In 2006, Amartya Sen asked-
WHAT DO WE WANT FROM A THEORY OF JUSTICE?
David Hume, back in the eighteenth century, had expressed the common sense view that Justice is about Utility. We want to have a Judicial system which promotes economic activity (which is what yields utility) by making transactions safer and more ubiquitous. Jurists, economists, sociologists etc. may have different theories as to how to improve the Justice system. But the thing itself is ideographic, though, no doubt, under different circumstances one 'nomothetic' theory is more useful than another. One might say that different political parties or ideologies have different theories of justice and that was certainly the case fifty years ago in many Western countries. The Left thought it was unjust that some people were much richer than others while the Right thought the thing was salutary. Indeed, they worried that the 'Welfare State' was causing some people who were capable of working to remain idle thus becoming a parasitic class. Previously, the 'idle rich' were termed parasites. Increasingly, voters (who were paying more and more of their income in tax) decided that it was the 'Welfare Queen', not the leisured aristocrat who was the true parasite.
Sen was blissfully ignorant of these developments in England or America or an India where the rags-to-riches billionaire Dhirubhai Ambani was a folk-hero. Bollywood turned his biography into all singing all dancing hit movie around the time Sen wrote this-
I begin from the general Rawlsian position that the interpretation of justice is linked with public reasoning.
Rawls thought 'public reasoning' would lead to people choosing a Society which prioritized raising the standard of living of the least well-off. Clearly, voters had disagreed with him. Under Clinton, 'workfare' proved more popular than 'welfare'.
The focus has to be, in John Rawls's words, on "a public framework of thought" that provides "an account of agreement in judgment among reasonable agents."
Did such a 'public framework' actually exist? Academics like Sen probably thought of themselves as 'reasonable agents'. Could Sen himself point to any 'account of agreement in judgment' he and his colleagues had arrived at?
The answer was no. Why? All conceivable theories were arbitrary and made irrational assumptions or demands. Also, the Soviet Union had collapsed. In China, the leadership considered it glorious to get rich. Tech billionaires were the new popular heroes just as in the time of Edison and Henry Ford.
Rawls outlines this demand in terms of avoiding what he calls "a personal slant": We do not look at the social order from our situation but take up a point of view that everyone can adopt on an equal footing.
No. Rawls assumes that everybody is given a 'plug in' such that they have equal knowledge of Economics and other relevant Social Sciences. Sadly, this involves an 'intensional fallacy'. Knowledge of Economics is an 'epistemic object'. It changes all the time for any given person and no two people have the same thing. Thus, in answer to the question 'who is that masked man on the screen', my Mother may say 'that's Batman'. I might say 'No, Mummy. That is Bruce Wayne'. However, at a later point, I realize it was actually Alfred the Butler who had donned the costume so as to throw District Attorney Harvey Dent off the scent.
In mathematics, there may be a 'naturality square'- i.e. a non arbitrary set of transformations- such that there is no 'personal slant' but rather a convergence to a unique, 'objective', truth. Sadly, no such thing exists in the Social Sciences though some arbitrary 'uncorrelated asymmetries' may be better as the foundation for 'bourgeois strategies'- e.g. the owner of a resource being uniquely identified as having the right to dispose of it.
In this sense we look at society and our place in it objectively: we share a common standpoint along with others and do not make our judgments from a personal slant.
We do share a common standpoint- it is that of utility. STEM subject discourse is useful. Political Philosophy is useless when it is not downright mischievous. But this has been known since the time of Plato.
The bearing of public reasoning on the theory of justice leads to two further inquiries: What is the relevant public and on what questions should the reasoning concentrate.
The relevant public is skool kids and the relevant question is how marbles should be distributed. The answer is that bully gets them unless the other kids can beat him up. That's how Justice works. It is costly to enforce but it can be worth incurring the cost.
The former query concerns the range of points of view that should count in public reasoning (for example, whether they must all come from inside a given political state),
Yes- if only voters in that State get to choose what policies will be implemented.
while the latter relates to the subject matter of public reasoning, in particular what are the questions to be answered for a satisfactory theory of justice?
None. The thing is arbitrary. Under different circumstances we choose different theories- if we can be bothered to do so.
The two issues, I will argue, are linked, and together they lead us to the foundational question: What do we want from a theory of justice?
Generally, we want useful predictions or a 'Structural Causal Model' which permits us to tinker with things so as to improve outcomes.
I have begun by drawing on Rawls's lead on the basic connection between objectivity, public reasoning, and the theory of justice. How ever, I have to argue for a rather different way of pursuing that connection, departing not only from the substantive content of the Rawlsian theory of justice but also from Rawls's diagnosis of the very requirements of a theory of justice, including the subject matter of public reasoning and the reach and coverage of public participation. I begin with the issue of the subject matter of a satisfactory theory of justice. In his analysis of "justice as fairness," Rawls takes the principal question to be: What is a just society?
One where wrongdoing is punished or prevented in some non-arbitrary way with the result that there is little wrongdoing. On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent anyone saying Society is fat or complacent or has the habit of sucking off all and sundry. Sticks and stones etc.
Indeed, in most theories of justice in contemporary political philosophy, that question is taken to be central. This leads to what can be called a "transcendental" approach to justice, focusing as it does on identifying perfectly just societal arrangements.
