‘It is open, public reasoning that will combat injustice’

In his latest work, The Idea Of Justice, economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen attempts to shift the focus of the theoretical debate on justice: from the realm of ideal societies and institutions, to applying practical reason for redressing injustice in the real world. In a free-wheeling interview, historian Dilip M Menon gets Sen to explain how his theory of justice would apply in live, contemporary issues and situations, such as the American invasion of Iraq, farmers displaced by development projects, casteism, and women’s rights. Excerpts:

As an economist you’ve dealt with themes such as poverty and famines, questions of development, and ethics in relation to economics. Is this book on justice the capstone of the thinking that you’ve done so far on issues of this kind?
Not really. I have been working on philosophical problems for forty years now. I wanted to do a book on political philosophy primarily aimed at a theory of justice. The main theories of justice have not been very helpful in what we can call practical reason. There’s quite a lot out there about an ideal state of affairs and particularly ideal institutions, but not enough about the practicality of theories of justice. The whole idea of practical reason and practicality is more in the nature of an inspiring ideal; ideas do inspire and can lead us to action. But I thought that there is a case for presenting a theory of practical reason that is aimed at removing injustice; a theory that identifies public reasoning to be central to the way of pursuing justice. And that’s what the book in essence is about.

In the book you speak about concentrating on “redressable injustice”. First, can there be an existing consensus on what constitutes injustice, and second, would there be in the future the idea that an injustice had been redressed given that historically notions of what constitutes injustice keep changing?
I use the idea of consensus differently. For example, James Buchanan, in his theory of public reasoning, talks about whether there is an actual consensus or not. For him, it does not matter whether the consensus is reached through reason or by other means. He is very keen on public discussion; then whatever emerges is a consensus. But for me, consensus is mainly a counterfactual (that is, asking the ‘what if’ question): asking what would’ve been acceptable had people reasoned in an open-minded, impartial way in a situation.

To some extent, it is all based on an assumption of how such a discussion would have gone. Now, people could therefore say that I haven’t given any proof [of consensus] and, yes, certainly I haven’t. But my arguments are based on reasoning of that kind: mainly about what could have happened in a situation where people engage in impartial public reasoning on a subject.

In such a situation, if slavery, the subjugation of women or the large-scale undernourishment of children would be regarded as unacceptable and unjust, then I would say it is indeed unacceptable and unjust in the sense that I mean it. And that does not indeed indicate that there is a public consensus on that matter. There was no consensus at the time that slavery was abolished; slaveowners did not come out with the view that I am arguing. One is arguing that had the slave owners been willing to engage in an impartial discussion, they would have had to concede that justice requires that slave-owning be done away with. If an impartial public discussion was to take place and slavery is rejected, well, then slavery is unjust on that count without there being a practical consensus, an actual consensus on that subject. Both actual public reasoning, which I emphasise in the book, as also the counterfactual of what would have happened if people were willing to enter public reasoning, become a big factor. That’s a big factor in the practice of democracy also. Often you’ll find that given the nature of party politics and the playing of one caste or group against another, things may not go that way. But if you ask me what would be the demands of justice in politics, I’d say that it would have to be based on an exercise where, in an impartial way, you reason out where you would have ended up if you had such a discussion.

Let’s say that in an ideal situation, the slave owner is shown the error of his reasoning, and in fact he did accept this, then there is nothing that compels him to act upon that admission. The reason why I say this is that if you think about India, there is a large consensus about how reprehensible untouchability is — this consensus is even enshrined in our Constitution. You can’t get a reasonable individual anywhere to say that untouchability needs to be practised. But it is practised and in fairly violent ways.
That is an excellent example of exactly what I am trying to say. Namely, the fact that even those who practise caste discrimination would agree in a reasoned argument that it is wrong, indicates that it could be taken to be wrong and unjust. But in enforcing it we have to recognise that compliance need not come voluntarily. Pioneering women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft says in a letter that if, after consideration, people were to agree that reason demands that women be treated with equal respect and have the same rights as men, then that should be made into a provision of the federal constitution. Then you have an argument for enforcement that is not anti-democratic even if lots of people are forced to do something. Why? Because it has been established that in a state of impartial reasoning they tend to accept it. State actions in defence of the realisation of rights have to force people sometime to do certain things they are not spontaneously willing to do.

