The Idea of Justice. By Amartya Sen

The Idea of Justice

Amartya Sen

Published in 2010 by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.

This was a present from Amritha, when she was leaving for the US. She gave it to me in April or so, but I got around to reading it only in July and finished it now (August middle, actually).

A good book, heavy, text-bookish, but still fairly easy to read for most part. However, I think, to really get the best out of it, one should be a serious reader of economics and jurisprudence. Most of the book is an attempt by Sen to show that John Rawls was not completely correct in what he said about justice in his seminal work 'The Theory of Justice'. It is difficult to summarize here what Sen actually says, but let me try.

First of all, what did Rawls say about 'justice'? As an aside, let me add that when I was studying law for those 2 or 3 months in 1977, I remember my lecturer in jurisprudence suggesting that we read Rawls - of course I didn't then, but I did intend to, I wrote that name down in my list of authors to read, but I never got around to reading any of his writing. So what I say here is sourced second-hand from Sen's work. Rawls says that 'justice is fairness'. So then the natural question is, can one define fairness, in some fundamental axiomatic way? The answer to that is, well, maybe not, but if we set up some procedures on how to decide what is fair, and therefore what is just, we should be able to get a firm handle on the idea of justice. So then, what are these procedures? Well, one of them is to set up a group of people, a kind of a club, drawn from a particular society (or nation - i.e. some kind of closed group) who will decide what is fair and just, and then make the laws and so on to implement these ideas. Well how do you ensure fairness and justice by this process? The thing is, the group of people that decides is actually an imaginary construct - and the group are screened by a 'veil of ignorance' from the society they are creating. They will be eventually part of it, but when they make the rules and the laws and set up the institutions, they do not know what roles they are actually going to play in that society and that way they are not biased towards any one particular viewpoint, or in promoting the interests of any one particular group of people.

Sen has many criticisms about this idea of justice. The most prominent among them, the one that stays most in my mind, is that, this idea may work for a closed group of people, such as a nation, but what happens when you have to see something as 'absolutely just', applicable to all peoples. Can we think of a group drawn from ALL the people in the world, who will then decide about what is just? Sen's answer is No. Obviously, as he himself says, he is thinking about the current situation where the US decides on what is just for itself, and assumes that this is some kind of absolute way of arriving at justice for everybody. Think Iraq, think Afghanistan, etc., etc. Sen also criticizes Rawls idea that what we need is an absolute idea of justice that will work for all, and that does not allow for any kind of diversity in culture, history or geography. The third point that Sen says is wrong about Rawls' theory is that all Rawls does is say how to set up institutions that will ensure this absolute idea of justice, e.g. elections, courts, free press, etc. Sen is concerned that the way these institutions actual work in practice may turn out to be different from the ideas with which they were set up. Sen has a few more criticisms, but these are somewhat technical, and I don't really follow them all.

After (and while) making these criticisms, Sen tries to present his own idea of justice. Actually he does not give any set of rules of ideas about what justice is and how it could be achieved. He does give a lot of ideas on what should be done to arrive at justice. He admits that democracy is essential (though he does not either subscribe to the view that electoral democracy as practiced in the West (USA, UK, etc.) now is the only true democracy, nor does he admit that democracy is a Western idea tracing its orgins solely to the Greeks and later to the Magna Carta, and the French and American revolutions. He gives a lot of examples from other civilisations (chiefly Indian) to show that the idea of democracy is somewhat broader that what the neo-cons would say. He also says that freedom of speech is essential to ensure justice, but only so that everybody may make his choice clear. Here, and also in the context of democracy, he talks about 'social choice theory'. He points to Kenneth Arrow's theorem that one vote for everyone would lead often to no choice at all, and therefore not necessarily to justice, but says that further developments in social choice theory, including his own and those of Rawls and his school, have shown that one can weight the choices to arrive at just decisions, and one chief way of weighting is to give a larger weight to the choice of what one may call the 'most deprived'. Sen also gives a detailed exposition of 'capability theory' which he has apparently played a big role in developing, where a person's freedom is not decided by what he can do, but by the choices in front of him, these choices being not controlled by anything other than his own will. The example he gives is of a person who is forced by others to stay at home, when he wanted to anyway stay at home. This would be imperfect freedom, since he is limited in his choices, or in his freedom of choice to exercise his capabilities, even though this limitation does not actually come in the way of his particular choice, anyway. Sen argues that a true system of justice would try to make way for every person to exercise all his capabilities. Again there are many technical and closely argued points about these ideas which I found difficult to follow.