No. Rawls & Co. never speak of perfection. They speak of an arrangement that is non-arbitrary which all may agree upon by following a particular line of reasoning. I suppose one could say that we are speaking of 'synthetic a priori' judgments. However this is not actually the case because Rawls stipulates that everybody receives the same epistemic plug-in re. Econ and other such theories. Sadly, Rawls did not realize that these are 'intensions' without well defined 'extensions'. But they are of an empirical sort because the laws of Social Science are empirical by definition. This is because we are social beings.
In contrast, what can be called a "comparative" approach would concentrate instead on ranking alternative societal arrangements
This can only be done in an arbitrary manner. Moreover, if ranking can be done, then there is a supremum- i.e. a 'perfect' arrangement it is feasible to achieve. So Sen's approach is either wholly arbitrary or else it too suffers from the intensional fallacy.
(whether some arrangement is "less just" or "more just" than another), rather than focusing exclusively or at all on the identification of a fully just society.
Sen is making a more extreme demand than Rawls. It is one thing to say 'everybody would want a nice nice Society' because this just needs 'verification' that a description of a state is indeed 'nice, nice'. It is a much crazier thing to say that everybody would agree that a state where I have a moustache is more 'nice, nice' than one where I am clean shaven.
In particular we might agree with Rawls (or Gandhi's notion of 'Sarvodaya' ) that we should be most concerned with the worst off but we can't agree with Sen that we can say that every possible state of the world can be ranked relative to each other. It is a different matter that we might think one state of affairs might have worse consequences than another. That does not mean it is in itself better or worse. Rather there is some exogenous factor which we fear will supervene.
One reason we think Rawls or Gandhi's views might be worth listening to is because both had an influence on the elites of their own countries. Sen & Co had been shit at Development Econ and then had emigrated to rich countries where they taught vacuous shite. They had no influence.
The transcendental and comparative approaches are quite distinct,
No. Both are based on an 'intensional fallacy' of an a priori kind. Essentially, the assumption is that there is well ordered, well defined 'extension' when there is no such thing.
and as will be presently discussed, neither approach, in general, subsumes or entails the other.
The Comparative is stronger and subsumes the 'transcendental' which is simply the supremum of the feasible ranking.
The transcendental approach to justice is not new (it can be traced at least to Thomas Hobbes),
It is very ancient. Most civilizations have a notion of a 'Golden Age' when Peace, Prosperity, Justice and Universal Harmony prevailed. We can agree that it might be nice to live in such an Utopia. We can't agree whether my having a moustache moves us closer or further away from that ideal.
but recent contributions have done much to consolidate the reliance on this approach. In his investiga tion of "justice as fairness," Rawls explores in depth the nature of an entirely just society seen in the perspective of contractarian fairness.
No. Rawls merely says he thinks he has found a reason why everybody would have a reason to prefer a Social arrangement where the material interests of the worst off are given the highest priority. Sadly, because of Knightian Uncertainty and the 'intensional' or 'epistemic' nature of Econ theory (which means nobody gets to the same answer twice) what Rawls had actually found was a reason why there can't be, indeed oughtn't to be, any such a priori beastie.
Rawls's investigation begins with identifying the demands of fairness through exploring an imagined "original position" in which the members of the society are ignorant of their respective individual characteristics including their own comprehensive preferences.
They don't know if they are women or men. If I were in the original position, I'd stipulate for no sex because the worst case scenario is me screaming in pain as a baby is dragged out of my fanny. Fuck I care if the human race dies out? It may be that, if I had a female body, I'd feel differently.
However, this is not the big problem with Rawl's gedanken. The fact is, it is irrational to agree to be bound by any set of conditions absent immediate passing of consideration. Also, we think guys who know about Public Finance should decide when and how much redistributive fiscal policy to do. Similarly, we want Medical Doctors and Public Health experts to decide Health Policy. It would be crazy to agree that Medical or Fiscal Policy should be fixed in advance regardless of the circumstances.
Kant may have thought 'synthetic a priori' judgments were a good thing because Newton's theory was right. But Newton's theory wasn't right. Even Einstein's theory breaks down under certain circumstances. If this is is true of 'Phusis', how much more must it be true of 'Nomos'?
The principles of justice that emerge in the original position are taken to be impartial because they are chosen by the persons involved under a "veil of ignorance," without knowledge of their individual identities in the society with specific vested interests and particular priorities. Later on in this paper, I shall discuss some limitations of this under standing of the demands of fairness (and ask whether the points of view to be considered must all come from the population of a given state), but the immediate point to note in the context of understanding the transcendental approach is that the fairness exercise is aimed entirely at identifying appropriate principles for a fully just society
Nope. Rawls isn't saying whether abortion or statutory rape or drug use should or should not be illegal. He is merely giving an argument (a foolish one) for redistributive policies which seemed plausible at the time. The fact is the welfare benefit to disposable wage ratio was rising (because of fiscal drag) in many Western countries in the Seventies. But this contributed to 'stagflation'. Voters rebelled. Mass unemployment was the price for killing off inflationary expectations. This tended to reduce Labour share of National Income. At a later point, tech billionaires became folk heroes while the 'trailer trash' or 'Council Estate chav' became an object of contempt and ridicule.
and at isolating the institutional needs for the basic structure of such a society. The working of these institutions, in turn, leads to further societal decisions at later stages in the Rawlsian system, for example through appropriate legislation (in what Rawls calls "the legislative stage"). The sequence moves forward step by step on firmly specified lines, with elaborately characterized unfolding of completely just societal arrangements.
