Introduction

How does one meaningfully honor a thinker who has already received what are considered, in much of the globe, to be the highest of honors?

The answer will no doubt vary depending on the aims of a given scholar. However, for a genuine intellectual, or someone committed to the creation of generative and transformative thought, surely it never becomes redundant to be seriously and critically engaged. Indeed, one would hope that being prized does not amount to an ending, to being celebrated rather than debated. But additionally, and crucially for these purposes, even the most prestigious forms of recognition are ultimately bestowed by particular communities, though their reach and power may be considerable.

In selecting contributors to this special issue, I therefore prioritized those who form a distinctive community. More specifically, while sharing with Sen an anchoring in urgent questions rooted where the domains of philosophy, economics and politics meet, the authors of the articles that follow each, in mundane academic life, answer to different segments of the global audience; each is faced by specific pressing issues. Together, I thought, these 8 authors offer a unique mirror to the arguments that comprise The Idea of Justice.

While their collective reflection raises a diverse and diffuse range of questions, there are some recurrent themes. Put most crudely: for all of the contributors to this special issue, Sen is a good guy fighting the good fight in an establishment that is deeply flawed and often either blissfully unaware of the suffering and injustice surrounding it, or, worse, fundamentally indifferent about the more direct role it may play in perpetuating and actively rationalizing these trenchant inequalities.

Several of the contributors to this issue, with the profoundest of respect for Sen, wonder about the costs or whether one could productively, as Mathew Forstater generously puts it, refuse to make ‘a complete break’ with mainstream economic theory (and I could add, mainstream philosophy and studies of politics) in ‘the hope of bringing as many fellow travelers as possible along’ in the programme of improving the lives of all? Put slightly differently, could mainstream, establishment communities, rather than a small set of individuals within them, be allies of the projects of freedom and justice and transformation that Sen keenly illuminates?

This question is repeated with distinct inflections in Drucilla Cornell’s urging that Sen more fully embrace the implications of what she calls the ‘Kantian imagination’ and in Forstater’s pressing on why Sen does not explicitly demand a right to full employment given the richness of his own account about why such a right is indispensable. It also informs the contribution of Greg Graham who wishes that in challenging social contract tradition accounts of justice, Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, would directly consider the significance of unleashed multinational corporations on the projects of democratic self-governance that must be central to his vividly articulated realization-focused accounts of freedom.

It also helps to explain the frustration that surprised Sen in the contribution of Sanín-Restrepo and Méndez-Hincapié. They implore: How can one write and seriously consider matters of justice today without centering the enduring legacies of a global colonial system that left in its wake a line dividing who is considered human and who is left stratified beneath that category by which one could demand being treated ethically and as a political subject deserving of rights? Formulated slightly differently again: it is not that Sen does not substantially engage intellectual resources beyond those of western Europe. He does not fail to recognize that the West holds no positive monopoly on the history of institutions of democracy. In the Argumentative Indian he illustrates the centuries-long heterogeneous tradition of public debate in his home country and he has been a central figure in it through a variety of roles. But when push comes to shove, Sen’s The Idea of Justice, while outlining a theory of justice with global implications, is first and foremost addressed to and seeking to persuade Anglo academic communities based in the two Cambridges on either side of the northern Atlantic.

The point is not that there is anything wrong with these audiences. Instead the question (which is both political and philosophical) is whether making these one’s primary intellectual sounding board is consistent with the political aspirations that have informed the decades of scholarly contributions that Sen has made. For some readers and writers, there is no tension here. No issue. But for several of these authors, advancing the causes for which Sen is famous necessarily demands that we engage and address other communities.

This question extends to another methodological consideration about the relationship of general theories to specific empirical examples. While Sen is legitimately delighted by Shatema Threadcraft’s empirical illustration of the distinctiveness of a capabilities approach to questions of freedom and justice, with the challenges posed by Greg Graham, Sen suggests that the onus is on Graham to prove that Sen’s theory would struggle to make sense of the examples that he describes. There is no doubt that a defensible general theory combines some specific parameters with wide applicability to diverse cases. And it is true that to be general, a theory cannot mention and engage every particular empirical example. More, not mentioning these does not mean that the theory cannot deal with them. Additionally, the absence of ubiquitous examples of justice surely does not diminish the idea’s usefulness as a regulative ideal. If justice were the norm we would not need tomes devoted to its delineation. We do not, for example, write treatises on why murder is wrong.

Still, what is evident in Graham is a question concerning the choice of empirical examples. Given that Sen rightly roots thinking about justice in the thick of norms and practices of injustice, Graham asks why the urgent and ongoing tragedies of political failure do not suffuse Sen’s ideas of justice? Wishing for Sen to marry his philosophical and empirical work, Graham asks for elaboration of how Sen’s unique conception of justice and freedom would be mobilized to make concrete, empirical arguments about how we should best protect the domain of politics in the bleakest of conditions or those where opportunities seem to fade to nil as neo-liberal economic policies erode the capacity of democratic institutions to secure anything like the conditions of self-determination for their citizens.

