This piece is part of an ongoing response to Amartya Sen’s book that continues the discussion of reason, emotion and ethics from the seminar I taught last year. Introduction. Amartya Sen’s “The Idea of Justice” (IOJ from now on) is arguably the most awaited and critically acclaimed work of ethics of the twenty first century. In IOJ, Sen has combined sympathy for those who suffer injustice with an impressive analytic framework combining philosophical argument with social science theory. Throughout the book, Sen defends the role of public reasoning while drawing inspiration from emotional sources such as compassion. Sen walks a tight rope between deductive theories of justice that start from transcendental axioms and moral relativism that doubts the existence of universal principles. Sen’s approach is robustly “this-worldly;” he would rather reduce actual injustice than defend a theory of perfect justice.
Doing Justice to an Idea
Doing Justice to an Idea
Doing Justice to an Idea
This piece is part of an ongoing response to Amartya Sen’s book that continues the discussion of reason, emotion and ethics from the seminar I taught last year. Introduction. Amartya Sen’s “The Idea of Justice” (IOJ from now on) is arguably the most awaited and critically acclaimed work of ethics of the twenty first century. In IOJ, Sen has combined sympathy for those who suffer injustice with an impressive analytic framework combining philosophical argument with social science theory. Throughout the book, Sen defends the role of public reasoning while drawing inspiration from emotional sources such as compassion. Sen walks a tight rope between deductive theories of justice that start from transcendental axioms and moral relativism that doubts the existence of universal principles. Sen’s approach is robustly “this-worldly;” he would rather reduce actual injustice than defend a theory of perfect justice.