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rotorguy64's review against another edition
2.0
I had high expectations of this book when I first heard of it. Amartya Sen has some serious academic achievements, he's regarded as one of the worlds leading experts on famines, and the book had high ambitions. The Idea of Justice, not even Rothbard could've come up with a more powerful and impressive name for a book. Understandably, I expected a philosophical treatise on, well, the idea of justice. Boy, was I in for a ride. I really wanted to like this book, if not as something that I could agree with, then as something that would at least challenge my libertarian views. Within a few pages, I realized how wrong I was.
Let me first say something about the style of the book. Its trains of thought are the opposite of stringent. The author keeps referring the reader back to earlier chapters where he (supposedly) already tackled a question, all the time. It was also filled with redundancies. These two things don't go along well. When you refer me to an earlier chapter after I read something that sounded like that earlier chapter, I feel cheated. Reading 400 pages isn't fun when they all sound the fucking same. I've read books that developed out of stand-alone essays that had more of a red string running through them.
The worst thing about his style, though, is how extremely imprecise and relativistic his writing is. I'm used to libertarian philosophers. They tend to give you definite ideas that you can easily grasp, incorporate into your worldview, cricitize and modify. Sen gives you suggestions on how things might be and shares his thoughts on what he believes could be important, hidden behind a layer of pretentious academic phrases. There is nothing definite to grasp or to criticize, and that makes reading the book tiresome. I had no sense of reward, no moment were I felt like everything was coming together.
That brings me to his philosophy. You'd expect there to be a lot of that in a book with 400 pages, but no, it doesn't go beyond giving these vague suggestions and unpolished thoughts. At one point, Sen mentions three systems of ethics that have different ideas on how to allocate resources, namely marxism, libertarianism and utilitarianism. He notices that they are in conflict with each other, says that this conflict cannot be decided in favor of one ideology and calls it a day. I think he did that to illustrate how complex questions of justice are. Why, of course they are complex to the point of not being solvable when you outright refuse to remove the clutter and the bullshit surrounding them! The book goes on like that, making statements that it instantly relativizes, and telling the reader about aspects that have to be considered alongside other conflicting aspects. That's the equivalent of "be yourself" and "listen to your heart", except worse.
To summarize, on a philosophical level, the book fails. The only things I gained from it were the niti-nyaya-distinction and the word "transcendental institutionalism" and its counterpart, as well as some admittedly very interesting thoughts on environmentalism, but in a book as long as this one, a few decent ideas only make the difference between two stars and one star.
Now, Sen is also an economist. In fact, that's his primary occupation. So you'd expect him to share some of his economic ideas, right? Wrong. Check out the footnotes for that, sucker! Sen could've dealt with different government programs in this book and detailed which ones are more effective, but he never did that.
Another beef I have with this book is that despite supposedly dealing with justice, it really only deals with social justice. General welfare and equality are not justice, they are general welfare and equality. Granted, they are related to the question of how goods should be distributed, which is a question also related to justice, so dealing with both makes sense, and mixing them together is understandable. However, not only does The Idea of Justice not deal exclusively with justice, it doesn't really deal with it at all aside from the question of distributing scarce goods. No mention at all of the criminal system, for example. Why does a book about justice not deal with justice? I blame the modern Zeitgeist. Justice is not in. Justice rapes consequentialism, pragmatism and relativism hard if you allow it to, and then what are you left with? Nothing that supports tyranny and social engineering, that's for sure, and the planners that run academics and politics can't have that.
The Idea of Justice only gets two stars from me because of the few decent (sometimes genuinely good) passages inside it, and because one star is reserved to books that I find outright disgusting, depraved, vile and worthless. The Idea of Justice is far from meeting these terms, but I still can't recommend or even like it.
Let me first say something about the style of the book. Its trains of thought are the opposite of stringent. The author keeps referring the reader back to earlier chapters where he (supposedly) already tackled a question, all the time. It was also filled with redundancies. These two things don't go along well. When you refer me to an earlier chapter after I read something that sounded like that earlier chapter, I feel cheated. Reading 400 pages isn't fun when they all sound the fucking same. I've read books that developed out of stand-alone essays that had more of a red string running through them.
