Book Review: The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen

Abstract

What is justice? What does a just society look like? And what principles should guide us in achieving it? These enduring questions have dominated the tradition of political philosophy, led by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and, among contemporary philosophers, John Rawls and Robert Nozick.

However, Amartya Sen, in his influential book The Idea of Justice, argues that these are the wrong questions to ask. Rather than focusing on defining a perfectly just society, Sen shifts attention to the more urgent question of how we can reduce injustice in the real world.

Sen critiques the dominant approach, which he terms “transcendental institutionalism”—an effort to identify ideal principles for a perfectly just society and to build institutions accordingly. He identifies two core problems with this approach: feasibility and redundancy.

The problem of feasibility arises from the practical difficulty—or even impossibility—of reaching consensus on a single set of just principles through impartial reasoning. For example, John Rawls proposes two lexically ordered principles of justice, which he believes would be unanimously chosen in a hypothetical “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance.” However, Sen doubts the assumption that these specific principles would emerge from such a process.

To illustrate the plurality of reasonable outcomes, Sen recounts the story of three children arguing over who should receive a flute: one claims it because they can play it best, another because they are the poorest, and the third because they made it. Each argument is grounded in a different principle—utility, equality, and entitlement—and each can be justified impartially.

This diversity undermines Rawls' claim of unique emergence and challenges the usefulness of his theory. Sen notes that even Rawls later qualified some of his earlier assertions, especially in The Law of Peoples, which could be seen as a departure from his rigid, stage-by-stage model of justice.