Learning from Akbar, Ashoka, Arjuna and Kautilya

The Idea Of Justice
Amartya Sen
Penguin
496 pages
Rs699

We are prone to remark that there is no justice in the world. The provocation for this observation may stem either from an immediate and exasperated sense of personal deprivation or a larger perception of some durable and insoluble problem such as poverty.

There is an intuitive sense that injustice is a compound of the unreasonable behaviour of other individuals (our sense of our own rectitude is usually strong!) and the irrationality or weakness of institutions and procedures.

In his new book, Amartya Sen makes the case, following Kant, for practical reason that seeks to take us beyond this impasse by mediating between abstract justice and real individuals through a stress on public reasoning.

A certain tradition of thinking about justice imagines a closed situation in which reasonable individuals get together and debate impartially about the distribution of resources. The assumption is that there are certain principles that all reasonable individuals would work with in an understanding of what is fair, and this unanimity would both precede and follow the debate.

Following on this, an institutional framework can be set up that ensures both fairness and justice. Sen argues that this is a transcendental approach which works with an idea of a perfectly just state that is the result of a perfect and permanent consensus about the good society.

His argument is that there can be no consensus regarding either justice or injustice, and that this is neither sufficient nor necessary in thinking about justice. A plurality of positions is both inevitable and indispensable to ensure a continuing evaluation of differences and inequalities.

Moreover, he stresses a comparative approach where discussion cannot take place within a closed system, and has to accommodate what Adam Smith called the “impartial spectator”: someone who brings in the concerns of a larger world and includes people not directly present but who could be affected by the results of a closed debate.

Ongoing public reasoning about justice that is inclusive in nature and capacious in accommodating differences is a more robust resolution than an ideal theory of justice enshrined in perfect institutions.

While Sen argues from within an Enlightenment tradition that includes as much Kant as Mary Wollstonecraft, he resists the insularity of much European philosophy. He draws as much on distinctions drawn from classical Indian philosophy as historical examples like Akbar and Ashoka.

For instance, in elaborating on the distinction between ideal theories of justice and the awareness of the ways of the world, Sen emphasises the distinction between niti and nyaya: the one relating to absolute propriety and the latter situated in an understanding of the life that people are able to lead. Public reasoning and contention mediates between the two.

Akbar laid stress on reason since even in disputing reason, we would have to give reasons for that disputation, and in doing so, would determine the framework of both duties and entitlements. Is justice better served by an appeal to the goodness of individuals or through the establishment of robust institutions that are transcendent and punitive in nature?

Sen deploys the examples of Ashoka’s rock edicts that made an appeal to a notion of virtue innate in humans, and Kautilya’s hard-headed appreciation of the necessity of danda embodied in institutions to keep the population in line.

He revisits the classic example of Krishna’s peroration to Arjuna on the battlefield in order to raise some fundamental issues, not least Krishna’s insistence on the niti of duty and Arjuna’s questioning of both niti and nyaya. Central to Arjuna’s doubts are three propositions.

First, that the world, rather than parochial considerations, must matter in our moral and political thinking. Second, that there has to be an insistence on personal responsibility for outcomes, which stands prior to a notion of abstract duty. Third, an acknowledgement of personal connection with those he is required to kill; a rejection of an absolute objectivity. A final and crystalline example from the Sutta-Nipata (3rd century BC to 2nd century BC), which has the discourses of the Buddha, reasons that if someone has the power to make a change that will reduce injustice in the world, then in itself that is the strongest argument for doing just that.

Sen sees public reasoning as a fundamental feature of democracy rather than the contemporary emphasis on the presence of institutions: elections, parliament and so on. Parallel to this is his robust rebuttal of western triumphalism of the unique provenance of democracy in European history, evolution and temperament.

Public discussion has been and is a feature of all societies and it is in sustaining such procedures that the possibility of justice lies. As he puts it, ‘discussionless justice’ that emphasises institutions alone can be an incarcerating idea.

Under-girding the entire discussion in the book is the simple counterfactual: what if people engaged in impartial public reasoning; would they not reach an agreement on injustice, on at least “redressable injustice” even if not the Holy Grail of justice?  

Dilip M Menon teaches history at Delhi University