No. Rawls distinguished perfect from imperfect procedural Justice. Sadly the example he gives of the former- one guy cuts the cake and the other chooses which piece to take (which is like ancient Greek 'antidosis')- is only 'fair' if there is perfect information, no Knightian Uncertainty, no non-convexities (e.g. if I have economies in distributing cake slices then I benefit more from cake division), no externalities, no 'nosy' preferences, etc.
In any case, it is obvious that if I you bake a chocolate cake using common resources and I am allergic to chocolate, 'fair division' does not arise.
More generally, 'super-fair' or 'envy free' cake division requires the complete, frictionless, reversal of all transactions and physical processes.
Despite the standing and widespread use of the transcendental approach, the intellectual interest in, and practical relevance of, comparative questions about justice are hard to deny.
They are easy to deny. That shit wasn't just useless, it was actively mischievous to the Left-Liberal cause. Rawls may be thought of as trying to promote the spirit of the Warren Court. But having to listen to his demented shite pushed young peeps towards the Federalist Society.
Investigation of different ways of advancing justice in a society (or in the world),
can only be done empirically by guys who actually know the law. Similarly investigation of different ways of curing cancer must be done by Doctors and Scientists- not stupid Professors of worthless subjects.
or of reducing manifest injustices that may exist, demands comparative judgments about justice,
No. It requires expert knowledge of an ideographic sort. There is no need to judge Justice itself. Just see if there's a way to arrange things so the world is a little less shitty.
Anyway, comparative judgements about justice require comparative judgements about comparative judgements which in turn require comparative judgements about comparative judgements about comparative judgements and so on ad infinitum.
for which the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient.
To say- 'we can all agree such and state would be nice' is not to identify fully just social arrangements. What Sen is saying we must do is to find a way to rank the state of the world where I have a moustache over the world where I don't. Sadly, this won't be a robust ranking because the world where I have a moustache and speak with a faux-Scottish accent must be ranked over the state of the world where I sound like Apu on the Simpsons.
To illustrate the contrast involved, it may well turn out that in a comparative perspective, the introduction of social policies that abolish slavery, or eliminate widespread hunger, or remove rampant illiteracy, can be shown to yield an advancement of justice.
No. They either advance or don't advance justice. This can be verified or stipulated but it can't be shown. Why? Knightian Uncertainty means that it is always possible that tomorrow we might discover that 'removing rampant illiteracy' was the very worst thing we could have done because of some exogenous event.
But the implementation of such policies could still leave the societies involved
more vulnerable to an utter catastrophe which no one could have predicted.
far away from the transcendental requirements of a fully just society (since transcendence would have other demands regarding equal liberties, distributional equity, and so on).
So what? Everything we do leaves us far away from our best possible position. I just took a dump. That was a good thing for me to do. Sure, while taking a dump, I could have chanced on an article telling me to buy a particular stock which shoots up in value. But that possibility does not detract from the fact that I'm happy I took a great big dump. I may be old, but can still poop like a champion.
The grand partition between the "just" and the "nonjust," which is what a theory of transcendental justice yields, would leave the society on the "nonjust" side even after the reform, despite what can be seen, in a comparative perspective, as a justice-enhancing change. Some nontranscendental articulation is clearly needed. To take another type of example, instituting a system of public health insurance in the United States that does not leave tens of millions of Americans without any guarantee of medical attention at all may be judged to be an advancement of justice, but such an institutional change would not turn the United States into a "just society" (since there would remain a hundred other transgressions still to remedy).
Sen wrote this before it became obvious that 'Obamacare' was 'justiciable'- i.e. courts might decide it was unconstitutional.
Still, Sen is attacking a strawman. Nobody- not even a fool like Rawls- ever said they had the formula for perfect Justice or even the perfect dump. On the other hand, only Sen was stupid enough to think that the state where I take a big dump while growing a moustache should be or can be ranked relative to the one where I am determined to remain clean-shaven. Obviously, one could just arbitrarily choose one over the other. But the ranking would be inconsistent. We'd have bizarre situations where my taking a dump while growing a moustache and forming the determination to speak with a fake Scottish accent is better than one where I suffer some sort of neurological incident such that I speak in a fake Scottish accent while losing the ability to shave. Still, this would be better than a clean shaven guy talking faux Scots while taking yet another champion dump.
It must be said that if an arbitrary 'bliss point' is identified on a connected configuration space, then, it would always be possible to claim that there is a metric such that any given incremental change in the state of the world is ranked. The math may be intractable but an 'oracle' or Messianic leader could claim to possess supernatural knowledge of this. Nothing can be proved either way but, clearly 'verification' is possible if some highly improbable event- e.g. winning a war against a much more powerful neighbour- occurs under this sort of inspired leadership.
Sen doesn't get this.
DOES TRANSCENDENTAL SPECIFICATION YIELD COMPARATIVE RANKINGS?
By arbitrary stipulation- sure. So long as some non-deterministic 'verification' procedure is being appealed to (e.g. the Divine Voice that Mahatma Gandhi claimed to hear) the thing is beyond the ken of any algorithmic decision procedure.
I begin with the issue of sufficiency.
It is irrelevant. The whole thing is arbitrary or based on intuition. It isn't logico-deductive- at least in a Hilbert type calculus.
Does a transcendental approach produce, as a by-product, relational conclusions that are ready to be drawn out, so that transcendence may end up giving us a great deal more than its overt form articulates?
By arbitrary stipulation- sure. But that is all that is available because there is no underlying 'naturality square' here.
In particular, is the specification of an entirely just society sufficient to give us rankings of departures from justness in terms of comparative "distances" from perfection, so that a transcendental identification might immediately entail com parative gradings as well? The answer here is a firm no.