The worst thing about his style, though, is how extremely imprecise and relativistic his writing is. I'm used to libertarian philosophers. They tend to give you definite ideas that you can easily grasp, incorporate into your worldview, cricitize and modify. Sen gives you suggestions on how things might be and shares his thoughts on what he believes could be important, hidden behind a layer of pretentious academic phrases. There is nothing definite to grasp or to criticize, and that makes reading the book tiresome. I had no sense of reward, no moment were I felt like everything was coming together.
That brings me to his philosophy. You'd expect there to be a lot of that in a book with 400 pages, but no, it doesn't go beyond giving these vague suggestions and unpolished thoughts. At one point, Sen mentions three systems of ethics that have different ideas on how to allocate resources, namely marxism, libertarianism and utilitarianism. He notices that they are in conflict with each other, says that this conflict cannot be decided in favor of one ideology and calls it a day. I think he did that to illustrate how complex questions of justice are. Why, of course they are complex to the point of not being solvable when you outright refuse to remove the clutter and the bullshit surrounding them! The book goes on like that, making statements that it instantly relativizes, and telling the reader about aspects that have to be considered alongside other conflicting aspects. That's the equivalent of "be yourself" and "listen to your heart", except worse.
To summarize, on a philosophical level, the book fails. The only things I gained from it were the niti-nyaya-distinction and the word "transcendental institutionalism" and its counterpart, as well as some admittedly very interesting thoughts on environmentalism, but in a book as long as this one, a few decent ideas only make the difference between two stars and one star.
Now, Sen is also an economist. In fact, that's his primary occupation. So you'd expect him to share some of his economic ideas, right? Wrong. Check out the footnotes for that, sucker! Sen could've dealt with different government programs in this book and detailed which ones are more effective, but he never did that.
Another beef I have with this book is that despite supposedly dealing with justice, it really only deals with social justice. General welfare and equality are not justice, they are general welfare and equality. Granted, they are related to the question of how goods should be distributed, which is a question also related to justice, so dealing with both makes sense, and mixing them together is understandable. However, not only does The Idea of Justice not deal exclusively with justice, it doesn't really deal with it at all aside from the question of distributing scarce goods. No mention at all of the criminal system, for example. Why does a book about justice not deal with justice? I blame the modern Zeitgeist. Justice is not in. Justice rapes consequentialism, pragmatism and relativism hard if you allow it to, and then what are you left with? Nothing that supports tyranny and social engineering, that's for sure, and the planners that run academics and politics can't have that.
The Idea of Justice only gets two stars from me because of the few decent (sometimes genuinely good) passages inside it, and because one star is reserved to books that I find outright disgusting, depraved, vile and worthless. The Idea of Justice is far from meeting these terms, but I still can't recommend or even like it.
livyyy's review against another edition
4.0
4.5
Sen is honestly such a great writer. Usually these treatise-like works are such a bore but Sen made it enjoyable and easy to comprehend
Sen is honestly such a great writer. Usually these treatise-like works are such a bore but Sen made it enjoyable and easy to comprehend
oceanwader's review against another edition
3.0
The content, thesis and reasoning is terrific, but 3 stars only due to the deplorable academic writing. Without the constant references backwards and forwards to sections in other chapters, the needless adverbs, the repetition of arguments already hashed and repeated to death, and unnecessary asides, this book would have been half as long - and compelled the reader not to put it down. As it was, I ended up skipping portions because the writing was so off-putting. Even so, took me almost a week to get through it.
nwhyte's review against another edition
3.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3345733.html
I've never been hugely attracted to philosophy, not even political philosophy, and this book reminded me why not; the essential argument is that justice and fairness are crucially intertwined concepts, which I accept without feeling strongly about; and it is largely in reaction to Rawls' classic work, which I have not read and am not really persuaded to read.
There are some interesting insights. For Sen, "democracy" is not just about voting, but about having a plural political system where governments are under scrutiny (see my recent posts about Season 12 of Doctor Who). This also means that we should not get too hung up on developing perfect institutions, as the process is more important than the form of government.
Two bits did grab me. Chapter 7, "Position, Relevance and Illusion", starts with King Lear and ends with the Good Samaritan, and insists that to get a better understanding of justice (or indeed anything at all) we need to look beyond our social and cultural comfort zone and bring in insights from viewpoints that we do not ourselves know. It brief and well argued.
