Paper short abstract:

In articulating his Capability Approach to Justice, Amartya Sen seems to mark a departure from the dominant understandings of justice. Though he claims to engage from a completely different perspective, it seems he falls short of going beyond the contractarian reasoning of justice in society. This paper will critically examine his engagements and try to look for an alternative in Plato.

Paper long abstract:

Amartya Sen (1995, 2009) in developing the Capability Approach to justice, rejects the idea that institutions or transcendental institutions should necessarily be seen as manifestations of justice as put forth by John Rawls (1971). Instead of considering institutions as the locus of justice, we need to investigate whether, as an outcome of institutional justness, justice has been realized in society or not. He argued against the Rawlsian belief that under certain constraints on social contract, rational agents would necessarily arrive at a unanimous rational decision. He believes in the possibility of apprehending plural notions of impartial reasons from that kind of setup. Sen also opposes the approach that considers resources or distribution of it is the ultimate concern of social justice. Instead, he proposes capability which should be the primary object of distribution. Though Sen strongly advocates the concerns of equity in terms of taking into consideration different abilities to convert resources into valuable life, he does not deviate from the understanding that distribution is the ultimate concern of justice. The difference lies in the question of the object of distribution and the method of how it should be distributed. Equal distribution of resources would be inadequate in securing justice in society, instead, we should focus on the distribution of capabilities keeping in mind the heterogenous factors that influence people’s capability.

It seems that Sen’s engagement through his Capability Approach with modern political thought marks a significant departure from dominant liberal understandings of justice. We need to acknowledge his effort to make it a substantial departure and to provide an alternative way of how justice should be understood. But his engagement of understanding justice not only revolves around a similar kind of approach but also similar kinds of presuppositions. Similar to the dominant liberal understanding of justice and also to the Rawlsian conception of it. First, Sen does not disapprove of the contractarian reasoning of justice. Unsurprisingly, as a consequence, he does emphasize the role of institutions to bring justice to society. Instead of adhering to one kind of institution that Rawls talks about, we need a comparative analysis of institutions to see which one would better address the concerns of justice, not only in terms of policymaking but also in realizing justice. For justice to be there in society we tend to rely only on institutions. The fundamental question that arises here is - does a person’s being just/unjust, truthful/untruthful, being kind or not, honest/dishonest etc. have any relevance in making a society a just society?

Second, going against the idea of an objective/ideal conception of justice, Sen gives priority to identifying injustices in society and reducing that would amount to justice. In the absence of a standard criterion, apart from capability deprivation or non-proportional distribution of capabilities any form of injustice should have been counted as injustice and addressed accordingly. How this theory would address the problem of greed/desire to accumulate more in people which leads to corruption with impunity in the institutional sphere? Theoretically, is there any instrument to identify this as a problem and address it? While Sen’s approach is more into analyzing injustices and removal of them, it fails to consider the character trait of a corrupt person or dishonesty as unjust and responds to it accordingly. At best, it can measure the outcome of corruption in the form of capability deprivation of someone else. But it is less likely that it can treat the dishonesty/character trait of a corrupt person as a problem for justice to be there in society. Almost every theory of justice that emerges out of the social contract tradition seems to be incapable of addressing this issue plausibly. Problematizing Sen’s notion of justice, I would try to bring in Plato’s idea of justice in The Republic where he conceives justice primarily as a virtue of the human soul and explores how justice from the individual level gets reflected in the State institutions. He considers both of them i.e., individual and institution, as significant in establishing a just society. This way of understanding provides us with a holistic and much more profound way of being just individually and institutionally.

Keywords – Justice, Capability, Social Contract.