Sen is wrong. If you have an arbitrary specification of perfection, nothing stops you from having an arbitrary 'golden path' to it.
The main difficulty lies in the fact that there are different features involved in identifying distance, related, among other distinctions, to (1) different fields of departure, (2) varying dimensionalities of transgressions within the same general field, and (3) diverse ways of weighing separate infractions.
None of this matters. Provided the underlying configuration space is connected (which, by arbitrary stipulation, it can be) we can always claim that doing some stupid shit now will get us to the perfect place fastest.
The identification of transcendence
is arbitrary. There is no logico-deductive process by which you can get to 'synthetic a priori' or 'transcendental' judgements. The thing was always arbitrary though one could hand-wave and pretend 'intuition' is 'natural' when it really isn't.
does not yield any means of addressing these problems to arrive at a relational ranking of departures from transcendence.
save in an arbitrary manner
For example, in the context of the Rawlsian analysis of the just society, departures may occur in many different spaces.
But Rawls was only concerned with departures from his two principles. Sadly, they were meaningless and thus 'anything goes'. If the worst off keep getting fucked to death by horny antelopes, we might say this satisfies the difference principle coz getting fucked to death by horny antelopes is still preferable to watching Wheel of Fortune.
They can include the breaching of liberty,
like banning smoking in public places?
which, furthermore, can involve diverse violations of distinctive liberties (many of which figure in Rawls's capacious coverage of liberty and its priority).
Nope. Rawls doesn't touch on any liberty that matter. Also, the guy didn't get that liberties are 'Hohfeldian incidents' of a specific type. They are useless unless the remedy is incentive compatible. But we can never be sure if this is the case. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But what that vigilance reveals is that liberties shrink and expand as circumstances change and the remedy provider's incentives and capabilities wax or wane.
There can also be violations again in possibly disparate forms of the demands of equity in the distribution of primary goods (there can be many different departures from the demands of the Difference Principle which forms a part of Rawls's second principle).
Sadly, people won't allow 'primary goods'- like sex- to be distributed. They don't greatly care about food stamps or minimum rations provided the fiscal burden is small.
Similarly, diverse transgressions can occur in other transcendental theories of justice (for example, those that would replace the Rawlsian focus on "primary goods" in the Difference Principle by concentrating respectively on "capabilities" or "resources" or "opportunities," or some other way of formulating the allocational and distributional needs of transcendental justice).
Nobody knows their own capabilities let alone those of others. Am I the worst off in Society because I alone lack the capability to twerk while growing a moustache and speaking with a faux Scottish accent? Yes, if that is what gets me a big fat check from the Treasury.
There are also disparate ways of assessing the extent of each such discrepancy
all are arbitrary as fuck- not to say stoooooopid
and of appraising the comparative remoteness of actual distributions from what the principles of full justice would demand.
what is the big problem with arbitrarily stipulating an arbitrary distribution of totally arbitrary, not to say stooooopid, shit?
Further, we have to consider departures in procedural equity (such as infringements of fair equality of public opportunities or facilities), which figure within the domain of Rawlsian demands of justice (in the first part of second principle). To weigh these procedural de partures against infelicities of emergent patterns of interpersonal distribution (for example, distributions of primary goods), which also figure in the Rawlsian system, would require distinct specification? possibly in axiomatic terms?of relative importance or significance (or "trade-offs" as they are sometimes called in the crude vocabulary of multidimensional assessment). But these extensions, helpful as they would be, lie well beyond the specific exercise of the identification of transcendence, and are indeed the basic ingredients of a "comparative" rather than a "transcendental" approach to justice.
But both are arbitrary. To say 'Iyer having a moustache represents a more unjust state of Society' is just as arbitrary as saying 'it is a synthetic a priori truth that in a perfect world all moustaches will be teleportation devices when they aren't tickling the hyperdimensional clitoris of True Justice and Nice-to-be-Niceness'.
The characterization of spotless justice
is always arbitrary, stoooopid shit- unless it involves moustaches tickling a hyperdimensional clitoris.
does not entail any delineation whatever of how diverse departures from spotlessness can be compared and ranked.
but if you claim to know what is perfect you can just as easily claim how to get there. Alternatively, some other nutter may claim to do so. Thus I might say 'I'd be happy if I had a hot girl friend but there's no way any such thing is gonna happen at my age'. You might say 'I happen to know that if you hand over all your savings and property to me and then spend the next ten years giving blowjobs to hobos, a real hottie will become your g.f'. Actually, both statements are arbitrary and stoooopid. Having a hot g.f would force me to focus on the fact that I've got a tiny dick and am shit in bed.
The absence of such comparative implications is not, of course, an embarrassment for a transcendental theory of justice, seen as a freestanding achievement.
But it opens the door to that type of stupidity. I felt safe enough when I said 'having a hot g.f will make me happy.' I didn't realize some nutter would start pestering me to do stupid shit so as to achieve happiness.
The relational silence is not, in any sense, an internal difficulty of a transcendental theory of justice.
Any synthetic a priori judgment has an 'internal difficulty' in that it makes certain stupid predictions and permits certain shitty research programs to burgeon. By 1919 everybody should have understood that Kant and Husserl and so forth had wasted their time. There is nothing you can learn about anything by sitting in an armchair- not even that armchair philosophy is ab ovo shit.
Indeed, some pure transcendentalists would be utterly opposed even to flirting with gradings and comparative assessments, and may quite plausibly shun relational conclusions altogether.