My own reponse to the book has two parts to it. First, I expected some kind of scientific or mathematical theory of justice, where a few self-evident truths are laid out, and then these are developed by argument into practical principles that could be applied to various real life situations. Apparently this is what Rawls tries to do, but Sen rejects this in favour of a more amorphous idea of justice, where certain truths are affirmed, but these truths are not absolute, and then are not developed into some idea of justice that is written in stone. Second, after reading this book I expected to be able to answer a specific set of questions regarding what is happening in the tribal areas of India. What for example would be the policy to follow or the attitude to have when thinking about or dealing with a tribe such as the Jarawas, who may live primitive lives, without even having the knowledge about what and how to choose. Suppose we have tribe that practices human sacrifice, with the person sacrificed willingly and happily accepting his role - what then? Would it be 'just' to not expose them to 'development' or 'education' or other thought processes, which may end the human sacrifice, but also end up in their exchanging their relative innocence for all the ills of 'civilisation'? Of course human sacrifice is extreme, but there are several such less extreme examples one comes across in everyday life. One of them is the argument by people like Rajan, that after all since the PhD programme requires a lot of sacrifice (time, effort, money), which some of the people (women, 'lower' castes, etc.) can't afford, and which does not anyway lead either to jobs or to good careers, therefore such people should be advised against it. Clearly this would be unjust (and highly partronising). Anyway the book does not answer such doubts in my mind, except to vaguely support the kind of leftist, and the kinder and more gentle and more inclusive view of justice, which I have anyway - but maybe that's what I am reading into the book. Maybe Sen means something else altogether.

Tall Short Stories. Edited by Eric Duthie

Tall Short Stories

edited by Eric Duthie

Published by Ace Star, New York, 1959.

This is a lovely collection of short stories that I first, serendipitously, laid my hands on nearly 30 years ago. The book then disappeared from my shelf. When I wanted to re-read it, it was out of print. Recently I located a second-hand copy on Amazon.com and got Chitra to get it for me. On the second (actually nth) reading it is still as lovely as ever. The book collects together about 50 short stories,all of them, as the book title says, 'tall' stories. It has a nice introduction by Duthie (who apparently is/was a kind of compulsive editor of various collections of short stories). Let me list some of my favourites, that I remember from the previous, 30-year old, reading as well - The open window, 'Saki'; The unicorn in the garden, James Thurber; Earth to earth, Robert Graves; Two bottles of relish, Lord Dunsany; Guest of the Redshields, Christina Stead; Pigs is pigs, Ellis Parker Butler; The awful fate of Melpomenous Jones, Stephen Leacock; The Golden Scilens, Sir John Squire; God and the machine, Nigel Balchain; I'll always call you Schnorrer, my African explorer, S.J. Perelman; Love is a fallacy, Max Shulman.

Appointment with Death. By Agatha Christie

Appointment with Death

Agatha Christie

Harper Edition (2001) First published 1938

A Hercule Poirot mystery set in what is now Israel/West Bank/Jordan. The story is not so good, though I could not guess the criminal. The background however is interesting. Though Christie pays no special attention to it, the politics that was going on (and which eventually led to the current extremely complicated situation in that region) comes through even with the cursory descriptions of the local people and what they say and do. The entire main cast of characters consists of a British and American tourist party (except, of course, for the Belgian Poirot), the figures of authority are all British, the servants (inefficient, unreliable and having to be 'firmly' dealt with) are all local Arabs and Palestinians who grumble incessantly and, to the tourist party, irritatingly, about the 'Jews'. Christie's husband was an archaeologist who worked in Palestine, and she often accompanied him there. Which explains her rather authentic, though superficial, descriptions of the background.