This brings us to a final reflection informing Cornell’s article and that is whether, in her terms, the Kantian imagination when fixed on current challenges necessarily points beyond justice. As Lewis Gordon puts it, here echoing the provocations of Sanín-Restrepo and Méndez-Hincapié, whether one of the legacies of a modern world defined by colonial practices is the need for the decolonization not only of our epistemology but also of our normative life. ¹ In other words, do we require an orienting ideal for political life that transcends justice’s frame? Once we add social and economic and cultural rights to those of politics are we in fact exceeding the approach that we are aiming to augment? These and other questions run through the 8 articles and the rich reply to them that follow.

In brief summary, the symposium opens with Alistair Macleod’s discussion of the tension between Sen’s refreshingly expansive doctrine of human rights (one that includes economic, social and cultural rights and that gives recognition to the diversity of obligations that must be fulfilled if human rights are to be properly respected) and the narrower one designed to protect fundamental freedoms rather than interests or utilities to consider whether philosophical reflection on the nature of justice has a crucial role to play in arguments about conflicting human rights claims that survive unobstructed discussion and scrutiny.

This article is followed by Drucilla Cornell’s enjoining that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is crucial for (and implicit in) Sen’s work since the idea of justice should be considered a regulative ideal in the sense that Kant used it. Since regulative ideals are aspirational, imagined possibilities by which we seek to live justly together, they can never be fully actualized in this world and must always be reimagined because of the inadequacy of their reach. For Kant, the greatest ideas of reason can be represented only as aesthetic ideas that inform aesthetic judgements that allow for provocations by feelings while not being overwhelmed by them. A prime example for Cornell is the focus on the scale of loss that should be remedied if we are to take on our responsibility to make this world a better place through what Sen himself calls realization-focused comparison. Centering this loss is precisely what informs the article of Sanín-Restrepo and Méndez-Hincapié who consider whether a discussion of justice can be adequate without hinging on the fundamental question of colonialism to the development of the modern world and its ongoing life as coloniality in the current one. Failing to center the line that divides human being from non-being can only impair any potentially viable conception of freedom, tarnishing both the possibility of meaningful public debate and accounts of how so-called democratic regimes can expand self-determination under capitalist conditions.

Greg Graham continues this line of investigation in asking whether Sen’s broadened definition of indices relevant to the pursuit of justice sufficiently grapple with the continued ways in which domestic options in the postcolony are overdetermined by the unequal positions of states in a global capitalist order the priorities of which are increasingly dictated by a small set of multinational corporations and multilateral lending agencies. Although Sen’s approach dramatically improves upon the abstract models of John Rawls and classic social contract theory by virtue of its exploration of specific political circumstances, Graham argues that more is demanded of Sen’s comparative method if it is to help to make sense of what current developments in the global economy mean for the pursuit of justice in the developing world. Where else might we measure the true utility of a theory of justice than in the throes of the injustice wrought historically by colonialism and currently by the relations of global corporations and agencies to domestic actors who become limited thereby in their ability meaningfully to exercise freedom and establish stable, prosperous democracies? Sampie Terreblanchle also engages Sen in the context of post-coloniality to underscore the implications of the failures to realize the public reasoning dimension of his idea of justice in the profoundly unequal democracy institutionalized in the South African state in the mid-1990s.

Turning then to the post-colonial United States, Shatema Threadraft argues that Sen’s capabilities approach to justice is particularly useful in illuminating the challenges to the emotional and reproductive health and nurturing capabilities of young women and girls living in spatially isolated, economically, politically and reproductively marginalized black communities and to developing a vision of justice in which such women are one day endowed with a capacity to construct themselves as ‘women’ equal to others in the wider society. Focusing on historical and contemporary ‘racialized movement’ in this country, Threadcraft emphasizes how the more public commutes of black female caregivers relative to their white counterparts endanger them in ways that should be central to assessing the long-term impacts of gentrification as blacks are displaced to poorly serviced areas outside central cities.

Mathew Forstater moves from an explicit focus on nurturing capabilities to those indispensably tied to employment. Revisiting Sen’s Employment, Technology, and Development (1975), where he outlines three aspects of employment – the production aspect, the income aspect, and the recognition aspect – Forstater explains that unemployment therefore results in a loss of output, lower income and failure to satisfy a deep human need for social recognition. Sen’s analysis therefore surpasses the limited view of traditional neo-classical economics, where work is viewed as a ‘disutility’ and individuals are assumed always to prefer leisure, yet, argues Forstater, it falls short of capturing all the multiple benefits of employment and the staggering social and human costs of unemployment. Forstater attempts to broaden Sen’s notion of the third aspect of employment through cataloging the numerous benefits of employment noted throughout Sen’s own writings and additional ones that follow from Sen’s general economic philosophy.

