Amartya Sen's take on the Social Contract

Amartya Sen:

The dominitaries (dominators/dignitaries?) of justice today tend to think up the deliberation from justice be aimed at clarifying or arriving at a diagnosis of perfect justice, in particular perfectly just institutions. That it tends to do either directly or indirectly by using a device that was generated in just pre-Enlightenment or just pre- the main phase of Enlightenment, namely Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, the idea of a social contract. So the idea of justice has got intimately linked with a kind of perfect world with particular perfect institution that the social contract should aim at and achieve.

And I think we have two problems with it. First of all, I think that the belief that we would have an agreement on the nature of the perfect world is I think a mistake. It's not that we wouldn't agree on many things, but you know some people would ultimately when they tackle between say promoting liberty and promoting economic inequality may go in one direction or the other. And couldn't we say that one position is unreasonable and the other not. On the other hand both these groups quite agree on lots of things in the Enlightenment period itself, like Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and many others I could think of, Tom Paine, would agree that slavery was unjust, but that doesn't mean that they agreed necessarily upon a perfectly just world.

So I think that gets the question wrong, and particular to think about only perfect institutions assumes that we are not really concerned ultimately with human lives. And institutions fine, but you know you gotta second guess the institutions, did you get them right? Supposed you arrive at a contract, thinking that "these will work out like they did" doesn't. So the ultimate test has to be how is the world going? So in both these respects are needed a departure. I think the idea of justice needs a departure. Also by the way concentration on the social contract which is conducted by citizens of a sovereign state, you limit your deliberations of justice within the confines of the citizenry of a state. And while that might of been the direction in which Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau did and might go, and later on in our time Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls the greatest philosopher of our time, I think *unintelligible*, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, differing from each other, but each taking a social contract within a nation state to be the central exercise.

In contrast say somebody like Adam Smith was right from the beginning concerned with the openness of the deliberation. You have to listen to voices not only from near but also from very far. The third respect is the first, is that it complete makes the idea of global justice absolute nonsense because you can't have a global sovereign state. Indeed that point of view was put forward very powerfully by one of the great philosophers of our time namely Tom Nagel arguing that the idea of global justice is a chimera. Given that, I think we need a departure, but that really means we have to drop the social contract. Social contract demands a unique resolution, a concentration in institution, behavioral fall inline, and concentration of participation of members of the state. And the idea of justice is much broader than that. It's concerned with how to remove injustice in which anyone from anywhere in the world could have their say. We could pay attention we don't have to come to a complete agreement on the nature of the perfectly just world. But if we agree that certain things are say the subjugation of women (*unintelligible*), or slavery in that time, people dying of illness for which cure is known, medicine could be produce cheaply but the delivery system doesn't work, to say/to agree that it is a great injustice doesn't require you to agree on a view of a perfect world.

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