Inductive reasoning goes from the particular to the general. Deductive reasoning goes from the general to the particular. Amartya Sen's reasoning doesn't go anywhere. It just sucks ass endlessly.
Tadashi Hiraia and Yukio Ikemotob have a paper titled 'Sen’s Economics in The Idea of Justice: Induction vs Deduction'ABSTRACTIn Philosophy, a "transcendental idea" is a concept or idea that is purely rational and necessary for understanding experience, but whose object (what it refers to) cannot be experienced directly, as it transcends our capacity for sensory and cognitive experience. The idea of Justice or Beauty or Truth is transcendental in that we can's see or touch or measure the thing itself. We can merely say, based on existing knowledge base, I think this is more beautiful or true or just than that.' Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, examined the nature of such ideas, arguing that while they are useful for organizing our thoughts and pushing our understanding, they are ultimately unverifiable and exist in a realm beyond human experience. We are not obliged to go that far. We merely say that Justice and Beauty and Capability are 'intensions' whose extensions change as the knowledge base changes. This means there is no set or mathematical function which corresponds to them because they are no well defined.
In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen revealingly differentiates his capability approach from the mainstream in terms of structure: comparative vis-à-vis transcendental.
Instead of constructing models based on fundamental principles and questing for perfection,
In which case, we have to change the model the moment someone spots an imperfection in it. That's a good thing. It is how Maths and Physics and Engineering and Economics have made great progress.
Sen seeks to compare feasible options and to choose one from among them.
People already do this in every activity they undertake. Sen might as well seek to breathe in and then breathe out so as not to suffocate.
What lies behind this strategy is respect for a plurality of values and reasoning in society.
People who seek to create perfect models- e.g. mathematicians- may be even more respectful of pluralism. But, it is wholly irrelevant.
In this context description plays a key role in this approach, given that plural values and reasoning can be reflected only in an inductive manner which requires rich description.
No. They are reflected in an 'imperative' manner- i.e. they are 'value judgments'. No 'inference' or induction is involved.
The purpose of this article is to examine how Sen’s approach is related to the Cambridge tradition, which typically embraces inductive methods of reasoning, with a particular focus on the influence of Maurice Dobb.
A Marxist who thought there was a universal law at work in human history. He was not a pluralist. Indeed, we could say he was a teleologist or determinist. Sen did collaborate with Dobb in his youth. The Dobb-Sen thesis was Stalinist. The fruits of productivity gains must be confiscated from the proletariat so as to invest in heavy industry. This can't be done in a democratic country.
Sen (2009) addresses the “idea” and not the “theory” of justice.
He does neither. He is talking of economic policy- stuff done by politicians and bureaucrats- not Justice which is the province of the Courts. True, in India, there was a time when some pretended that the Supreme Court had 'inherent power' to order the Government to do anything it liked. But this was not true. The Executive ignored orders it didn't like and took its revenge on the Bench till it backed down.
Although the traditional and orthodox theories of justice tend to answer the question “What is justice?”,
No. It is a Tarskian primitive. Judges and Courts already exist. The question is whether there is some superior principle- e.g. Utility, Liberty, Income Redistribution, promotion of one class or race or gender above another, etc.- which Courts should base their ratios on.
the perfect answer that they pursue has not been found in the long history of humankind.
Yes it has. Justice is a service industry. It must pay for itself by raising productivity. If it fails to do so, it will either be disintermediated or else the country may decline in relative terms and end up getting invaded or facing an insurrection.
What is more realistic and important is to locate areas of agreement on the ways to improve our society.
Politicians do this all the time. Indeed, we all do.
Our main challenge here is to compare feasible options and to choose the best one from among them.
We don't know the feasible options. Also, unless you are a Dictator, with plenty of secret policemen under your command, the only things you can choose are things you yourself can pay for.
To do so, our argument needs to be grounded in reality and thus start with real-life problems, not the creation of models.
Professors aren't concerned with 'real-life' problems. They are glorified child-minders.
