Review Symposium: Amartya Sen's Idea of Justice: The Idea of Public Reasoning.

摘要

For a methodology of economics journal, one of the most important things to emphasize about Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice is the priority it gives to methodological reasoning in its approach to the subject of justice. Sen does not begin with the question ‘what theory of justice?’ – a substantive sort of concern – but rather begins with the question, ‘what kind of a theory?’ – a methodological sort of concern (ix). What guides his approach is the view (in a very Aristotelian spirit) that we must take seriously the nature and requirements of practical reasoning in order to think clearly about how we ought to think about the subject of justice. Thus, the starting point for the book is his contrast between two divergent kinds of reasoning about justice: transcendental institutionalism and realization-focused comparison. Transcendental institutionalism, the approach he sees as dominant in today’s mainstream political philosophy (and John Rawls’ approach), asks what ideally just institutions require, and banishes virtually any discussion regarding how or even whether such a world might be brought about from re?ection on the nature of just society. In contrast, a realization-focused comparison approach, which Sen recommends, asks more humbly how are we to make the world we live in more just, where this is often a matter of removing manifest injustice, whether or not we can precisely say what the most fundamental principles of justice are, and whether or not we can say what sort of institutions justice must reside in. The idea is captured for Sen in his parable of three children’s rival claims over the possession of a ?ute (12–15). Each makes a reasonable justice claim to the ?ute, and each claim is advanced as if it (transcendently) should carry the day. But none of the three claims is suf?cient to determine who ought to get the ?ute. Thus, we instead need to approach the subject of justice by asking how people reach agreement over what they regard as just, not begin by asking what justice per se requires.