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There is no such thing as perfect justice
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There is no such thing as perfect justice
Amartya Sen
During a whistle-stop tour of India for the launch of his new book, Sen took out 25 minutes from his extremely hectic schedule to speak to Forbes India.
Why is justice so intriguing to you?
Mainly it’s the face of injustice we see in our day to day life that makes us feel what we can do to make things better from the point of view of justice. If I walked around in India or any other country today and were not invaded by a sense of injustice, then there is something to be explained there. There is nothing to be explained about why one is invaded by a sense of injustice because it is there. So much inequality. So much lack of freedom, tyranny and denial of liberty on one side and inequality and deprivation, and denial of substantive opportunity on the other.
In the Indian context post 1991, there has been a remarkable change in the lives of people. Would you say that India as a society or as an economy is more just today?
I wouldn’t even try to bring about an overall judgment. Do I think there are many unremoved injustices in India? Yes. Have some of the unremoved injustices been tackled reasonably well? I would say yes. There have been changes. The percentage of illiteracy has gone down. That’s one way of putting it. But the percentage of illiteracy is still unacceptably high. That’s also true. So the overall judgment is far less interesting than the detailed assessment of what the society is like.
Is there really a way to measure justice?
The question that you are asking — is there more injustice or less injustice. That’s an excellent question. The answer isn’t 37 as opposed to 51. That ranking is the basis of measurement we have known for at least a hundred years. The basic measure to look at is a ranking. Then everything else follows from it. And it’s the ranking that justice is concerned with, not a numerical measure, I think. The debates are all about rankings.
Take the issue of land acquisitions in SEZs. There are several stakeholders. A villager would feel it’s unjust to take his land. A company would feel their taking the land is justified because it would add to economic activity. Are there mechanisms to deal with issues like that?
I wasn’t so much saying that justice means different things to different people. There are different ways of looking at justice. Sometimes the same person can take different views. In the flute case, I think I can give an argument for all three of them and I see merit in each of them.
[Note: In the book, Sen describes a problem of divergent views on justice in which you have one flute and three children who want it. One child wants the flute because she knows how to play it, the second one wants it because he is poor and doesn’t have toys, and the third one says she made the flute, so she should get it. Who do you give it to?]
The main point is that there can be different reasonable positions not that different people must have different positions. It’s not related to difference between persons. It’s related to difference between arguments and reasoning. That’s the first thing. On SEZs and land acquisitions, I am not going to make any statement because every time I have made some statement everything else has gone and the headline will be on it. One thing I have learnt is not speak on these subjects if you want the headline to capture anything else in the book. Not that I don’t have any view.
Are there mechanisms that can deal with differences between persons?
Yes there are mechanisms. It is called conversations and meetings.
In the recent past the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has approached social security in a different manner by giving entitlements. So are those entitlements the way to go for delivering justice?
That’s one way to go. If you are dealing with gross injustice in a country where lots of people are hungry, lots of people are very poor, lots of people don’t have the opportunity to get educated, lots of people don’t get the chance of getting medical treatment when they are ill, you need different kinds of organisations for different problems. You might need an employment programme, you might need some targeted food programme, you might need some non-targeted food programme, you might need a school programme, some other actions on right to education, mid-day meals, you might need a right to healthcare and so forth. The idea that there will be one “the” way of delivering justice in India will not
Source:
http://www.business.in.com/interview/real-issue/there-is-no-such-thing-as-perfec
