A Nobel Prize-winning economist argues that a more equitable society must be rooted in pragmatism and not just principle
A SPECTRE IS haunting Europe, it seems, drifting across the coastlines of Britain and Ireland. It’s not exactly the ghost of Marx, not even the shadow of Joe Higgins, but it’s a real portent of change nevertheless. In the shock of failing institutions, the left is clearing its throat again and finding an audience less hostile to its ideas.
The brash, red-braced children of the Thatcher era who drove the gap between rich and poor in Ireland as in the UK and hailed it as rising tide – as the triumph of a benign, if invisible, hand of the market – are no longer in the ascendant. In the absence of regulation, we were persuaded to believe that Adam Smith’s paradox would work its alchemy for the common good: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.” Greed would nourish a Celtic Tiger better than restraint and regulation.
Now we know better. As Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz said, the reason the invisible hand seems invisible is that it is often not there. It is not just outstanding representatives of the left, such as Noam Chomsky, who puncture the myths of capitalist self-regulation today, but eminent public intellectuals of impeccable provenance such as Stiglitz and Michael Sandel.
Introducing the BBC Reith Lectures earlier this year, Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel echoed the new orthodoxy: “We live in a time of financial crisis and economic hardship – everybody knows that – but we also live in a time of great hope for moral and civic renewal,” he said. “Economists can inform us about possible implications of policy choices, but they can’t tell us – and they don’t really claim to tell us – what’s right and wrong, what’s just and unjust.”
No one has articulated this better, or for longer, than the professor in economics and philosophy at Harvard University, Amartya Sen. The recipient of a dizzying array of honours and awards, including the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, Sen bestrides the moral and scientific disciplines with the ease and confidence of a master, which he displays in this book. (His Nobel citation noted his contributions to welfare economics, leading a senior Harvard colleague to describe him – enigmatically, one suspects – as “the Mother Teresa of economics”.)
He begins this major exploration of the idea of justice with the simple observation that nothing so engages us in weighing our place in society as the question of fairness; and nothing so enrages us, as little children or adults, as the sense of unfairness. As he quotes Pip in Dickens's Great Expectations, "there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt as injustice". It is not the discovery of flaws or gaps in the theoretical understanding of what makes for the just society that arouses the passion of scholars and saints throughout the ages, but the simple, stark, identification of what is unfair. It matters less to work out the ideal than to root out the unjust.
In this respect Sen echoes the approach of the American sociologist of the 1960s, Barrington Moore. Rather than inquire into the character and source of the decent society, he took the view, espoused here by Sen, that the ideal is the enemy of the possible. In his Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery, Moore followed the same maxim. The decent society is one that reduces human misery, just as the fair society is one that minimises injustices.
Chief among the works which make up the scholarly literature on justice, and against which Sen measures his originality, is the famous thesis of John Rawls, his former colleague at Harvard. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls posited a hypothetical situation in which the actors would choose an ideal arrangement to guarantee the just society. With a self-imposed "veil of ignorance" preventing them from knowing how each might gain over others because of individual advantage, Rawls's actors – assumed to be rational and fair-minded – would choose a society guaranteed to be fair and impartial to all.
Sen will have none of it. In the real world there is no possibility of ideal justice and no point in pursuing the chimera of a society built on utopian notions of justice. Like Barrington Moore’s decision to focus on misery as the analytical path to happiness, Sen opts for the pragmatic strategy of promoting justice by addressing the clear instances of injustice. Our claims for justice cannot be resolved by appeal to ideal principles. We cannot always agree on the principles of justice; but, like Pip, we can surely put our finger on instances of injustice and make more credible demands to rectify them.
Sen has given us a magisterial treatment of a moral and philosophical problem which touches us from the cradle to the grave. The work bids to replace John Rawls and his predecessors back to Hobbes and Locke as the model and paragon of theoretical analysis on the idea of justice.
Is it the definitive refutation of that idealist tradition that it purports to be? It is a compelling read, but even Sen’s admirers would hesitate to claim that the gap between an ideal of justice and an instance of injustice is as clear as it appears. Not all disputes about fairness can be resolved pragmatically. We need principles to test our convictions and move the argument forward.
Bill McSweeney is research fellow in international peace studies at the School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin