Book Review: The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen

I finished this book over a week ago, and I have tried to wrap my head around what to say about the book. I have been on a quest to understand what justice means. We have this innate sense of what is just and what is not. Amartya Sen writes in the book that justice is about feelings. (A statement on which he doesn’t elaborate.) Something would be easy to dismiss from justice as justice is rational, founding our societies. The thing is that it doesn’t seem to be. We have rationalized our systems. We see through our history that circumstances, wants, and beliefs have built our institutions. Yet, we pretend them to be rational and the truth. Still, we don’t agree with each other on how things should be. We can agree that justice has something to do with social, societies, and how we organize our interactions.

Amartya Sen proposes that information, democracy, and duty are at the core of justice. With an informed understanding of human nature, interactions, and reality, we can make a democratic, just society. Instead of pursuing the ideal of justice as Rawls does, justice is part of a continuum of history, present, and future and is, in a way, in a constant state of discussion and is upheld by our actions or lack of them. He criticizes our modern democracy and its interplay with media. He also argues that those who are more affluent have a greater duty towards others as their power positions give them more leeway to act. Nothing too confusing with his arguments. I agree with him, especially in establishing our societies on the science we produce. And we do produce a lot. I have always wondered why those studies on human behavior, interaction, and well-being aren’t put to use. We throw billions of dollars into them, yet we end up structuring our political decisions on beliefs and personal desires. But politics isn’t about rationality. It is about emotions and power.

The book itself is confusing, superficial, meandering, and a mess. It was a chore to follow Sen’s argumentation. I had to reread his sentences in fear that I had missed something, only to notice that he had repeated himself. I felt that the book was a hasty argument of how he sees justice in society. He throws ideas around what justice means and how others see the idea of justice, and then he sums up his own view in a sentence. He promises the reader a dive into an Asian philosophy of justice and summarizes some ideas in front of the chapter here and there, not going into details. I feel like this book was published too early. With a lot more editing and polishing his ideas, this could have been a book everyone should read. Now, I think the fruits of his thoughts are hard to grasp. I read other reviews and take away from Sen’s thoughts vary, which always makes me wonder if I am wrong, if I didn’t get it, and if I read the same work at all. But then again, we all view the world from our perspective, and we can ponder whether there is truth to our reality. (Ha, I summed this up without backing up my claim. Something I criticized Sen doing.)

Thank you for reading! Have a wonderful day ❤