What Is Democracy? Reflections on Sen's Idea of Justice

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Notes

Notes

I want to thank R. A. Macdonald for reading my review-essay and sharing his comments on it with me.

1. Emphasis in passages cited is in the original unless otherwise indicated.

2. In a footnote Sen observes that Michael Polanyi in The Tacit Dimension argues that “an understanding of operations at a ‘higher’ level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars forming a ‘lower level’” and rejects the claim of scientists “that a mechanical explanation of living functions amounts to their explanation in terms of physics and chemistry” (414). Sen himself states, in regard to his summary of Nagel's position, with which, it is clear, he agrees: “Those distinctions remain, and my reason for asking what it is like to be a human being is different—it relates to the feelings, concerns, and mental abilities that we share as human beings” (414). While I find this sentence unhappily ambiguous—different from what? we ask—I understand Sen to mean that, in accepting Nagel's distinction between consciousness (mind or soul) and nature (or body) —consistent with Descartes, the contract theorists, Hegel, and Kierkegaard—his emphasis is on the actual lives (as distinct from the “minds”) of human beings.

3. Sen adds: “There is no automatic settlement of differences between distinct theories here, but it is comforting to think that not only do proponents of different theories of justice share a common pursuit, they also make use of common human features that figure in the reasoning underlying their respective approaches.” While the deprivations to which so many in our world are subject are terrible, “it would be even more terrible if we were not able to communicate, respond, and altercate” (415).

4. It is often not properly acknowledged that in the Leviathan Hobbes, like Spinoza in both the Ethics and the Theologico-Political Treatise, articulates the laws of nature that constitute the “social” contract in the terms of the golden rule. In Chap. XXVI he writes: “The laws of nature therefore need not any publishing, nor proclamation; as being contained in this one sentence, approved by all the world, Do not that to another, which thou thinkest unreasonable to be done by another to thyself.” He writes in Chap. XIV that, as the first law of nature is to follow peace, so the second is for a man, in giving up the natural right of doing anything he likes “in the condition of war,” to “be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself…. This is the law of the Gospel; whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them. And that law of all men [given in Latin], what you do not wish to be done to you do not do to another.” Also see Chaps. XV and XVII for additional formulations of the law of nature in the terms of the golden rule.

5. Sen indicates that the sustained and detailed critique that he provides in his book of the ideas of Rawls is to be understood to include Kant.

6. See, for example, Lev. 19.18, 34; Mat. 22.39; and Rom. 13.8-10. It is noteworthy that Sen, in a section of his book entitled “Who Is Our Neighbour?”, discusses Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan as found in Luke. He observes that the Samaritan who, as he was passing by, came to the aid of the wounded Israelite, “was now in a relationship with the injured person” (172). What he proceeds, consequently, to draw from the parable is that the “neighbourhood” that we construct through “our relations with distant people is something that has pervasive relevance to the understanding of justice… particularly… in the contemporary world” (172). He concludes, then, this brief section on the neighbor with the following remark: “There are few nonneighbours left in the world today” (172). What is strange, however, is that Sen, having invoked the concept of the neighbor, together with the idea of relationship, in reference to the parable in which Jesus famously exemplifies what it means to love the neighbor (it involves sacrifice or self-denial, in the words of Kierkegaard), does not mention in his book, let alone discuss, the golden rule or reflect on the significance of the fact that the neighbor, together with the ethical imperative that we are to love the neighbor as ourselves, is central to the contract theory while it is absent from the worlds of both ancient Greeks and ancient Indians. Nor does he take into consideration a thinker like Kierkegaard who points out in Works of Love that Socrates, together with paganism, generally, did not know the neighbor.

7. That the notion of transcendental perfection held by Sen appears to be Platonic rather than critical is evident in the analogy that he makes regarding aesthetic judgments. He observe that, if we hold that a particular painting, say, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, is perfect or ideal, that does not help us choose between paintings by, say, Dali and Picasso. In other words, a “transcendental alternative” does not allow us to make a judgment “about comparative justice” (16). He returns to this art analogy later when he remarks that the fact that we regard the Mona Lisa to be “the best picture in the world” does not allow us to judge between a Picasso and a Van Gogh: “it does not tell us much about the comparative merits of different social arrangements” (101). But what Sen fails to observe in his analogy with art is that, if I consider the Mona Lisa to be the best, perfect, ideal painting, what counts is not that I have this judgment but why. What counts, in other words, is that I give reasons for my judgment, that I elaborate the criteria for my judgment such that they can be tested, i.e. publically scrutinized, by others. All of us have the responsibility of testing our aesthetic criteria against other paintings to see whether they (criteria and/or paintings) hold up. The aesthetic imperative, consequently, states: critically test the perfect by the real as you test the real by the perfect. Or, as Hegel puts it: the actual is (must be shown to be) rational; and the rational is (must be shown to be) actual. This is what Kant calls the critique of pure reason.

8. Ethics, II. Def. 6. Also see III. Def. of the Affects 2 and IV. Pref. (the ending).

9. It is strange that, while Sen makes casual (unsystematic) use of “related” terms like relation, relationship, relative, relational, relativities (see, e.g., 98-100, 105-6, 129, 170, 172), he does not invoke the strong concept of the relationship of self and other as found in, for example, Buber's I-thou, Kant's categorical imperative, Hegel's process of mutual recognition, and so, ultimately, the social contract as based on the golden rule (the covenant: the relationship of God and human beings). Also, see note 6 above.

10. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant demonstrates that the stance of critical reason involves at one and the same time transcendental idealism and empirical realism.

11. Sen also writes: “The Smithian ‘impartial spectator’ is, of course, a device for critical scrutiny and public discussion” (135).

12. The Bhagavad Gita is consistent with the Upanishads, often called the Hindu scripture.

13. Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (New York: The New American Library, 1954).