Sen employs this approach and calls it comparative. It can be seen in his argument on “missing women” and famines, developed by using existing data.
bad data. Everyone in Bengal knew that statistics for food output in the early Forties were wholly fictional. Sen pretended this wasn't the case. As for 'missing women', the Brits in India knew about female infanticide in the 1780's. Sex-selective abortion was promoted by International Agencies in the Seventies. Sen came late to that particular party.
In contrast, both orthodox economics and Rawls’ theory of justice are transcendental, to the extent that they make assumptions about human behaviours, construct models based on fundamental principles, and draw conclusions by focusing on the models while setting reality aside.
No. Orthodox economics is 'positive'- i.e. focussed on empirically verifiable predictions. Rawls's theory was simply wrong as Harsanyi pointed out. He wasn't a mathematician. Also, he didn't know about Insurance.
The rationale of this dichotomy (i.e. ‘transcendental institutionalism’
Rawls proposes a rule to be followed. He does not mention any institution. In Kantian terms a 'transcendental institution' would be one which is a priori and which must be presupposed for any experience to be possible. I suppose, a Theist might say, that transcendental Institution is Heaven with its angels ruled over by God Almighty. It was God and his angels who created our species and our planet and our Galaxy.
versus the ‘realisation-focused comparison’ proposed in The Idea of Justice) goes back to his partitioning of the arguments into formal and informal chapters in Sen’s (1970) earlier study, in that the formal chapters were written for readers who are concerned with formal statement and technical derivation while the informal chapters were written for those who are concerned with the relevance of the results.
Sen worked within an Arrow-Debreu framework without Knightian Uncertainty and no mathematical problems of concurrency, complexity, computability etc. In such a world, there would be no need for language or politics or education or scientific or other types of research. The prive vector would encode all information. Suppose I want to find out if I am capable of becoming a successful ballet dancer. I look up the price of ballet training for me with a money back guarantee. Suppose it is one trillion dollars then I know that though the thing is possible, it will be very very difficult to achieve. I don't really have the capability to become a ballet dancer because I am fat and clumsy. This is not the 'real' world. It is a fairy tale based on the wholesale misuse of mathematics and what in logic is known as the 'intensional fallacy'.
This classification in turn seems to correspond to the two types of reasoning, deduction and induction, to the extent that transcendental institutionalism requires certain frameworks/models constructed in advance for pursuing perfect justice in a deductive manner,
No. Rawls uses induction- in particular backward induction- to arrive at his conclusion re. what people would chose in the 'original position'. Had he used a 'deductive' method, he would have realized that no contract is binding without the passing of consideration. What can be deduced from this is that anything agreed in the original position will not be enforceable in real life.
whereas realisation-focused comparison pays attention to fact and evidence in order to compare realities so as to identify manifest injustice in an inductive manner.
Sen does not do so. Suppose I feel that a rich man gained his wealth by unjust means. I would need to find a 'base case' where there was unjust enrichment and then I would have to show that profit was gained from it in the subsequent period. After that it would be enough to show that at time n, there was wealth arising from that unjust enrichment and this directly lead to the existence of unjustly acquired wealth at time n+1. This is the principle of induction and is used by prosecutors. But 'manifest injustice' is something which is directly perceivable as unjust. Consider a thief who has in his sack the very valuable crown of the King of England. It is manifest that this is 'unjust enrichment'. But we can't be sure that a respectable banker worth a billion dollars came by his wealth unjustly. We would have to find him stealing money from a client when he was 20 and then investing that money and thus accumulating a fortune.
The backbone of Sen’s approach to justice is the reflection of plurality in our reasoning.
Judges are used to different parties to a suit giving different reasons for why they should prevail. What makes Judges and Law Courts special is that they have protocol bound methods of arriving at a decision such that even if the parties were different, the outcome would be the same.
In contrast to orthodox economics and contemporary political philosophy, which claim the unique choice of one particular set of principles based on a single dominant rationale (i.e. a theory), he argues that reasoning can take many different forms which nonetheless make room for some points shared by all.