And the final four chapters, on Public Reasoning and Democracy, really spoke to me - a challenge to put principles into practice (including a nice section on "Wrath and Reasoning", why anger is an important part of discussions of rights), with plenty of references to India and the Middle East, and the failings of the so-called West.
So I got more out of it than I thought I would get from the opening chapters - a case where it was very much worth reading to the end.
I've never been hugely attracted to philosophy, not even political philosophy, and this book reminded me why not; the essential argument is that justice and fairness are crucially intertwined concepts, which I accept without feeling strongly about; and it is largely in reaction to Rawls' classic work, which I have not read and am not really persuaded to read.
There are some interesting insights. For Sen, "democracy" is not just about voting, but about having a plural political system where governments are under scrutiny (see my recent posts about Season 12 of Doctor Who). This also means that we should not get too hung up on developing perfect institutions, as the process is more important than the form of government.
Two bits did grab me. Chapter 7, "Position, Relevance and Illusion", starts with King Lear and ends with the Good Samaritan, and insists that to get a better understanding of justice (or indeed anything at all) we need to look beyond our social and cultural comfort zone and bring in insights from viewpoints that we do not ourselves know. It brief and well argued.
And the final four chapters, on Public Reasoning and Democracy, really spoke to me - a challenge to put principles into practice (including a nice section on "Wrath and Reasoning", why anger is an important part of discussions of rights), with plenty of references to India and the Middle East, and the failings of the so-called West.
So I got more out of it than I thought I would get from the opening chapters - a case where it was very much worth reading to the end.
cetian's review
4.0
Took me a long time to finish it, and severall restarts. But it was rewarding. Amartya Sen has a brilliant analytical capacity, that sometimes can almost be too thorough, but always seems anchored in a humanist horizon. The final chapters are the ones in which we can see more clearly the socio-political aplications of the moral philosophy that the author goes through the entire book. The body of references to other authors is incredibly rich and there is a balance of intelectual modesty and academic confidence that make this work unapologetic where it is critic of others but with an elegant and polite tone. Coming from a series of Zizek and Sam Harris texts, maybe this was part of the dificulty I had in picking up rhythm. Eventually I discovered it was my problem and it had to do with style, not content.
cpa85's review against another edition
Couldn't finish this one. The general idea proposed was very intriguing but it got to be way too much of a chore to grind through this dry, tedious material.
collismeanshill's review
I’m ok with slow books. I can push through dense, heavy texts without trouble. I will no longer, however, finish over-written and rambling books that appear to have been paid for by-the-word. I don’t have enough years left for this kind of drudgery.
trsr's review
2.0
When an author as distinguished as Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in economics and acclaimed polymath and thinker, writes on the issue of justice, one expects great insight into an aspect central to human life and democracy. With more than 400 dense pages of text and footnotes, over 30 pages of notes, and a long preface, Sen's book tries to take the reader through a labyrinth of ideas and literature from ancient times to modern days. Indeed, in proposing an approach that is philosophically and morally relevant to human freedom and capability, and that integrates well with modern views on democracy and openness, Sen makes a stalwart contribution to the literature of our times.
Sen's essential thesis is simple. He sets up a contrast between two views of justice. The more paradigmatic traditional view, which Sen calls transcendental institutionalism, based on John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is set against a more realization-focused comparative approach developed by many thinkers and espoused by Sen himself. The former depends on a social contract among individuals that will ostensibly evolve in a hypothetical 'original condition' of impartiality where everyone is free of their vested interests due to a 'veil of ignorance' that separates them from what they will be in the real world. This is then supposed to lead to two fundamental principles of justice (liberty, equality and equity) and determine the right institutions and rules governing justice, after which we are home and free on the road to perfect justice. In the latter view, Sen questions whether perfect justice is either attainable or required, and if creating institutions and rules are sufficient to see that justice is actually achieved in the real world. The answer, rather obviously, is no. We are mostly not interested in what perfect or ideal justice is in a given situation; mostly, what we have are two or more options that we need to assess to see which would be more just. Such assessment, should be based on reasoning, preferably public reasoning that is open, impartial, and democratic and leads to the best social choices and actual realization of justice among people in the real world. The contrast between the two concepts is also presented by Sen as the distinction between the concepts of niti and nyaya in Indian thought.
This overarching message of the book and the additional weight provided by someone like Sen in pushing it, is a valuable one. It suggests that in a world rife with problems and conflicts, citizens and the media have a more central role in engaging with issues, learning about them, reasoning publicly over diverse choices, and arriving at rational and better courses of action.
In the end, however, the book disappoints more than it edifies, it frustrates more than it clarifies. To be fair, this is not because Sen's reasoning is defective or that the approach to justice he espouses in the book is vague or poorly reasoned. It fails partly because Sen is not really saying anything new in this book that he and others have not already said earlier. More important, Sen buries his simple and highly relevant thinking and his effort to pull ideas together under a cloud of pedantry and repetition. Only a diehard reader willing to suffer some poor, laboured writing in order to grasp some really rich ideas can plough through this book.
Does a man who knows so much about the economy of the world, know so little about the economy of words?
Early on, Sen describes the essential features of Rawls's theory briefly, with the apology that "...every summary is ultimately an act of barbarism..." and his counter-view and reasoning. This, along with other related ideas on the importance of reason and impartiality, is then repeated many times (easily over a dozen times, but one loses count) throughout the book. Not only does Sen repeat the basic idea of justice (often in more or less the same words) in the text, he repeats himself in the extensive footnotes, and just in case you haven't caught on, he obligingly marks in numerous additional footnotes that this same point was already made by him in an earlier chapter. It becomes rather more than a passing annoyance when he repeats his expression of what Rawls's 'veil of ignorance' means thrice in two paragraphs (pg. 197-8). If summaries are an act of barbarism, then how does one describe such verbiage: vandalism? To quote Sen himself (pg. 73): "Words have their significance but we must not become too imprisoned by them. Or even better, if only Sen had heeded the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein quoted in the first sentence of the first chapter of his book: "What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."
Reading Sen's repetitive work, one feels for his editor, Stuart Profitt, who Sen says in the Acknowledgements made "invaluable comments and suggestions... almost on every page of every chapter", mentioning his "relief" at the end of this book, which we come to understand well. Still, one wishes Sen could have 'Profitted' more from the editing. Sorely tempted, at the end of the 400+ page book to commit a barbaric act myself, I summarised his tome into a single sentence:
John Rawls's theory that perfect justice can be derived by creating the right institutions and rules based on principled social contracts among people in a hypothetical original condition where everyone is ignorant of what they will be in the real world, is untenable; instead, the idea of justice requires open, impartial, and public reasoning to arrive at more just and democratic solutions through social choices made by comparing actual available alternatives, while being mindful of process and outcome on people in the real world.
Three other aspects I found wanting in this book are (a) the lack of discussion of real cases and choices on burning issues of justice, (b) the paucity of discussion on how his idea of justice naturally translates into important consequences for debates on global environment (e.g., climate change, wildlife conservation issues), and (c) his rather limited use of Asian philosophy, literature, and ideas. A few lines about each of these below.
Sen makes passing mention of some real cases: a line about the Iraq war and the role of the US (which he calls "this country", on pg. 71, giving away the readership he seems to be writing for), mentions of famines, the French Revolution, and rights of women and slavery. There is some empirical data and discussion on famine in Chapter 16, but again based on old material he has covered in his 1981 book Poverty and famines. When Sen does discuss a case in greater depth, it is rather frivolous invented examples, about personal freedom and choices when sitting on seats in airplanes, or three children and a flute. These are alright to introduce the nuances of choice in justice, but in all this mad, chaotic world could Sen really find no real cases where the same dilemma for justice is present? He talks so much about realization and consequence in the real world, but the real world of cases is strangely absent in his own book. Real injustice and the failure of institutions could be well illustrated and discussed in many cases: for example, the Bhopal tragedy, the Holocaust, or the case of global climate change.
My greatest disappointment with the book was, however, more personal. As someone interested in the environment conservation movement--including issues of global justice, social choices and sustainability, and the expansion of human ethical horizons to include nature and the interests of animals--I expected more from this book than I perhaps should have, given that it is, ultimately, written by a Harvard economist. Sen deals with sustainable development and the environment in a little over 4 pages (pg. 248-252), bringing mainly two points to the fore. One, that development should not be seen as antagonistic to environment as it could lead to benefits, for instance through empowerment, female education and reduction in fertility rates. Second, that conservation can be based on our sense of values and our freedom and capability to hold and pursue those values is sufficient substantive reason to pursue conservation goals: a sort of freedom to conserve, indeed.
