Rawl's disease and Sen's diagnosis

Sen's criticism of Rawls is based on a fallacy- viz that a diagnosis has to be perfect before it can validly identify something as belonging to an ideal type. This has never been the case. Tanquam ex ungue leonem- from seeing the claw, the presence of the lion is known- is an ancient saying. No doctor ever waits to develop a perfect diagnosis but proceeds on the balance of likelihoods. A hypochondriac may feel disappointed with his Doctor when the latter dismisses him as 'perfectly healthy' after a perfunctory examination. But a diagnosis can only be perfected on the autopsy table- not a desirable outcome, even for the hypochondriac itching to be proved right. 'I told you I was ill' is a poor epitaph for one's gravestone. It is better that one accepts an imperfect diagnosis that one is in perfect health- and then does something worthwhile with one's life- rather than kill oneself in the hope that the coroner will find one really did have some terrible disease.

Sen takes a different view-

If a diagnosis of perfectly just social arrangements is incurably problematic, then the entire strategy of transcendental institutionalism is deeply impaired, even if every conceivable alternative in the world were available.

Transcendental institutionalism doesn't exist but, to keep Sen happy, let us say that it does. But, what does it cash out as? For Rawls, it yields two simple 'deontological' rules which are relatively simple to apply- for example, in a Cost Benefit Analysis or in a Judicial context. Since Rawls was a Boston Brahmin of clerical bent, it is no surprise that Rawlsian rules aren't very different from Gandhian or Buddhist 'sarvodaya'- viz. testing any given proposal on the basis of its impact on the least well off and upholding such liberties as can be extended to all. Of course, as in the theological case, this seemingly bleeding heart rule-set quickly cashes out as 'the bourgeois strategy' because the class that enforces it really is composed of precious little snowflakes servicing whose Student Loans would engross more and more of the Economy's surplus value.

Still, such snowflakes- whatever the theological or ideological colour of their alma mater- can always hypocritically agree that these delusively 'bleeding heart' rules can be 'plurally grounded' (to use Sen's terminology) because there can be  an overlapping consensus (to use Rawls's) between people with different values and beliefs regarding the utility of those rules, provided 'utility is transferable'- i.e. high bargaining power or 'Shapley value' minorities can be bought off.

Sen believes his 'idea' is better than Rawls's 'theory' because it doesn't even commit to 'rules', so its hypocrisy can never be exposed.
Why? Rules can be 'institutionalised' and Institutions can take on a life of their own. Like Thomas Becket who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury to advance the King's interests, but who switched allegiance to the Church; such Institutions have the potential to turn into a check or countervailing power against those who seek to instrumentalize it.

No doubt, 'Social Justice warriors' may pretend otherwise and claim that such and such institution has only recently been subverted by neo-liberalism and that they are struggling to re-establish the previous eco-feminist status quo ante 'bourgeois strategy' type equilibrium. This claim is purely tactical. Everybody knows that it is easier to reclaim property fraudulently usurped than grab something which never belonged to you because evolution has more or less hardwired that game theoretic cognitive bias in us. Anyway, what you collectively grab will soon be grabbed from you- as Soviet and Chinese peasants soon found.

Sen's contribution is a claim of this type. He knows Institutions are judged on the basis of fairness in a manner that people are not. No one objects to a person's tendency to interact more, or marry, within his own class or ethnicity. However, one might well object if an Institution is revealed to have this sort of institutional bias.

Thus by moving away from rules and institutions, Sen thinks he's helping by muddying the waters even more. But, this is old wine in new bottles. Unjust institutions have always been justified by saying 'institutions don't matter. The people will make equitable adjustments among themselves.' Thus, when Sen returned to India in the Fifties, the intelligentsia was saying- 'we needn't bother with land reform. Vinobha Bhave and J.P are getting the landlords to hand over land to the poorest of the poor. We needn't bother with the agricultural sector but can instead devote ourselves to dreams of capital intensive industrial development financed by freezing or squeezing real wages a la the Sen-Dobb thesis.'

How does Sen pull of his trick? He makes 'the Perfect' the enemy of 'the Good'- though perfection, as opposed to fairness, has never been a desiderata for Human Justice. Why? Perfect Justice is global not local. Suppose, having suffered a tort, I go not to the Magistrate's Court but that of the Archangel Gabriel. The Magistrate would only looks at the facts of the case and makes a decision which I might feel to be fair or unfair. The Archangel, however, immediately knows that inter alia, I lust after my neighbour's goat and causes me to grow horns on my head by way of condign punishment.

