Yogesh Yadav, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat
PENGUIN BOOKS (2009) (P 155-193)
INTRODUCTION
Though the central concern of Sen’s Idea of justice is to find the most just society by comparing the existing and non-existing social alternatives, which are based on a diversity of reasons and democratic principles, the dogmatic pursuit of an idealised, perfectly just society remains the main focus of John Rawls and his contemporaries and predecessors in the social contract school of philosophy. It’s important to note that none of these schools of thinking is uniquely Western. They did so unaware of similar arguments taking place in other societies, such as the enlightenment movement in the West and the argumentative tradition in the East.
Since Europe’s Enlightenment Movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has produced two intellectual traditions in the West: (a) the social contract school of philosophers such as Kant and other social contract school figures such as Hobbes and Locke, (b) the social realization-focused comparative approach led by Smith, Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Bentham and Mill (c) the contractarian tradition. Sen also calls the former transcendental institutionalism, which “concentrates its attention on what it labels as perfect justice, rather than on relative comparisons of justice and injustice”. Rather than discovering criteria for one option being less unfair than another, this inquiry is focused at determining the essence of the just (p.6). However, in their quest for a fair society and institutions, contractarians fail to see how the actions of institutions and people affect the final result. As opposed to these people, those who adhere to a comparative and social realization-focused approach stay focused instead on transcendental searches for a perfectly just society in order to arrive at the least unjust society through “comparisons of societies that already exist or could potentially emerge”. As a result, their concern rises to the level of ‘praxis,’ which is the eradication of systemic injustice. Though the ‘idea of justice’, Sen offers is a departure from both ‘transcendental institutionalism’ and ‘realization-focused comparative’ theories. Sen acknowledged his affinity for the latter because its primary concern is finding a society with the least amount of injustice possible, whether or not alternatives exist. He thus, poses the question in a different way: “how would justice be advanced?” rather than what would be absolutely fair institutions? As a result, Sen’s concern for social justice causes him to shift away from an approach that is comparative in nature and toward one that is centred on actual manifestation. Sen’s ‘transcendental institutionalism’ has two major flaws. He refers to it as the ‘infeasibility’ and ‘redundancy’ dilemma, and goes into detail about both. The quest for just institutions is predicated on the assumption that society and just institutions have come to an accord via reason.