Oliver Twist. By Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

Penguin Popular Classics (1994).
First published 1837-39

I re-read this book maybe for the fourth or fifth time, having first read it, to my memory, in about 1968, when I was about 13 years old. I remember it was the Blackie edition then, maybe abridged, with very small (8 point?) print and a hardcover. The impressions that remained with me from that time include the famous 'Some more' scene, the Artful Dodger and friend confusing Oliver when they practice their pickpocketing with Fagin, the scene when Oliver is first cared for by Mr. Brownlow, and, most of all, the climactic scene where Bill Sikes murders Nancy and then later hangs himself accidently in trying to escape. Rereading the book after many years (I don't remember when I last read it, but it must have been about 20 years ago, when I used to visit the British Council library regularly) brought back these scenes with renewed vividity. They were as good as I ever remembered them. Being an very early work (Dickens must have written it when he was 25!) some of the maturity of his later work is missing, though his 'leftist' ideas are already visible. Also he has not yet developed into a very competent storyteller, so many of the connections between the characters are hard to follow and there are too many coincindences invoked to tie up the story. The other thing which struck me about this book, as, in retrospect, about all his other novels, is that though outwardly 'leftist' he does not go too far away from the basic feudalism of his times, times populated by 'gentlemen' and 'common folk' and the good ones among the former patronising the latter, but not really mixing with them. These class differences, of course, persist very strongly to this day in many of the ancient civilisations, including India, but are less apparent, for example, in America, where anyone with money is respected. Thus Dickens' protagonist is usually a child with an upper class (or upper middle-class) origin and background, who by circumstance, falls into the lower class, and then by fortune or hardwork, regains his upper class status. Pip, David, Oliver, Nicholas all go through roughly through such a process. (Only, Pip in Great Expectations, among the four, does not have a upper-middle background to start with).

In Cold Blood. By Truman Capote

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote

Penguin Books, 2008; First published 1965

A book that I always wanted to read, having heard so much about it. It's a factual account (written almost like a novel) of the brutal murder of an ordinary rural upper middle-class farmer family of four in Kansas by two men, whose initial motive is robbery. They are convinced the farmer has a safe full of money, they find it's not so, they kill all four, including two teenagers. The killing however seems completely random, not really connected to their frustration at not finding the money. Capote paints a good picture of the psyches of the two killers, though there is some psycho-babble, trying to 'explain' their personalities as a result of their childhood. However, the account is honest enough to admit Capote's defeat even after six years of research trying very hard to understand why the killings occurred, before he wrote the book. Capote also links up, if only tangentially, the randomness and meaninglessness of these killings to others of a similar nature that kept occuring while he was writing the book (and presumably keep occuring into the present day, maybe also here in India). A lot of the motive, means, characters, their actions, background, etc. seems essentially American, though some parts of it, especially characters, remind me of John Wainwright's novels set in England. A good, and, on the whole, honest book about a couple of very bad people (though Capote does not thrust his judgments such as 'good' or 'bad' on us).

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. By Michael Chabon

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Michael Chabon

Harper Perennial Olive Edition (2008)

I bought this book because Chitra's in Pittburgh. Apparently, Chabon wrote this book when he was 23 years old - his first novel, and apparently written as an assignment for one of the courses he was taking at UC, Irvine. It shows! Described as a 'bildungsroman' on the blurb, it a very American coming-of-age tale - so a lot of navel gazing, with shades of 'Summer of '42' (The entire story happens one summer!). And a 100 other books, I suppose. Including, as admitted by the author, 'The Great Gatsby'. Chabon writes well, except for a tendency to make only tangential allusions to the real action and the real thread of the story, and instead spend his time describing surroundings, people, etc. He also keeps pulling out words and expressions that one has to Google for (or look up in the dictionary), which might, I think, have been substituted easily with something simpler. Just showing off!

