Sen Argues Against Mainstream Theory of Social Justice

Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard professor of economics and philosophy, argued against what he called the mainstream theory of social justice in a talk at Harvard Law School’s Pound Hall yesterday.

Sen argued that the transcendental theory of justice, which he attributed to philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick, overlooks important aspects of justice by concentrating narrowly on what it would take to have a perfectly just society, rather than on improving existing, imperfect social structures.

“Justice-enhancing changes demand comparative assessment, not any immaculate identification of the just society,” Sen said.

Sen won the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions to welfare economics. Sen pioneered the “capability approach” for measuring a citizen’s social well-being, and his work has been included in the United Nations Human Development Report.

In her introduction to the speech, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan said Sen had earned the nickname “Mother Teresa of economics.”

The talk drew a diverse audience, with many Law School students. Christel A. Green, a third-year law student, said she attended the event out of an interest in “economics and its effect on law and the best ways to help poor nations develop,” a subject that Sen has focused on for much of his career.

In his lecture, Sen outlined the Enlightenment-era divergence in theories of social justice that produced two main philosophical positions: transcendental institutionalism, which focuses on the nature of a perfectly just society, and realization-focused comparisons, which compare levels of justice in societies.

The former approach, advocated by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, draws a clear line between the just and unjust while the comparative theory, influenced by the writings of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft, discriminates between degrees of justice.

A proponent of the realization-focused comparisons, Sen said he was skeptical that societies could ever agree on a single set of principles—a requirement of the transcendental theory.

“Justice-enhancing changes demand comparative assessment, not any immaculate identification of the just society,” Sen said.

He summed up this transcendental view of justice by quoting Thomas Nagel’s conclusion that “global justice is not a viable subject for discussion, since the elaborate institutional demands needed for a just world cannot be met at the global level at this time.”

Sen said he considers the transcendental theory’s focus on rules, rather than on their effect on people, a major shortcoming.

“Justice cannot be indifferent to the lives of people,” he said.