Presented by

Azmarina TanzirMPPG, 2nd Batch

North South University

Contents Part I

The Demands of Justice Reason and Objectivity

Rawls and Beyond

Institutions and Persons

Voice and Social Choice

Impartiality and Objectivity

Closed and Open Impartiality

Contents

Part II

Forms of Reasoning

• Position, Relevance and Illusion

• Rationality and Other People

• Plurality of Impartial Reasons

• Realizations, Consequences and Agency

Part III

The Materials of Justice

• Lives, Freedoms and Capabilities

• Capabilities and Resources

• Happiness, Well-being and Capabilities

• Equality and Liberty

Contents

Public Reasoning and Democracy

Democracy as Public Reason

The Practice of Democracy

Human Rights and Global Imperatives

Justice and the World

Social Justice:

an ideal, forever beyond our grasp; or one of many practical possibilities?

The transcendental theory of justice is concerned with identifying perfectly just

social arrangements, defining the nature of the perfectly just society.

Amartya Sen’s view of justice

•He offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice

•Sen sees on the comparative judgments of what is “more” or “less” just, and on the comparative merits of the different societies that actually emerge from certain institutions and social interactions.

Amartya Sen’s view of justice

•Justice is not absolute, rather relative. Defining justice from the flute example

•Sen argues for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives that we inevitably face.

Well-being, Capabilities and Democracy

•Sen's major contribution to welfare economics, which is providing an alternative to the selfish and materialistic Homo Economicus of standard neoclassical economics.

•For traditional economics, well-being is a function of the goods and services and individual enjoys. For Sen, well-being is a function of how fully and vigorously an individual exercises his human capabilities.

Well-being, Capabilities and Democracy

•Democracy, then, is less about who gets what, and more about how people come to craft both their personal life-meaning and their collective destiny through political participation and discourse.

•Democracy is based not on distributional issues, but rather on a deep understanding of the importance of communicative discourse and public debate in making the good society.

Poverty •Sen treats poverty as an inability to develop and exercise one's personal capacities.

•A family in the United States can have much higher income than another in a third world country and yet suffer from poverty. This is because the US family may be socially dysfunctional, or may live in a community that fails to provide the social relations and cooperative institutions that allow people to develop their capacities even though lacking in income.

Conclusion

• Sen's innovation in this book is to critique the "transcendental institutionalism" of such traditional moral philosophers as Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Dworkin and Rawls, who seek to define a set of social institutions that foster "perfect justice"

• Sen argues that perfect justice is not capable of attainment, and it is better to focus on how society can be improved from its current state, given its actual pattern of injustices.

Conclusion

• Sen rejects Rawl’s idea of Justice as Fairness as it is one of the absolute just systems. In fact all thinkers or politicians that claim to have developed an absolutely perfect system are wrong. Very important is to look not only at a system from a theoretical justice point of view but also equally important what is the reality of application at the level of all citizens.

Conclusion

• Amartya Sen presents the remarkable conclusion that justice is a process that never becomes absolutely perfect. He presents very convincingly the view that you need to compare many alternative "social choice" and discuss them widely with many people from different categories, also considering what other countries have done and rank these alternatives.

Conclusion

• Those that might have hoped to find a system of justice that is absolutely right will be disappointed, those are looking ways to improve justice will be very enthusiastic about this book

Thank You