When Sen speaks of social choices, rationality, and other aspects of people such as sympathy and sharing, he seems oblivious, at least in this book, about the rich literature in anthropology and biology (including evolution and animal behaviour and psychology), and ethics (including environmental ethics and animal rights). Arguably, these have more contemporary relevance to the issue than Adam Smith's early and other economists's recent speculations, uninformed by biology and anthropology, on these matters. The ideas of various thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Nagel, Adam Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft, have been discussed extensively in the light of recent scientific research on human and primate behaviour, and moral philosophers have extended the ethical principles underlying human rights to issues of animal welfare and rights and environmental conservation. These are relevant, but missing, in the otherwise valuable chapters 'Rationality and Other People', 'Human Rights and Global Imperatives', and 'Justice and the World'. This may seem harsh, but until Sen can integrate these views of economics and justice with the stellar advances in fields of biology, anthropology, animal behaviour, and moral philosophy, he remains, not a polymath as some have called him, but like most other economists, mostly a 'math'.
Finally, Sen brings Asian philosophy to bear rather sparingly in the book. This includes, besides the niti-nyaya gradient, description of some essential ideas from Kautilya's Arthashastra, the famous debate between Krishna and Arjuna on duty and consequence in the Bhagavad Gita episode of the Mahabharata, about Akbar and Ashoka, and sound bytes from the Buddhist sutta nipata. That's it? That's all that thousands of years and billions of people have to contribute to the idea of justice? Or is this a deliberate choice by the author to keep the focus on the John Rawls and Kenneth Arrows of this world? I can't really tell.
In sum, this is an important book for the core idea it contains. For those who don't wish to wade through the whole book, four chapters are still worth reading that present the essentials: the Introduction, Chapter 4 on 'Voice and Social Choice', Chapter 11 on 'Lives, Freedoms, and Capabilities', and Chapter 15 on 'Democracy as Public Reason'. There are some interesting books and literature cited in the bibliography that can lead one to a wider reading (e.g., Jonathan Glover, Barry Holden, Jon Elster). One wishes, however, that Sen will enlarge his view and shrink his text in his next offering.
So it goes.
Sen's essential thesis is simple. He sets up a contrast between two views of justice. The more paradigmatic traditional view, which Sen calls transcendental institutionalism, based on John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is set against a more realization-focused comparative approach developed by many thinkers and espoused by Sen himself. The former depends on a social contract among individuals that will ostensibly evolve in a hypothetical 'original condition' of impartiality where everyone is free of their vested interests due to a 'veil of ignorance' that separates them from what they will be in the real world. This is then supposed to lead to two fundamental principles of justice (liberty, equality and equity) and determine the right institutions and rules governing justice, after which we are home and free on the road to perfect justice. In the latter view, Sen questions whether perfect justice is either attainable or required, and if creating institutions and rules are sufficient to see that justice is actually achieved in the real world. The answer, rather obviously, is no. We are mostly not interested in what perfect or ideal justice is in a given situation; mostly, what we have are two or more options that we need to assess to see which would be more just. Such assessment, should be based on reasoning, preferably public reasoning that is open, impartial, and democratic and leads to the best social choices and actual realization of justice among people in the real world. The contrast between the two concepts is also presented by Sen as the distinction between the concepts of niti and nyaya in Indian thought.
This overarching message of the book and the additional weight provided by someone like Sen in pushing it, is a valuable one. It suggests that in a world rife with problems and conflicts, citizens and the media have a more central role in engaging with issues, learning about them, reasoning publicly over diverse choices, and arriving at rational and better courses of action.
In the end, however, the book disappoints more than it edifies, it frustrates more than it clarifies. To be fair, this is not because Sen's reasoning is defective or that the approach to justice he espouses in the book is vague or poorly reasoned. It fails partly because Sen is not really saying anything new in this book that he and others have not already said earlier. More important, Sen buries his simple and highly relevant thinking and his effort to pull ideas together under a cloud of pedantry and repetition. Only a diehard reader willing to suffer some poor, laboured writing in order to grasp some really rich ideas can plough through this book.