This doesn't matter. The moment you say 'there is a God but we can't know anything about him', you have opened the door to some nutter claiming people who hand over cash to them will definitely get closer to God.
Their understanding that a "right" social arrangement
'right' is arbitrary. The most you can say is 'this social arrangement, under current circumstances, does not appear to be attracting much opposition'. Whether it was 'right' or not will only be revealed after the fact.
must not, in any way, be understood as a "best" social arrangement,
'best' is just as arbitrary
which could open the door to what is sometimes seen as the intellectually mushy world of graded evaluations in the form of "better" or "worse" (linked with the relationally superlative "best").
all are arbitrary.
The absoluteness of the transcendental "right"
there is no fucking absoluteness. There is merely arbitrariness.
against the relativities of the "better" and the "best" may well have a powerfully reasoned standing of its own.
No. There is no difference between saying 'This is the perfect cake!' and saying 'Chocolate cake is better than Walnut cake'. These are just arbitrary or purely subjective statements.
But it does not help at all in comparative assessments of justice.
Nothing this cretin does is of any help to anybody. We make 'comparative assessments of justice' all the time. That's why certain jurisdictions are preferred over others to transact particular types of business. Dubai might be a great place for me to do business but the laws there are probably a bit tougher on guys like me who tend to kite checks.
To be sure, members of any polity can contemplate how a gigantic and totally comprehensive reorganization may be brought about, moving us at one go to the ideal of a fully just society. A no-nonsense transcendental theory can serve, in this sense, as something like the "grand revolutionary's complete handbook." But that handbook would not be much invoked in the debates on justice in which we are constantly engaged, which focus on how to reduce the manifold in justices that characterize the world.
Why not? In fact, after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets did come up with a theory of justice which emphasized class origin. Essentially, if a prole did something wrong, 're-education' was emphasized. If a 'bourgeois idealist' committed the horrible crime of writing the wrong type of poem, it might be safest to kill him.
Even if we think of transcendence not in the "gradingless" terms of "right" social arrangements, but in the graded terms of the "best" social arrangements, the identification of the best does not, in itself, tell us much about the full grading, such as how to compare two nonbest alternatives.
Why not? Islamic jurisprudence has a well developed theory of 'qiyas' or analogical reasoning. But 'harmonious construction' is similar.
The identification of the best does not specify a unique ranking with respect to which the best stands at the pinnacle;
it can do- in the same arbitrary way.
indeed the same best may go with a great many different rankings with the same pinnacle.
So what? The whole thing is arbitrary in every respect.
To consider an analogy, the fact that a person regards the Mona Lisa as the best picture in the world, does not reveal how she would rank a Gauguin against a Van Gogh.
But I could arbitrarily do it for her. Moaning Lisa is famous. So is Van Gogh. Gaugin- not so much. The dim bint will go for the guy who chopped off his own ear. Indeed, if the lady says 'I prefer Gauguin' you say 'really?! How come Van Gogh paintings sell for so much more? Are sure you didn't confuse the two? In the film, Kirk Douglas played Van Gogh. He was a bigger star than Anthony Quinn who was cast as Gauguin'. The lady then says 'Shit! I meant to say Van Gogh. Mind you, Quinn made me feel all tingly in my nether parts. That's probably why I said Gaugin.' You reply 'You aint fooling anybody you great big lezza! It was me who had the hots for Quinn.'
The search for transcendental justice is an engaging exercise in itself, but irrespective of whether we think of transcendence in terms of the gradeless "right" or in the framework of the graded "best," it does not tell us much about
anything. It is just arbitrary shite.
IS A TRANSCENDENTAL THEORY NECESSARY FOR COMPARISONS OF JUSTICE?
No. We compare stuff all the time. What matters is the purpose for which we are making the comparison. A Corporation may say, 'we should locate our office in London not Paris because French Contract Law is less predictable'. The French might then consider amending their Legal Code so it does better in such comparisons. Utility is linked to a specific purpose.
It may be said that the 'artificial reason' of the Law must have synthetic a priori judgments. But this just means you might have different schools of thought- e.g. 'originalists', 'Law & Econ' mavens, 'progressives' etc, etc.
I now take up the second question, concerning the hypothesis that the identification of the best is necessary, even if not sufficient, to rank any two alternatives in terms of justice.
But a ranking will have a supremum. It's no good saying 'well, I didn't specify any such thing' because nothing can stop someone else claiming to have done it for you. The big problem with having an imaginary girl friend is you can't stop your friends banging her.
In the usual sense of necessity, this would be a somewhat odd possibility. In the discipline of comparative judgments in any field, relative assessment of two alternatives tends in general to be a matter between them, with out there being the necessity of beseeching the help of a third 'irrelevant alternative'.
But the assessment is arbitrary in a certain respect- viz. the purpose of the exercise. Suppose I think London, not Paris, is the right jurisdiction for my Company. The MD may say 'what would be the ideal jurisdiction' and I'd need to be able to speak to that to show I had thought through relevant considerations. I need to be very careful how I answer. No considerations are wholly irrelevant. It may be that transacting business in Paris, though exposing us to higher compliance costs, also gives us higher protection. If I stipulate for a jurisdiction which minimizes compliance costs, the MD could hang me out to dry. So, I need to bring in an 'irrelevant alternative' of a type which gets me off the hook. In this case it might have to do with a bigger library of Case Law from other Common Law jurisdictions.