The protagonist is torn between love for his boyfriend and for his girlfriend. He has a great deal of admiration for a crooked mutual friend, who's does the collection for a loan shark before he trains to be jewel thief, and gets killed after his first heist. He also is trying to run away from his father who's some kind of jewish mafia boss, and who's opponent is the one who trains the jewel thief. Ultimately there is very little you can take away from the book, except maybe a sense of tolerance to all sorts of people and personalities. But that is far better (far, far better) done by Graham Greene ('Travels with my Aunt') or even sentimental old Steinbeck ('Cannery Row'). There are homosexual as well as hetrosexual sex scenes which are mildly pornographic, and also, to me, mildly off-putting. If I had known the book would be like this, I would not have bought it. However, the 300 or so pages did not actually bore me, and the last 50 or so pages actually make you want to keep reading. And how about the Pittsburgh connection? Well it's there, some descriptions of some of the roads and localities in the city, but there's nothing in the book that could not have been placed in any other medium sized city in the US - Seattle, e.g. or Phoenix or some such - I don't know.

Chabon apparently won the Pulitzer prize for another later book of his (he wrote '...Pittsburgh' in 1988), but I'm not sure I would buy any other book by him.

War and Peace. By Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

Wordsworth Classics (This edition published in 1993)
It does not say who's the translator, except to mention on the blurb that 'this translation is the one that recieved Tolstoy's approval'.

There is also a brief introduction to the book, and a very brief biography of Tolstoy.

In a piece 'Some words about War and Peace', written in 1868 (after publication of the novel) and appended to this book, Tolstoy himself does not classify the book as history, epic or novel. In truth, it is all of these. Napolean's Russian campaign forms not just the backdrop to the events described but also merits a great deal of specific description from Tolstoy, together with large doses of historical theory. There are a huge number of characters, a huge number of events, viewpoints, philosphical discussions, etc., etc. Russian society (the very upper class Russian society) is depicted in great detail, mostly sympathetically, but some of the characters do come in for criticism. It is difficult to summarize the book (980 closely printed - 8 point type! - pages of it!), and to discuss it in detail. Anyway a Google search will fetch more than 43 million references. What I add here is only some impressions the book has left behind in me.

Firstly, there are several scenes that come to my mind as I think about the book. Here I will list them in no particular order (certainly not chronological).
1. The soiree (a kind of Page 3 party) at Anna Scherer's in Petersburg which opens the book and which introduces many of the characters.
2. At a drunken party Dolokhov gets Pierre (one of the main characters) to tie a policeman to a bear and throw them into the river
3. Dolokhov induces Nicholas Rostov (another important character) to gamble away 40,000 roubles of his father's ill-affordable money
4. Dolokhov and Nicholas have duel, which ends in Nicholas wounding and almost killing Dolokhov.
5. Some scenes from the Battle of Austerlitz, in which the combined Russian and Austrian army is defeated by Napoleon (Tolstoy's villian). A very young Prince Andrew Bolkonski is adjutant to General Kutuzov (Tolstoy's hero) and has his first taste of battle during which he is wounded and left unconscious on the battlefield, and is actually rescued by Napolean and well treated by him.
6. Pierre joins the Freemasons - his induction ceremony is described in detail.
7. The hunt organized by Count Rostov at their estate, in which Nicholas and Natasha Rostov take part.
8. The battle of Borodino, just outside of Moscow, in which Napoleon defeats the Russian army lead by Kutuzov, though Tolstoy presents it as a 'strategic' withdrawal by Kutuzov.
9. Pierre wanders through a burning Moscow, doing what he can to save property and lives. He is arrested by the French army as an arsonist.
10. In prison, Pierre meets an elderly peasant, who is the only sympathetic character of that class in the book.
11. Pierre is an illegitimate son of Prince Bezhukhov who inherits all the wealth against the wishes of the legitimate Princess. The death scene of the Prince, with the anxiety of the rest of the family regarding the inheritance is one of the memorable scenes.
12.Pierre tries to free the serfs on his estate and settle them with farms and jobs of their own, but his efforts come to nought because the feudal system is too strongly woven into the society and many intermediaries (priests and foremen, for example) undermine the project.
13. Andrew Bolkonski's strict, rather nasty father dies.
14. Andrew's love affair with Natasha Rostov, which comes to an abrupt end when she is seduced by Dolokhov and almost succeeds in eloping with him, but is prevented just in time.
15. Andrew is wounded in the Battle of Borodino, is evacuated to Moscow, and then joins the Rostovs who are fleeing to the the provinces before the city is occupied by Napoleon and his army.
16. Andrew dies of his wound. His death scene is marvellous, with a description of how Andrew loses all feeling, but simply speaks and moves in the way expected of him, without any emotions.
17. Young Petya Rostov is killed in a battle, unecessary according to Tolstoy, since the French are fleeing Russia anyway.

