I feverishly read this for my Social and Political Philosophy class back in college. My professor had us read Sen's "Idea of Justice" in about three class periods. I really didn't have time to adequately ingest much of this work - and I was probably twacked out on adderall - even though I was required to write 20+ pages on this damn book. From what I remember, I enjoyed some of Sen's thought. If I remember it correctly, Sen never really makes an argument for anything. Sen lolli-gags around other theories of justice, especially Rawls. This took me a little longer than I expected, but the pay offs are well worth it. And the good thing is that the amount of time I spent reading it had more to do with my hectic life than it did the difficulty of the philosophical approach. Sen is an incredibly lucid philosopher of justice who offers a critique of John Rawls theory of justice as fairness while constructing his own alternative that draws heavily from Adam Smith, Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. One of the virtues of the book is that, though it helps to be knowledgeable of these theories, one doesn't have to be an expert in the field of philosophy or any one of these philosophers to follow Sen's train of thought. Rather through a series of examples, key concepts and reasoning he is able to explicate his fundamental approach to a theory of justice.Sen begins by distinguishing his philosophy from a Transcendental approach that sets up rules and institutions for carrying out justice (what he identifies with the Indian philosophical principle of Niti). For Sen, a philosophy of justice must of necessity take the approach of nyaya, a term that can be described in terms of policy implementation and justice as process. Both the two Indian concepts and the fact that they are drawn from a non-European tradition are important for Sen's philosophy of justice because they work to give us not only a conceptual framework for the distinction of Transcendental vs. Empirical theories of justice, but they also set up one of the key points of arguments of the book: public reason and social justice are contingent on positional arguments (impartial reasoning) that require a pluralism of evaluation, analysis and argument. In the end, Sen argues for the implementation of justice (that justice must be seen) rather than its idealization. Even partial justice is better than no justice, and in the real world partial justice is all we have.
What do You think about The Idea Of Justice (2009)?
Beautiful book. A must read for every journalism student.
—baddottie