So what you are saying is that, alongside the act of public reasoning, one also has to simultaneously think about institutions and some degree of coercion towards the good.
Some coercion, the need for some coercion may emerge from it.  Arresting the thugs who were killing Muslims in Gujarat could be seen as coercion; they don’t want to be arrested! But that doesn’t go against the realisation of justice.

I am also thinking of coercion in the context of deeply held beliefs, as for example, the abolition of sati in the 1830s. These were not vindictive, unthinking people, but they did believe at that point that sati needed to be practised nevertheless.
People don't have to be vindictive or unthinking to be extremely nasty to others. If it turns out that in a reasoned public discussion that position may not be taken, then we can enforce it even if well-meaning people with a huge vision of the nobility of women about to be burnt were to support it!  Just because my book is in favour of public reasoning it does not mean that it denies the role of coercion in some cases.

In societies like India, and other societies where the notion of public intellectual discussion is still held within very small groups, what happens is that these societies come to be constituted through exclusions. Large  swathes of people are  excluded from the space within which intellectual discussion or public reasoning takes place. While we could argue that over time public reasoning will extend to cover more and more groups, most of the reasoning happening at any historical conjuncture will be determined by exclusion rather than inclusion.
I agree that the actual manifest public reasoning may have that feature. But that doesn’t prevent us from asking what would have happened if everyone participated. We can think about Greece in 500 BC and ask what if Athenians had not confined their political space only to the citizens, excluding non-citizens, slaves and women. On that question, someone can take the view that Aristotle was right in taking certain things to be important, like the importance of public discussion, but wrong in thinking that women should not participate in that. What we are saying is that in an open public reasoning women too can participate. The fact that the majority of men at that time did not think that to be the case doesn't change the picture. We can still ask what would have happened in ancient Greece if they had.

Sometimes I think we may work ourselves into an unnecessarily complicated spot because most societies do have public discussion. That’s one reason why I quoted Nelson Mandela and what he observed in his African tribal meetings. Even though they were not egalitarian societies, there was a lot of public discussion; people were allowed to speak. He comments that only men were allowed to speak, but nevertheless there was a tradition of openness there. The confinement of effective conversation to a small group is not unknown in the world. But it is not beyond our intellect to ask the question what would have happened if such conversation were not so restricted. A lot of the book is concerned with counterfactual reasoning and there’s no way of escaping that. We live in a world in which lots of things are happening which are not according to a just way of arranging things, but we can still ask the question what would justice demand.

Let’s take the question of the resettlement of displaced persons. Historically, from Bhakra Nangal to Sardar Sarovar to Nandigram, similar things have been happening. Large numbers of people were evicted and dispossessed without compensation in the early years of independence, without too much of an outcry, because there was a general consensus that the demands of development necessitated this. Historically, what is perceived as an injustice has changed; there was a consensus then that there was little injustice in dispossessing people for nation-building.
What I’m saying is that there might have been a consensus that there was no injustice in it, but that does not mean that there was no injustice in it — in the sense that the consensus was based on an insufficiently engaged public reasoning. So the idea that if you are displaced you have to get some kind of compensation seems to tally with what would emerge in an open public reasoning, even if such a public reasoning did not actually take place in newly independent India.  In fact, even then I can think of people like Jayaprakash Narayan who protested. Again, it is a counterfactual question: the fact that they did not raise the issue doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have been right to raise it. Quite often, we don’t raise very obvious questions. For instance, the very issue of women’s rights is so new and people, very humane people, have gone on without worrying about women’s rights. But we do regard that as a mistake. 

