The gentlemen called “The Fiction of Social Justice”

Nonsense From Professor Amartya Sen

I first heard Professor Amartya Sen when I was in school that is too from my Tamil teacher who was applauding that the first Indian won the Nobel Prize in Economics. I could not understand what was (is) his contribution in economics and the relevant to Indian economy at that time. But now, I could understand a how much demage has done to the discipline called economics and millions of poor in India. Though, Professor Sen’s contribution is full of mathematical and hypothetical. Infact, Sauvik Chakraverti has written many good articles critiquing Sen’s works.

Indeed, Sauvik has already commented on Sen’s latest interview in TOI the interview which was based on his latest book titled “The Idea of Justice”.

I am going to take this interview a step ahead. Since Sauvik has already cited Professor F A Hayek work titled on “The Mirage of Social Justice” which was published in the Law, Legislation and Liberty, in Volume 2.

Just before the publication of Law, Legislation and Liberty, especially Volume 2 Professor F A Hayek gave lecture titled of the lecture was “The Fiction of Social Justice” I have a copy with me. It is a part of Readings in Liberalism published by Fredrich Naumann Stiftung.

Let’s take what Prof Sen said in the TOI interview and the excerpts from the book.

The interview:

• “the idea of justice interests us all.
• There is a kind of vanity of the self-defined "intellectuals" who bend down to talk to "common people". (It is, by the way, very bad for the intellectual's back to do so much bending down!)
• Has the concept of justice in this century come only to mean human rights?
• This is a very interesting question. The idea of human rights is much used in practice, and is very powerfully invoked by activists these days, often with admirable effect.
• In that quiet confidence there are reasons of hope for the future of justice and democracy in India.
• Lord Meghnad Desai once said that you "prefer to be subversive in a technical way". Might he have meant that you are not a 'doer' but seek change through technical argument? Do you see yourself as an activist?
• I see myself as an activist - through writing, speaking and arguing. I've done my share of demonstrations when I was young, when I was a student in Calcutta. Do I believe that causes that activists take up could be helped by reasoning? Yes. But perhaps Meghnad's comment about my being subversive in a technical way relates to the fact that I don't take the view that technical or mathematical arguments are useless and distractive. I still don't know why I was given the Nobel Prize, but whether that was deserved or not, the works of mine they cited were all quite technical - many of them also mathematical.
• If I could just get you to comment on an unfolding matter here. Would it be just to give Ajmal Kasab the death penalty? We're often criticized for continuing with capital punishment.
• I'm opposed to the death penalty in general and wouldn't want it given to Ajmal Kasab or anyone else. But this, of course, is not a subject matter of my book - it is not an engineer's handbook. I do discuss the need for prevailing practices, including capital punishment, to be scrutinized by public reasoning, and note the fact that capital punishment is most used in countries with relatively little public discussion, the three biggest users being China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Next comes the US, and I discuss why I disagree with those judges in the US Supreme Court who think that arguments coming from elsewhere (like Europe) are of no relevance in America.
• Is justice culturally specific?
• No, because there is an obligation to engage in argument no matter where it comes from - far or near.”

Excerpt from Sen’s book:

• “Having heard all three and their different lines of reasoning, there is a difficult decision that you have to make. Theorists of different persuasions, such as utilitarians, or economic egalitarians, or no-nonsense libertarians, may each take the view that there is a straightforward just resolution staring at us here, and there is no difficulty in spotting it. But almost certainly they would respectively see totally different resolutions as being obviously right.
• The general point here is that it is not easy to brush aside as foundationless any of the claims based respectively on the pursuit of human fulfilment, or removal of poverty, or entitlement to enjoy the products of one's own labour. The different resolutions all have serious arguments in support of them, and we may not be able to identify, without some arbitrariness, any of the alternative arguments as being the one that must invariably prevail.”

My comments:

First of all Professor Jagdish N. Bhagwati said the notion of “human right” is nonsense in more than one ways. It was published in the Economic Times I do not have the exact date and other things.

From Professor F A Hayek lecture:

• “To discover the meaning of what is called ‘social justice’ has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeadvour- or, rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to a society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever……But I must at first briefly explain, as I attempt to demonstrate at length in volume 2 of my Law, Legislation and Liberty, about to be published, why I have come to regard ‘social justice’ as nothing more than an empty formula, conventionally used to assert that a particular claim is justified without giving any reason.
• Indeed that volume, which bears the sub-title The Mirage of Social Justice, is mainly intended to convince intellectuals that the concept of ‘social justice’, which they are so fond of using, is intellectually disreputable……they have been led to the conclusion that all uses of the term justice have no meaningful content.
• I have therefore been forced to show in the same book that rules of just individual conduct are as indispensable to the preservation of a peaceful society of free men as endeavours to realise ‘social justice’ are incompatible with it. The term ‘social justice’ is today generally used as a synonym of what used to be called ‘distributive justice’.
• Justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, and no conceivable rules for the conduct of individual supplying each other with goods and services in a market economy would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust. Individual might conduct themselves as justly as possible, but as the results for separate individuals would be neither intended nor foreseeable by others, the resulting state of affairs could neither be called just nor unjust.
• We must not forget that before the last 10,000 years, during which man has developed agriculture, towns and ultimately the ‘Great Society’, he existed for at least a hundred times as long in small food-sharing hunting bands of 50 or so, with a strict order of dominance within the defended common territory of the band.”

Further reading:

Why Amartya Sen’se of Justice is Pure Nonsense

Review of Amartya Sen's rationality & freedom

Sen and Sensibility - Amartya Sen's Rationality & Freedom Re-Examined