It is worth noting here that the diagnosis of injustice
like the diagnosis of being lame or uncool or a total loser
does not demand a unique identification of the "just society," since many different identifications of perfectly just social arrangements may all agree on the diagnosis of a remediable deficiency of a particular social arrangement (say, with manifest hunger or illiteracy or medical neglect).
Why stop there? Why not say many different useless Professors would agree that it is unjust to rip off the head of senior academics and then shove those heads up their own poopers?
Indeed, it is not at all obvious why in making the judgment that some social arrangement x is better than an alternative arrangement y, we have to invoke the identification that some quite different alternative z is the "best" or the "right" social arrangement. In arguing for a Picasso over a Dali
i.e. comparing oranges and apples. I may like the former but it may be no oranges are available or, for some reason, they are super-expensive. So I settle for an apple.
we do not need to get steamed up about identifying the perfect picture in the world,
we are welcome to get steamed up over anything at all.
which would beat the Picassos and the Dalis and all other paintings in the world. It might, however, be thought that the analogy with aesthetics is problematic
it isn't. We are speaking of arbitrary, subjective, judgments which don't greatly matter. On the other hand, the question 'can Spiderman beat up Dracula' is worth pondering. Marvel Pictures can make a billion dollars if they get this right.
For example, we may indeed be willing to accept, with great certainty, that Everest is the tallest mountain in the world, completely unbeatable in terms of stature by any other peak, but that understanding is neither needed, nor particularly helpful, in comparing the heights of, say, Kanchenjunga and Mont Blanc.
Why agree that Everest is tallest? Kilimanjaro is taller if you measure from base to summit. Mont Blanc is an older range than Kanchenjunga. Adjusted for 'orogeny', some Scandinavian mountain is taller than the Himalayas. Even the Appalachians were once higher. Essentially, once we know which mountain you consider highest, we have a way of telling how you will rank other ranges- assuming you want to be consistent.
There would be something very deeply odd in a general belief that a comparison of any two alternatives cannot be sensibly made without a prior identification of a supreme alternative.
It is odder yet to think that a ranking principle won't have a supremum if there is some feasibility constraint.
Thus, the hypothesis of necessity in the standard sense would be hard to sustain.
Why not? We are just speaking of arbitrary assertions.
There is, however, a weaker form of the hypothesis of necessity, which merely asserts that if comparative assessments can be systematically made, then that discipline must also be able to identify the very best.
If there is a feasibility constraint- sure. There is bound to be a supremum.
The claim, in this case, would be not so much that two alternatives cannot be compared in terms of justice without first knowing what the best or the perfect alternative is, but that the comparative ranking of the different alternatives must inter alia also be able to identify the answer to the transcendental question regarding the perfectly just society.
That synthetic a priori question is already the basis of the arbitrary pre-order which allows any sort of ranking. The Szpilrajn extension theorem applies. Once you start ranking, there is a way to 'fill in the gaps'.
Or, to put it in another way, if the transcendental question cannot be answered, then nor can be the comparative.
Save arbitrarily. There is no 'naturality square' here. Get over it.
This understanding of necessity would not vindicate the need to go via the transcendental approach to comparative assessments, but it would at least give transcendental identification a necessary presence in the theory of justice. We have to examine this considerably weaker claim of "necessity" as well.
We really don't. Arbitrary assertions can be piled on arbitrary assertions in an arbitrary manner. The pretence of logic is fraudulent. This is like Jorgensen's dilemma. Normative reasoning may look 'logico-deductive' but it isn't really.
COMPARATIVES WITHOUT TRANSCENDENCE Would a sequence of pairwise comparisons invariably lead us to the very best?
Yes, by Szpilrajn Extension so long as there is a feasibility constraint. Thus if we have a criteria to say I am taller than you then there must be a tallest human on earth because we know there is a physiological limit to height.
That presumption has some appeal, since the superlative might indeed appear to be the natural end point of a robust comparative. But this conclusion would, in general, be a non sequitur. In fact, it is only with a "well-ordered" ranking (for example, a complete and transitive ordering over a finite set) that we can be sure that the set of pairwise comparisons must also identify a "best" alternative.
But Szpilrajn says every partial order is contained in a total order. If you arbitrarily impose a partial order someone else can extend it equally arbitrarily.
We must, therefore, ask: How complete should the assessment be, for it to be a systematic discipline?
Talking bollocks is not a 'systematic discipline'.
In the "totalist" approach that characterizes the standard theories of justice (including Rawls's), incompleteness tends to appear as a failure, or at least as a sign of the unfinished nature of the exercise.
No. The thing can always be 'completed' though the thing itself would remain obviously stooooopid and arbitrary.
Indeed, the survival of incompleteness is sometimes seen as a defect of a theory of justice,
being stooopid, however, is not a defect- right?
which calls into question the positive assertions that such a theory makes. In fact, however, a theory of justice that makes systematic room for in completeness allows one to arrive at possibly quite strong judgments (for example, about the injustice of continuing famines in a world of prosperity,
That is only an 'injustice' if there is a justiciable global right to food. Otherwise it is a misfortune, or a totes uncool situation or proof that my moustache is not tickling the right pan-dimensional clitoris or any other such arbitrary and subjective formulation.
On the other hand it is true that, if you are an electrician, it might be nice to say 'your porking my wife is totes against Faraday's Law! Stop it otherwise electrons will bite your dick off!'. Similarly, people teaching useless shite may want to pretend that their discipline can prove it is totes unjust or against some imaginary Law that famines happen or that the milk-man is porking my wife.
or of persistently grotesque subjugation of women), with out having to find highly differentiated assessment of every political and social arrangement in comparison with every other arrangement (for example, addressing such questions as: Is a top income tax rate of 45 percent more just or less just than a top rate of 46 percent?)