On the question of states and the balance of power: while it is possible to indict Hitler or Milosevic on the grounds of crimes against humanity, it is not possible to indict Bush. While there is a large international public consensus that the actions of Bush, or Kissinger in an earlier era, were reprehensible, it is not possible to bring them to justice in the same way since the United States is in many senses above international law.
If it were to emerge that Dick Cheney had actually authorised torture like waterboarding and it is accepted that waterboarding is torture, then whether or not the United States is governed by international courts and law, that issue could certainly be engaged with. We could say that he should be prosecuted but unfortunately we are not able to do it. The case of Bush is much more complicated. He won an election; there were doubts about that but the Supreme Court determined that that was the case. He had the huge support of the American population in going into Iraq; it was a hugely popular decision. People like me who were visiting the USA (I was then Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in England) for a few months found it very difficult to speak against the war because of being constantly interrupted. So whatever Bush could be accused of, he couldn't be accused of acting like Hitler. Bush was acting on the basis of a democratic mandate and he made a huge mistake and there could be arguments about whether he could not be prosecuted — the leadership, not he alone — for the killings in Iraq that happened as a result of the invasion.

To be facetious, then democracy disperses culpability: it is better to conduct genocide as the head of a democratic government than as a dictator!
We hope democracy will prevent that. And this case in America is, in this respect, a conspicuous failure of democracy. If the continuation of child under-nourishment is an evidence of the limitation of Indian democracy as practised (the democratic institutions may be right but not functioning well), several things that happened during the Iraq war brings out the limitation of American democracy. But it isn’t so much that if you want to kill people, first become a democrat and then kill people, which is putting it rather absurdly.

An important strategic move that you have managed in the writing of social theory is to pull a tradition of western thinking out of its parochialism. In this book, you bring up the examples of Ashoka, Akbar, Kautilya and so on. While there is a fine-grained engagement with western philosophy, the examples chosen from an ‘Indian’ tradition tend to be textbook ones of a somewhat lightweight nature. Do you intend this as a basic course for westerners to begin to understand traditions of Indian thought?
I don't think so. The thinkers from India who are seen as the heavyweights in the western literature are the ones who are saying things that are completely different from what the westerners are saying. That has come to be seen as a ‘quintessentially Indian perspective’, contrasted with the west. The people I am citing  are not engaged in a different exercise from what western intellectuals also pursue; much of the time they are engaged in the same exercise, sometimes giving better arguments. When Ashoka is talking about tolerance as a duty of the people and of the state, there isn’t a single voice that I can think of who was writing with such clarity on the need to listen to the point of view of others. And Ashoka is no lightweight figure. And Akbar isn't either; our secular constitution draws heavily from him. And neither Buddha nor the Lokayata tradition is lightweight. In the same way, it is Rabindranath’s mystical poems that are picked up, not his rational discussion about the nature of society and the evils of nationalism and casteism. The Lokayata argument against basing your belief on unobserved fact and indeed, imagined fact, does not draw western interest, since similar beliefs have been expressed in the west as well, sometimes less forcefully and often much later. That's a major argument. These are not marginal figures; they were central to the thought of their times. And the distinction between niti and nyaya that I employ is not marginal either [niti is about arrangements and rules for justice; nyaya is about what’s happening in the real world].

Finally, what would a just society look like. Would the demand be much more than just the decency of institutions and individuals?
What would a perfectly just society look like? I refuse to answer the question! If you read the book through, you will find that I see this quest as comparable with looking for a black cat in a dark room, when the cat isn’t there. And the point is that if you take the public reasoning view of justice, we will not reasonably agree on one view of what a perfectly just society would look like. We would agree that the perfectly just society would not have many features that we currently have: subjugation of women, undernourishment, lack of medical care and so on…But the neti neti is never completed here. It stops at a point when we are not left only with one thing. A lot of alternatives still exist! In my judgement, the fruitful rational argument is about reducing injustice on which there could be reasoned agreement. If we see an injustice, agree on it, then it is within our power to change it if we can organise things better and if we are ready to fight for it. But none of this requires the idea of a perfectly just society.

Dilip Menon teaches History at Delhi University.