Presented

by

Azmarina
Tanzir
MPPG, 2nd Batch
North South University
 Contents
Part I

The Demands of Justice

Reason and Objectivity

Rawls and Beyond

Institutions and Persons

Voice and Social Choice

Impartiality and Objectivity

Closed and Open Impartiality

 Contents
Part II Part III

Forms of Reasoning The Materials of Justice

• Position, Relevance and • Lives, Freedoms and

Illusion Capabilities

• Rationality and Other People • Capabilities and Resources

• Plurality of Impartial Reasons • Happiness, Well-being and

Capabilities
• Realizations, Consequences
and Agency • Equality and Liberty
 Contents
Public Reasoning and Democracy

Democracy as Public Reason

The Practice of Democracy

Human Rights and Global Imperatives

Justice and the World

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

The transcendental theory of justice is

concerned with identifying perfectly just social
arrangements, defining the nature of the
perfectly just society.
 Amartya Sen’s view of justice

•He offers a powerful critique of the theory of

social justice

•Sen sees on the comparative judgments of

what is “more” or “less” just, and on the
comparative merits of the different societies
that actually emerge from certain institutions
and social interactions.
 Amartya Sen’s view of justice

•Justice is not absolute, rather relative.

Defining justice from the flute example

•Sen argues for a comparative perspective on

justice that can guide us in the choice between
alternatives that we inevitably face.
 Well-being, Capabilities and Democracy
•Sen's major contribution to welfare
economics, which is providing an alternative to
the selfish and materialistic Homo Economicus
of standard neoclassical economics.

•For traditional economics, well-being is a

function of the goods and services and
individual enjoys. For Sen, well-being is a
function of how fully and vigorously an
individual exercises his human capabilities.
 Well-being, Capabilities and Democracy
•Democracy, then, is less about who gets
what, and more about how people come to
craft both their personal life-meaning and their
collective destiny through political participation
and discourse.

•Democracy is based not on distributional

issues, but rather on a deep understanding of
the importance of communicative discourse
and public debate in making the good society.
 Poverty
•Sen treats poverty as an inability to develop and
exercise one's personal capacities.

•A family in the United States can have much

higher income than another in a third world
country and yet suffer from poverty. This is
because the US family may be socially
dysfunctional, or may live in a community that fails
to provide the social relations and cooperative
institutions that allow people to develop their
capacities even though lacking in income.
 Conclusion
• Sen's innovation in this book is to critique the
"transcendental institutionalism" of such traditional
moral philosophers as Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant,
Dworkin and Rawls, who seek to define a set of
social institutions that foster "perfect justice"

• Sen argues that perfect justice is not capable of

attainment, and it is better to focus on how society
can be improved from its current state, given its
actual pattern of injustices.
 Conclusion
• Sen rejects Rawl’s idea of Justice as Fairness
as it is one of the absolute just systems. In fact
all thinkers or politicians that claim to have
developed an absolutely perfect system are
wrong. Very important is to look not only at a
system from a theoretical justice point of view
but also equally important what is the reality of
application at the level of all citizens.
 Conclusion
• Amartya Sen presents the remarkable
conclusion that justice is a process that never
becomes absolutely perfect. He presents very
convincingly the view that you need to
compare many alternative "social choice" and
discuss them widely with many people from
different categories, also considering what
other countries have done and rank these
alternatives.
 Conclusion

• Those that might have hoped to find a

system of justice that is absolutely right will
be disappointed, those are looking ways to
improve justice will be very enthusiastic
about this book
Thank
You