and institutions of justice were erected and fanatically pursued and nurtured. Theorists and philosophers have passionately articulated the related concerns and the need for an absolutely just society.
Centuries have passed but the world is far from that Utopian vision with gross cases of injustice happening all around us. What, perhaps, vary are only the nomenclatures and degrees of discrimination across societies and cultures.
'The Idea of Justice', the recently published book by Nobel-laureate Prof Amartya Sen, interrogates the precepts and premises of some of the most articulated and established understandings on the concept of justice. Prof Sen's argument is simple: a theory of justice that can serve as the basis of practical reasoning must include ways of judging how to reduce injustice and advance justice, rather than aiming only at the characterisation of a perfectly just society -- a dominant feature of many theories. Critiquing both the dominant perspectives on justice, that of social contract theorists pursued and led by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau on the one hand, and the other developed by contemporary political philosopher John Rawls, Prof Sen's emphasis is on the centrality of public reasoning in establishing conditions for a less unjust society.
These enlightenment theorists and their transcendental approach to justice overemphasised on how to establish 'just institutions' and gave some derivative and subsidiary roles to behavioral features. Prof Sen makes a departure here and argues that, "justice is ultimately connected with the way people's lives go and not merely with the nature of the institutions surrounding them".
As he further comments, "a practical concern, no less than theoretical reasoning, seems to demand a fairly radical departure in the analysis of justice". Democracy, for example, has to be judged not just by institutions that formally exist but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard.
Prof Sen proposes here a pluralist perspective on justice which is characterized or driven not so much by the fancied goal of finding a universal definition of a just society but by the dynamics of actual, everyday life of the people. The everyday world is about competing choices and alternatives and hence the existence and importance of plurality of reasoning in public discourse.
It is in the nature of reasoning, argues Prof Sen, that it does not allow all questions to be settled even in theory. So, far from rejecting or stifling or undermining such pluralities and trying to reduce them beyond the limits of reasoning, we should make use of them to construct a theory of justice.
In other words, Prof Sen's idea of justice marks a paradigm shift from an obsessive engagement with arrangement-centric rules and institutional structures to people-centric approach with sensitivity to their behavioral contexts and practical reasoning.
To further elucidate his position, Prof Sen makes a reference to the concepts of 'niti' and 'nyaya', as mentioned in our ancient texts, and argues that while 'niti' is important it is the invocation of the spirit of 'nyaya' which makes the process of justice comprehensible.
The beauty and profundity of Prof Sen's arguments lie in the fact that they transcend the dichotomies of the East and the West and go on to create a vision for a global society with the agenda of enhancement of global justice.
Prof Sen, in his characteristic style, borrows from diverse sources, more specifically from the religious texts and philosophies of the Indic traditions to develop his arguments as he finds no necessary adversarial relations between the East and the West.
For instance, there are many meeting grounds between Gautam Buddha's reasoning and the European Enlightenment traditions. The central themes of importance, however, are the questions that awakened the thinking of Prince Siddhartha, who later became Buddha, as he realised the grossness of injustices and misery around. These concerns are quite integral to the idea of justice.
Having established the theoretical groundwork, the book goes on to elaborate its central postulates through extensive discussions on a range of issues of contemporary relevance from democracy as a public reason to the idea of freedoms and capabilities to the question of human rights and global imperatives.
The final chapter titled 'Justice and the World' recognises the importance of the idea of global justice, much beyond its parochial understanding within the nation-state framework. With increasing interdependence in the era of globalisation, there is enormous possibility of applying a common humanitarian and pluralist understanding of justice in the arena of human rights, international terrorism and public health issues such as AIDS.
'The Idea of Justice' is an extraordinary work by one of the most influential public thinkers of our time. This is a path-breaking book as it exposes the damage inflicted upon the very essence of the idea of justice as a result of fetishisation of institution-building in our quest for a perfectly just world. We allowed 'niti' to dominate and 'nyaya' to disappear from our worldview of justice. As a result, the big fish still swallows the small fish.
Prof Amartya Sen wants us to relocate and centralise the elements of 'nyaya' so that a new world with lesser injustices and with a built-in perpetual urge for justice enhancement can be ushered in.
---------
The reviewer is a Chandigarh-based sociologist and writer. |
|
| |
more ... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