Secondly, the entire book pushes two of Tolstoy's closely held beliefs about History in general and the roles of Napoleon and Kutuzov in particular. About History. Tolstoy completely rubbishes the idea that individual heroes/leaders/writers or their ideas are responsible. He does not even agree that social causes such as Feudalism or better education or natural causes such as drought, etc. are responsible for historical events. He seems to substitute all this some kind of mysterious 'destiny' - whatever happens, happens because it had to be so, and not because someone or some idea or some event made those things happen. Personally I cannot accept this. Just consider the following question - if Napoleon had not been born, would there have been some other equivalent leader, and would the events have happened in almost the same way? Also consider for example the 'butterfly effect'.

The other point Tolstoy constantly pushes is that Napoleon is no genius, no great General, just a lucky (presumably very lucky) fool, who got his way until he came up against Kutuzov. According to Tolstoy, Kutuzov has been roundly abused by all historians, and even by most of his contemporaries for losing the battle of Austerlitz, for losing the battle of Borodino, for abandoning Moscow, and a few months later for failing to pursue the fleeing French army and destroying it and capturing Napoleon. Tolstoy makes out that all these events (except maybe Austerlitz, where the probem was the Austrian army, not the Russian one) were actually planned and executed in exactly the way they happened by Kutuzov, who forsaw that any other plan might lead to immense losses for the Russian army and the Russian people. This is not believable. Tolstoy's writing is unfortunately, for some reason not clear to me, tendentious and prejudiced.

Finally, overall I like the book, and am happy I spent about two months reading it. I like the way Tolstoy ignores conventions and writes now about individual people (mainly the Bolkonski, Rostov and Bezhukov families - like a soap opera), now talks about historical figures (like Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I and many of the generals and diplomats), and now just discusses history and the historical significance of the events. He sometimes takes an overall view of history; sometimes a broad view of some historical event, usually a battle, or the burning of Moscow; sometimes gives a ground-level desription of the event; and sometimes a description a individual feelings and hurts and passions. There is immense detail about Russian upper class life, and from the point of view of literature, there is no complaint at all to make - i.e. if the book is seen as a novel.

But as a history, it fails, because Tolstoy is not fair enough to other views of history, and seems to have almost a religious urge to make his readers see his point of view of history as destiny. Another major complaint I personally have against the book is his concentration on the upper class feudal view. He appears to have absolutely no clue about (or at least he doesn't write about) the lives of the peasants, the serfs, the small tradesmen, the govt. officials, the foot soldiers, in fact the vast majority of the population. This despite the fact that he believes that unless all these people act in a certain way, history will not happen, not by the acts of individuals. War and Peace is certainly not a Howard Zinn-like 'A People's History of the Napoleonic campaign", and doesn't set out to be one. But ignoring 99% of the people involved hardly makes the book representational of those times.

Final word: I would like to read the book again, but not for many years, and the next time I hope I get a more comfortable print (maybe Kindle?)

A few quotes:

Page 289, Book V Chap. VI "What was needed for sucess in the service was not effort or work or courage or perserverance, but only the knowledge of how to get on with those who can grant rewards"

Page 425, Book VII Chap. X "...does it ever happen to you feel as if there were nothing more the come - nothing; that everything good is past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?" - Natasha Rostov, 16 years old.

Pgae 852 Book XIV Chap. XII "...Pierre had learned...that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but superfluity."

Page 861 Book XIV Chap. XVIII "There is no greatness where simplicity truth and goodness are absent."

Page 888 Book XV Chap. XII "He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to see into the far distance, finds what he sought at his very feet."

Page 908 Epilogue I Chapter I "If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed."

Page 932 Epilogue I Chapter XII "The most expensive luxury [is] the kind of life that can be changed any moment"

Page 968 Epilogue II Chapter IX "The farther I go back in memory,...the more doubtful becomes my belief in the freedom of my actions."