It's fine to say 'it is more just but not consistent with the canons of taxation'.
I have discussed elsewhere why a systematic and disciplined theory of normative evaluation, including assessment of social justice, need not take a "totalist" form.
But it is still arbitrary and wholly useless if not mischievous.
Incompleteness may be of the lasting kind for several different reasons, including unbridgeable gaps in information, and judgmental unresolvability involving disparate considerations that cannot be entirely eliminated, even with full information.
This is not true. For any particular purpose you can have a weighting method to get to commensurability.
For example, it may be hard to resolve the overall balance of the comparative claims of equity considerations that lie behind Rawlsian lexicographic maximin, compared with, say, sum-ranking in a gross or equity-adjusted form.
It is easy to do a Cost Benefit Analysis with a Rawlsian weighting mechanism. True 'worst off' is intensional but it can be given an arbitrary extension. True, the numbers may be fudged or arrived at stupidly, still, this is true of almost all Project Evaluation.
And yet, despite such durable incompleteness we may still be able to agree readily that there is a clear social injustice
even if there is no such thing. But then we can also readily agree that Biden is totes Fascist or that Jewish Homosexuals are being persecuted by Hollywood.
involved in the persistence of endemic hunger
Why did Sen's own people not see 'endemic hunger' or, indeed, large scale famine, as 'social injustice'? One reason is that things got worse once a radical Socialist like Mujib took charge in Sen's ancestral East Bengal.
or exclusion from medical access,
Why not make it illegal for Doctors or Hospitals to turn away indigent patients? Oh. The provision of medicine might disappear. In that case, we aren't really talking about 'injustice' at all. The country is as poor as shit. It may be that public policy can improve things. But that is a question about politics, not justice.
which calls for a well-specified remedying for the advancement of justice
The thing has nothing to do with justice. It may be that Doctors and Hospitals don't turn away the indigent just in case they get knifed. Injustice- e.g. getting knifed- can increase the provision of health care.
(or reduction of injustice), even after taking note of the costs involved. Similarly, we may acknowledge the possibility that liberties of different persons may, to some extent, conflict with each other
It is obvious that they do. A liberty is a Hohfeldian 'immunity' which however might be trumped by somebody else's superior entitlement.
(so that any fine-tuning of the demands of equal liberty may be hard to work out),
Only fuckwits demand 'equal liberty' or equal penis size.
and yet strongly agree that torturing accused people would be an unjust violation of liberty
that is a justiciable matter. We are speaking of an action which is per se illegal. However, the torturer may have a defence in law or it may not be in the public interest to prosecute him or else, if juries make determinations of fact, it may be impossible to convict him.
and that this injustice calls for an urgent rectification.
Unless it doesn't at all. The fact is, it is only quite recently that judicial torture has been considered unjust. Under exigent circumstances, it probably isn't really considered unjust by most people.
There is a further consideration that may work powerfully in the direction of making political room for incompleteness of judgments about social justice, even if it were the case that every person had a complete ordering over the possible social arrangements. Since a theory of justice invokes agreement between different parties (for example, in the "original position" in the Rawlsian framework),
no actual agreement is needed. What is required is 'meta-agreement'- i.e. agreeing there would have been such an agreement.
incompleteness can also arise from the possibility that different persons may continue to have some differences (consistently with agreeing on a lot of the comparative judgments). Even after vested interests and per sonal priorities have been somehow "taken out" of consideration through such devices as the "veil of ignorance," there may remain possibly conflicting views on social priorities, for example in weighing the claims of need over entitlement to the fruits of one's labour.
Sen doesn't get that there can be an eusocial 'bourgeois strategy' which all respect on the basis of an arbitrary 'uncorrelated asymmetry'. John Maynard Smith clarified this decades ago. Sen, sadly, was too stupid to understand such ideas. I have dealt with his 'parable of the flute' elsewhere.
Rawls, it must be said, wasn't really a 'Rawlsian'. Sen says-
Not surprisingly, Rawls actually abandons his own principles of justice when it comes to the assessment of how to go about thinking about global justice.
Rawls published his magnum opus at a time when most Western countries were using fiscal policy to do some amount of explicit 'redistribution'. Sadly, inflation meant actual redistribution was from older savers to younger, better educated, boomers.
There was some talk of raising the proportion of GNP to be given in aid, but, by the end of the Sixties it was obvious that Aid created poverty- not to mention Sen-tentious stupidity.
In a later contribution, The Law of Peoples, Rawls invokes a "second original position," with a fair negotiation involving representatives of different polities or different "peoples" as Rawls call them who serve as parties under this second veil of ignorance.
Rawls's second book was not well received. He had been wrong about the direction Fiscal policy would take in Western countries. After the end of the Cold War, Huntingdon's 'Clash of Civilizations' might be important. Rawlsian shite wasn't.
However, Rawls does not try to derive principles of justice that might emanate from this second original position, and concentrates instead on certain general principles of humanitarian behavior.
Which is all that the West had. Nobody was talking of redistribution any more.
The Rawlsian vehicle of justice that would take us rapidly forward in pursuit of some justice in a justiceless world remains stalled and stationary in the wintry morning of a world with out a global state.
Captain Kirk, in the original Star Trek series, had a better version of whatever senile shite Rawls was spouting.