Closing the symposium, Deen Chatterjee explores how the increasingly common ‘preventive’ use of military force and the tragic dilemmas of recent military operations have severely challenged international law over the question of the justification of waging preventive wars for self-defense and under the guise of international peace and security. Also, the growing trend of justifying preventive war by invoking principles of the just-war doctrine has left just-war theorists wondering whether the theory itself is in need of a fundamental shift. Chatterjee responds to these concerns by placing the debate in the wider discourse of global justice. By invoking Sen’s idea of justice, he discusses prevention from a non-interventionist perspective to show how it can be an effective measure for national security as well as for humanitarian policies.

For his part, Amartya Sen offers a detailed and thoughtful response to each article that suggests that he received them in the spirit with which they were offered – as a gesture of gratitude in an invitation to even more discussion. In sum, Sen replies that while his primary concern had been to make basic distinctions between his own and the social contract tradition approach, his debt to Kant is not in dispute and he is persuaded by Cornell’s encouragement to draw differently and more from him and from the idea of a ‘Kantian imagination’.

To Forstater’s question of why, as a radical critic of ‘mainstream neo-classical theory’, Sen never made a complete break, insisting on guaranteed employment for all provided by the government, Sen argues that in developing his conception of human rights he does not confine himself to making the immediately feasible a requirement of a human right. The challenge of realizing a guaranteed living wage–benefit package for all right now does not discredit its importance. Instead we need to maintain the distinction between what is worth wanting that could be made feasible with (even radical or revolutionary) social change and what can be achieved directly and at once to improve the realization of justice.

Sen graciously thanks Macleod for his exposition of the Idea of Justice and then assesses Macleod’s considerations of whether Sen overstates the distinction between his own approach and that of Raz, through the former’s focus on freedom and the latter’s on self-interest. While acknowledging that much of this turns on how broadly one can defensibly define self-interest, Sen offers a longer engagement of Macleod’s challenge over the substance of what distinguishes his own position and that of Rawls. Sen agrees that the difference between Rawls and his own stance is not that Rawls emphasizes mere means while he focuses on ends in themselves. Instead as Sen states, ‘Rawls is focusing on means in the form of primary goods whereas Sen’s theory focuses on people’s respective capabilities to achieve what they have reason to value (taking into account the means they have, but also their personal and social circumstances)’.

With Sanín-Restrepo and Méndez-Hincapié, Sen argues that he has been fundamentally misunderstood as he does not argue that democracy is a western contribution to the world or that capitalism is a foundation of democracy. And Sen struggles to understand what he perceives as the anger in the tone of this piece.

Sen praises Threadcraft for her exploration of how concrete social circumstances influence the capabilities of people through institutional arrangements and attitudinal variables. Illustrating through empirical example how extensive a range of considerations is implicated by the idea of social realizations, Threadcraft’s article, writes Sen, helps to establish the social importance of the philosophical distinctions he was aiming to advance. With Graham, Sen is less certain of the empirical evidence that informs Graham’s diagnostic analysis but Sen sees it as raising methodological concerns. Sen is not sure about what Graham fears in terms of the difficulty of applying his idea of justice to contemporary post-colonial circumstances but, if it were specified, Sen writes, he and Graham could talk through how to broaden the theory accordingly, and he welcomes that programme of work if it arises.

Sen then praises the application by Terreblanche of his notion of public reasoning to analyse the implications of its absence in the South African context, which contributes directly to manifest injustice that falls unequally on disadvantaged groups sustaining tensions that strain the viability of the South African democratic system, including the lack of a challenge to economic inequality and capture by corporate dominance to determine domestic politics and the policy initiatives of international lending institutions. Sen considers this to be a powerful exploration of cycles of inequality in which problems exacerbate one another in adverse circumstances. Finally arguing that Chatterjee’s analysis of the significance of the Bhagavadgita goes well beyond his own, Sen frames Chatterjee’s work on war and peace as importantly paralleling his reflection on justice and injustice, thanking Chatterjee for an article so rich in insight.

When initiating, with Kenneth Panfilio, the project of holding a written symposium dedicated to Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, Drucilla Cornell’s reasons for doing so were unusual and profound: while Sen’s tremendous record of significant scholarly output – his public face as an intellectual – is very well known, less appreciated is his behavior behind closed academic doors. And that was Sen’s unwaveringly fair advocacy for scholars whose work, while meritorious, was not rewarded in the ways that it deserved. In other words, it was in the mundane unjust politics of the academy that Cornell had witnessed Sen’s idea of justice at work.