We are in no hurry to encounter 'Perfect Justice'. 'Use every man after his desert and who will escape whipping?' A fair means of resolving a dispute- even if stochastic, as by tossing an unbiased coin- solves a coordination problem. Institutions, precisely because they can operate according to impartial rules, represent a Schelling focal solution.

Sen takes a different view-

For example, the two principles of justice in John Rawls’s classic investigation of ‘justice as fairness’, which will be more fully discussed in Chapter 2, are precisely about perfectly just institutions in a world where all alternatives are available.

Rawls hasn't described any perfectly just institutions at all. He hasn't said 'Universities should be constituted in such and such a way'. 'Courts should operate in such and such a way'.  The Police and Armed Forces need to be organised in such and such a way.

Rawls gave a 'founding myth'- like the myth of Er- and whether we call this a canonical, or Schelling focal, solution to a coordination problem, or describe it as a Straussian 'noble lie'- the fact is we can all choose to adhere to Rawls's two decision rules.

We won't because, as Aristotle pointed out, nomos doesn't matter (save to pedagogues), physis does. Conventions don't matter if Entry and Exit are free. People vote with their feet. They quit places obsessed with nomos to go to places where physis is what people care about. Why? Science and Technology and Enterprise do matter. They can make the world a better place for all of us.

However, what we do not know is whether the plurality of reasons for justice would allow one unique set of principles of justice to emerge in the original position. The elaborate exploration of Rawlsian social justice, which proceeds step by step from the identification and establishment of just institutions, would then get stuck at the very base

Sen is being silly. Some guy says 'I propose these 2 rules- if you like, you can read my 10,000 page book justifying them'. Plural grounding or 'overlapping consensus' means we either agree or propose some amendment or alternative. Nobody- except an academic- has any duty to read those10,000 pages of shite. In practice, some jurisdiction may adopt those rules. If it proves beneficial, more and more people ('metics') will migrate there. If it is flawed in some way, people will leave. This is 'Tiebout sorting'.

Rawls, relying on Sen and his ilk, had indeed thought that a certain sort of Economic Institution- like India's Planning Commission- could be fit for purpose in a functioning Democracy under the Rule of Law. Young Indian Harvard students of the period- people like Gurcharan Das- initially accepted this idiocy of Rawls's. After all, a future Planning Commission Chief, Sukhamoy Chakroborty, had been praised to the skies by Samuelson who thought the Soviet Union might not just catch up but surpass America with respect to material living standards. Experience cured Das of his illusions- as he records in 'India unbound'. Rawls too was disabused of the notion that mathematical economics was like Physics. No 'Institutions' could be supervenient on its apodictic findings such that 'Growth' could be frictionlessly traded off with 'Equity' in a manner which yielded a golden path.

Still, savants could propose such rules on the basis of deep cogitation and other people, with different values and beliefs, could- on the basis of rational discussion- adhere to those rules.

Sen acknowledges that Rawls drew back from his initial, naive, faith in a Lefty or 'bleeding heart' version of Samuelson type ergodic theory. Sen writes-

In his later writings, Rawls makes some concessions to the recognition that ‘citizens will of course differ as to which conceptions of political justice they think most reasonable’. Indeed, he goes on to say in The Law of Peoples (1999): The content of public reason is given by a family of political conceptions of justice, and not by a single one. There are many liberalisms and related views, and therefore many forms of public reason specified by a family of reasonable political conceptions. Of these, justice as fairness, whatever its merits, is but one.

It is not, however, clear how Rawls would deal with the far-reaching implications of this concession. The specific institutions, firmly chosen for the basic structure of society, would demand one specific resolution of the principles of justice, in the way Rawls had outlined in his early works, including The Theory of Justice (1971).* Once the claim to uniqueness of the Rawlsian principles of justice is dropped (the case for which is outlined in Rawls’s later works), the institutional programme would clearly have serious indeterminacy, and Rawls does not tell us much about how a particular set of institutions would be chosen on the basis of a set of competing principles of justice that would demand different institutional combinations for the basic structure of the society. Rawls could, of course, resolve that problem by abandoning the transcendental institutionalism of his earlier work (particularly of The Theory of Justice), and this would be the move that would appeal most to this particular author.† But I am afraid I am not able to claim that this was the direction in which Rawls himself was definitely heading, even though some of his later works raise that question forcefully.

What Sen is neglecting to mention is that if  (as Rawls gullibly assumed,' General facts and common sense about human social life and general conclusions of science (including economics and psychology) that are uncontroversial' exist universally- i.e. if Econ is nomothetic not idiographic, which would be the case if Evolution is a false theory- then, sure!, 'transcendental institutions' would necessarily exist. 'Capacitance diversity' would have no survival value. Everything should and would be channelised because Knightian Uncertainty would be but a mirage.  However, if Evolution is false, some type of Occassionalism must be true. Transcendence would be the best thing for the mind to seek.