To be sure, Rawls need not agree that the world is really unjust if he remains fully attached to the belief that the concept of justice does not apply at the global level. Nagel, on the other hand, seems definitely convinced that "we do not live in a just world" (the opening sentence of "The Problem of Global Justice" (op. cit., p. 113)).
Sadly, those living in America paid money in taxes to make the world less just in a manner which harmed Americans.
While I firmly agree with that conclusion (given what I see as the role of a theory of justice, the subject matter of this paper), it is not entirely clear to me how Nagel can make statements of this kind given his conviction that the idea of global justice is "a chimera."
It is easy enough. I can think I am as ugly as shit while also believing there is no method of beautification which would make me as cute as Alia Bhatt. I'm kidding. Once I shave off my moustache, I'll be her spitting image. But that would be unjust to Gal Gadot whom I currently more closely resemble.
The challenge of making the world less unjust, thus, remains unaddressed within the transcendental approach.
Because the transcendental approach could totes kick Putin's butt if only it took up the challenge- right?
It is not, however, at all clear why we should be reduced to silence, so far as justice is concerned, merely because the reach of institutional possibilities does not prepare us for transcendental justice.
What's so conceptually difficult about creating a World Army under a World Government? A lot of people hoped that's what the UN would become.
The question how global justice can nevertheless be advanced remains pertinent to ask,
The answer is empirical or ideographic. It may involve boring institutional stuff like America agreeing to come under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court but not necessarily. Nobody needs to have any synthetic a priori judgments or, indeed, to share any ideology or theory or idea of Justice or Beauty or Truth or anything else.
unless we are forcibly removed from the territory of justice on the ground that transcendental justice is the only satisfactory or the only understandable idea of justice.
Sen thinks some stupid Professors are actually Super-Heroes like the Hulk or Spiderman.
Indeed, that question about advancement of justice (or about reduction of global injustice) can be a fruitful part of the subject matter of the deliberative framework of public reasoning.
Or it can be a waste of time. Indeed, it must be the latter if senile Professors are involved. Public reasoning, like private reasoning, is either fit for purpose or it isn't. Rawls was wrong about the direction Fiscal policy would go in his own country. Still, as a tenured Professor he had to keep talking bollocks. .
even though Rawls was a visionary leader of thought on the importance of public reasoning, he had considerable skepticism about the use of public reasoning at the global level.
At the time more and more countries were embracing Socialism or Communism. Rawls himself came under attack by American Leftists as a 'status quoist' who was trying to buy off the revolting proletariat.
It is important to separate out two possible grounds for Rawls's reluctance. One issue, which has already been mentioned, is the inapplicability of the exacting framework of transcendental justice at the global level, because of institutional limitations.
No. Rawls lived in a country where there was some fiscal redistribution. He thought there would be more. He was wrong.
A second reason for Rawls's reluctance is his insistence on linking public reasoning with the contractarian format of the "original position."
The West had 'Social Insurance' of one type or another. Since Rawls did not understand how Insurance markets actually work, he thought people would agree to a particularly stupid Fiscal policy.
This involves a devised deliberative exercise that would appear to be hard to apply beyond the limits of a particular society (or a particular "people," as Rawls defines this collectivity in his later works).
This isn't so. We can just as easily imagine ourselves not knowing our nationality as not knowing our gender or race or class origin.
Rawls's statement about the need for a "common standpoint"
with whom? I think the answer is 'with those on the progressive left. The Right may still have been clinging to the notion that any WASP who sided with the poor was a 'Race Traitor'.
which was quoted (from A Theory of Justice) at the beginning of this paper was immediately followed by the invoking of this particular conceptual device: Thus our moral principles and convictions are objective to the extent that they have been arrived at and tested by assuming this general standpoint and by assessing the arguments for them by the restrictions expressed by the conception of the original position.
This is foolish. Moral principles and convictions are irrelevant. All that is happening is that an economic argument is being made- viz. you don't know if your life might not turn to shit. So why not have a generous Social Insurance scheme? The answer to this economic argument is 'dude, you are talking about a pooling equilibrium based on 'cheap talk'. What will happen is 'adverse selection'. Guys in the insurance industry will figure out 'costly to disguise' signals and offer better 'separating equbilibria' based risk-pooling. Also the industry as a whole will encourage R&D and drive sensible legislation so that outcomes for everybody improves. Stop talking nonsense. You aren't an actuary.'
The deliberation thus takes the form of fair negotiation,
No. There is no fucking negotiation. Rawls thought he had identified an economic argument (based on risk aversion) for a redistributive policy (except it wasn't even that. If the tax take falls as the tax rate rises, then redistribution is off the table. But that's what happens to taxes on elastic factors (and all factors become elastic in the long run) anyway. So all you have is risk-pooling of a shitty sort for the poor and a much better sort for those with elastic factor supply.
in which the fairness of the reasoned negotiation is grounded on the demand that the reasoning occurs under a specially conceived veil of ignorance.
There was no negotiation. Rawls assumed that 'risk aversion' would do the work for him in what was essentially a 'representative agent' model. He forgot
1) Knightian Uncertainty exists. So risk aversion can't deliver
2) Because Knightian Uncertainty exists the Social Contract is 'incomplete' i.e. not once and for all. There has to be reapportionment along the way
3) Professors are as stupid as shit. There is a story of a Southern Senator visiting England where he is introduced to some darkie of consequence. He can't bring himself to refer to him as Mister so-and-so and thus settles for calling him 'Professor'. It may seem a term of respect, but- for Anglo Saxons- it conveys contempt.
No comments:
Post a Comment