People will pay for 'unique' answers which don't change depending on who says what. They won't pay for a guy who says 'well, all of you are right in your own way. One thing we can all agree on is that we should breathe in and then breathe out. Isn't that a marvellous discovery? Incidentally, I am a brown monkey from a shithole country. Please give me Nobel Prize.'
Indeed, illustrated with an example of three (respectively egalitarian, utilitarian and libertarian) children with a flute, he proposes competing rationales for social justice and yet raises the possibility of reaching a partial agreement.
This case should be decided on the basis of an uncorrelated asymmetry- viz. who made the flute. The poorest child is not uniquely identified. Another poorer child may come along, in which case Bob loses the flute and cries and cries. Neither is 'best flute player' uniquely identified. Anna loses the flute because Agnes, the internationally renowned flautist, turns up. She too cries and cries. John Maynard Smith showed how uncorrelated asymmetries promote eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'. Sen doesn't seem to have heard of him.
The bottom line is that ‘we cannot reduce all the things we have reason to value into one homogeneous magnitude’ (Sen 2009, p. 239).
No. The bottom line is that, at the margin, everything we value is turned into a homogenous magnitude- viz. dollars and cents. You trade off aesthetic and utilitarian considerations by buying not the most beautiful or the cheapest car but one which looks quite nice and which is affordable and fit for purpose.
What he presents is therefore ‘the approach to justice … [which] makes room for pervasive plurality as a constituent feature of the assessment of justice’ (Sen 2009, p. 309).
This is not an approach to justice. It is an approach to talking endless bollocks- preferably in return for a hefty salary from some UN agency.
The difference between plural and single reasoning corresponds to the information employed by each approach. Whereas, for example, contemporary welfare economics and political philosophy focus respectively on utility and resources (including primary goods) as the dominant information for a social arrangement, and with other information ignored or at best undervalued, Sen proposes instead—of such a narrow view—to expand the informational space for the direct consideration of plural features of our lives and concerns.
Thus endlessly prolonging discussion and never coming to a conclusion. This may suit bureaucrats and academics of a wholly useless sort.
Consequently, he takes particular note of capability, or ‘our ability to achieve various combinations of functionings that we can compare and judge against each other in terms of what we have reason to value’
We don't know our capabilities or those of anybody else.
, while not discounting the significance of other informational spaces. An advantage of drawing on capability is to represent irreducible diversities in our lives, our concerns, and thus our reasoning, which in turn allow us to reach partial agreements.
About what? We already have complete agreement that a judge who won't deliver a decision but just talks endlessly ought to be sacked.
In addressing the significance of public discussion for justice, Sen distinguishes two lines of reasoning: transcendental institutionalism (the transcendental approach) and realisation-focused comparisons (the comparative approach).
Jurists do this all the time. Thus, when the French felt they were losing business to Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions, they considered changing their approach to contract law, etc. Justice is a service industry. Even the Ayatollahs who, I imagine, trace their judicial institutions to the Divinely inspired Prophet, are happy to admit innovations originating in the Christian West- e.g. Codification- though, no doubt, they may find precedents for it in their own annals.
Sen supports the latter.
No. He isn't doing empirical studies of different legal systems and establishing whether the promote or retard progress.
Sen has studied set theory. Yet he says ‘[t]here would be something 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’ .
Does he not know that there is no highest cardinality?
To illustrate this point, he raises the possibility of comparing the peak heights of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley while disregarding the fact that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world.
Kilimanjaro is higher if you measure from the centre of the earth.
What is more realistic and important is thus to find areas of agreement en route to the advancement of or retreat from justice.
The agreement is to go to court or to an arbitrator to settle the dispute.
This leads to Sen’s focus on the identification of manifest injustice
e.g. that women have to sit down to pee
rather than the search for a non-existent perfect justice, as clearly stated at the beginning of the Preface: ‘What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate’ .
Some people are remedying those injustices. Sen isn't. That's an 'overlapping consensus' right there. The problem with pluralism is that decision spaces become multi-dimensional and, by McKelvey Chaos theorem, there is a struggle for agenda control with highly mischievous results.
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