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Reason and Justice: The Optimal and the Maximal1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2016

Amartya Sen
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Abstract

This paper is a revised version of the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Annual Lecture, 2016. It discusses the demands of critical reasoning in ethical arguments, and focuses in particular on the assessment of justice. It disputes the belief that reasoning about choice remains unfinished until an optimal alternative has been identified. A successful closure of a reasoning may identify a maximal alternative, which is not judged to be worse than any other available option. A maximal alternative need not be optimal in the sense of being ‘best’ (that is, at least as good as every other alternative). Critically sound reasoning can lead us to a partial ordering yielding a maximal alternative that is not optimal. The compulsive search for an optimal alternative needlessly limits the reach of reasoning in ethics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 92 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 5 - 19
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2016 

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Footnotes

1

Revised text of the Annual Lecture of the Royal Institute of Philosophy on 12th March 2016. For helpful comments and discussion I am grateful to Ted Honderich, Eric Maskin, Anthony O'Hear, Thomas Scanlon, and Kotaro Suzumura.

References

2 Translation taken from Reiss, Hans, eds, Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 55 Google Scholar.

3 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

4 Scanlon, Thomas, Being Realistic about Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 On this see my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979)Google Scholar, and ‘Maximization and the Act of Choice’, Econometrica, 5 (July 1997)Google Scholar.

6 The distinctions are more fully discussed in my articles ‘Internal Consistency of Choice’, Econometrica, 61 (May 1993)Google Scholar, and ‘Maximization and the Act of Choice’ (1997).

7 Cases of unresolved conflicts and consequent incompleteness belong to the class of problems that Isaac Levi has called ‘hard choice’, and as he has rightly argued, there is still a big normative question facing us (which Levi has illuminatingly analysed), to wit, what would be right thing to do given the incompleteness, even if it is tentative. See Levi, Isaac, Hard Choices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 An alternative interpretation of the problem of Buridan's ass is to assume that the ass was ‘indifferent’ between the two hay stacks and died of dithering. This interpretation – often invoked though it is – makes the famous donkey much more asinine than we need to assume (it cannot lose anything by choosing either alternative). I would prefer to think that Buridan's ass died for the cause of ‘optimal choice’, leaving us an important lesson in favour of ‘maximal choice’ over a set with an unranked pair.

9 So did, of course, Immanuel Kant, but he presented so many other major ideas that happen to be deeply relevant for non-contractarian theories of justice (as I have discussed in The Idea of Justice, 2009), that to see Kant as a theorist of the social contract would be at best a hugely incomplete description.

10 Arrow, Kenneth J., Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951, second ed., 1963, third ed., edited by Maskin, Eric, 2013)Google Scholar.

11 Rawls, John, edited by Kelly, Erin, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 133–34Google Scholar.

12 On this see my note ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’, Feminist Economics, 11(1) (March 2005)Google Scholar.