Sen is himself basing his 'idea of justice' on a supposed 'general fact' of human social life- which is that human beings always and everywhere want to extinguish instances of 'remediable' manifest injustice. This is not common experience nor common sense. 

If we elide the ignorant part of Rawls- as we elide the ignorant part of Kant- we still get, if not a deontological rule, then still something that is action guiding if only in a fuzzy sense or else something which cashes out as a virtue ethic. 

Thus, the fact that we know- from Physical experiments- that Kant's notions of Space and Time and theory of 'incongruent counterparts' are wrongheaded, as, indeed, is the whole Phenomenological project- this knowledge doesn't wholly nullify the imperative aspect of  Kant's work. Similarly, once we strip the bogus, nomothetic, Econ out of Rawls, we still get something original, closely reasoned, and thus thought provoking. Because Kant and Rawls are 'first order theorists' they retain an imperative force. Sen, by contrast is advancing a 'second order theory' critiquing an idiosyncratically caricatured first order theory which we already know must be false because it held that Econ was nomothetic and thus had 'general facts and conclusions'.

Why does Sen think the objection he raises to the later Rawls  doesn't nullify his own project? A 'remedial injustice' is either a Pareto improvement or it isn't. If it is, then it more properly described as an inefficiency arising out of remediable ignorance. If it isn't, then there is a concurrency problem. Which injustice should we tackle first? Is it not unjust to hurt x, who currently profits from the injustice we are about to tackle, rather than hurt y, who may have less 'Voice' or other 'countervailing power', by tackling the injustice from which y currently benefits?

Sen may feel his 'idea of Justice' isn't formally axiological. But, if it is action guiding, it faces a concurrency problem of a type which Public Reason can't solve because it itself is a case of Djikstra's starving philosophers. On the other hand, if Sen's theory is not action guiding then what is it? An advertisement for a product which does not exist? But why devote scarce resources to such an advertisement save for some corrupt chrematistic purpose? Or is our 'Mother Theresa of Economics' knowingly doing precisely that, not ad majorem Dei gloriam, but out of sheer unbridled narcissism?

One charitable answer is that Sen, because of his great age, thinks radical 'indeterminacy' to be a scandal for a research programme. It may be that Leftists in the Fifties genuinely believed in deterministic theories which, like Bazarov, they held to be required by, or supportive of,  their own atheism.

However, for mathematics- a subject Sen had a natural affinity with- indeterminacy has not been a scandal since the Thirties. The same can be said for pluralism. Anyone with a modicum of mathematical training can always rescue any first order Research Program in the Social Sciences by applying a sort of 'Reverse Mathematics' and winnowing out assumptions or axioms that are not necessary for it to be useful.  This is the proper task of a critique or 'second order theory'. Sen is critiquing Rawls but refusing to do this necessary work. The irony is that Rawls drew upon Sen's own work to persist in error. Perhaps, Sen suffers cognitive dissonance in this respect. He was proud to be cited by the more famous an academic but this pride blinded him to his own, second order, merely emulous error. Mimetic desire prevented Sen from repairing Rawls's substantive theory. Yet, the 'Idea of Justice' can't be read save as, not so much a commentary on Rawls, but rather a cowardly retreat from the task of doing the sort of idiographic Economics which might give Rawlsian imperatives a concrete model. No doubt, it is this ironic parapraxis, which has Sen use the word 'diagnosis' again and again in the Introductory chapter of a book equally crippled by the Economistic disease which vitiated Rawls's moral argument.

Oikonomia- a dispensation which is harmoniously constructed and thus 'Divine' in some sense- is always at odds with Akrebia- narrow, rules based, rigidity.

 Good Institutions develop and systematise Equitable remedies which bridge the gap between nomothetic rules and an idiographic reality. This is 'sound policy' or 'Niti'. Sen, given his profession, could have contributed to this sort of Economics. But this would have involved reforming Institutions and making them fit for purpose. Like Mohammad Yunus crying fie upon Dr.Akula's for profit Micro-finance scheme, Sen could have been a whistle-blower regarding academo-bureaucratic rent-seeking based on the compilation and manipulation of comparative metrics. Sen could have acted as check on Junk Social Science. Instead, he migrated from Econ. to Philosophy's la la land so as to evade all responsibility- because, you see, the people have this overpowering tropism to eradicate remediable injustice. Thus, if Sen's Credentialist swindle hasn't been eradicated, it must be what the people want it because it is just- not perfectly so, but comparatively. But then comparisons are odious.