Does a man who knows so much about the economy of the world, know so little about the economy of words?
Early on, Sen describes the essential features of Rawls's theory briefly, with the apology that "...every summary is ultimately an act of barbarism..." and his counter-view and reasoning. This, along with other related ideas on the importance of reason and impartiality, is then repeated many times (easily over a dozen times, but one loses count) throughout the book. Not only does Sen repeat the basic idea of justice (often in more or less the same words) in the text, he repeats himself in the extensive footnotes, and just in case you haven't caught on, he obligingly marks in numerous additional footnotes that this same point was already made by him in an earlier chapter. It becomes rather more than a passing annoyance when he repeats his expression of what Rawls's 'veil of ignorance' means thrice in two paragraphs (pg. 197-8). If summaries are an act of barbarism, then how does one describe such verbiage: vandalism? To quote Sen himself (pg. 73): "Words have their significance but we must not become too imprisoned by them. Or even better, if only Sen had heeded the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein quoted in the first sentence of the first chapter of his book: "What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."
Reading Sen's repetitive work, one feels for his editor, Stuart Profitt, who Sen says in the Acknowledgements made "invaluable comments and suggestions... almost on every page of every chapter", mentioning his "relief" at the end of this book, which we come to understand well. Still, one wishes Sen could have 'Profitted' more from the editing. Sorely tempted, at the end of the 400+ page book to commit a barbaric act myself, I summarised his tome into a single sentence:
John Rawls's theory that perfect justice can be derived by creating the right institutions and rules based on principled social contracts among people in a hypothetical original condition where everyone is ignorant of what they will be in the real world, is untenable; instead, the idea of justice requires open, impartial, and public reasoning to arrive at more just and democratic solutions through social choices made by comparing actual available alternatives, while being mindful of process and outcome on people in the real world.
Three other aspects I found wanting in this book are (a) the lack of discussion of real cases and choices on burning issues of justice, (b) the paucity of discussion on how his idea of justice naturally translates into important consequences for debates on global environment (e.g., climate change, wildlife conservation issues), and (c) his rather limited use of Asian philosophy, literature, and ideas. A few lines about each of these below.
Sen makes passing mention of some real cases: a line about the Iraq war and the role of the US (which he calls "this country", on pg. 71, giving away the readership he seems to be writing for), mentions of famines, the French Revolution, and rights of women and slavery. There is some empirical data and discussion on famine in Chapter 16, but again based on old material he has covered in his 1981 book Poverty and famines. When Sen does discuss a case in greater depth, it is rather frivolous invented examples, about personal freedom and choices when sitting on seats in airplanes, or three children and a flute. These are alright to introduce the nuances of choice in justice, but in all this mad, chaotic world could Sen really find no real cases where the same dilemma for justice is present? He talks so much about realization and consequence in the real world, but the real world of cases is strangely absent in his own book. Real injustice and the failure of institutions could be well illustrated and discussed in many cases: for example, the Bhopal tragedy, the Holocaust, or the case of global climate change.
My greatest disappointment with the book was, however, more personal. As someone interested in the environment conservation movement--including issues of global justice, social choices and sustainability, and the expansion of human ethical horizons to include nature and the interests of animals--I expected more from this book than I perhaps should have, given that it is, ultimately, written by a Harvard economist. Sen deals with sustainable development and the environment in a little over 4 pages (pg. 248-252), bringing mainly two points to the fore. One, that development should not be seen as antagonistic to environment as it could lead to benefits, for instance through empowerment, female education and reduction in fertility rates. Second, that conservation can be based on our sense of values and our freedom and capability to hold and pursue those values is sufficient substantive reason to pursue conservation goals: a sort of freedom to conserve, indeed.
When Sen speaks of social choices, rationality, and other aspects of people such as sympathy and sharing, he seems oblivious, at least in this book, about the rich literature in anthropology and biology (including evolution and animal behaviour and psychology), and ethics (including environmental ethics and animal rights). Arguably, these have more contemporary relevance to the issue than Adam Smith's early and other economists's recent speculations, uninformed by biology and anthropology, on these matters. The ideas of various thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Nagel, Adam Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft, have been discussed extensively in the light of recent scientific research on human and primate behaviour, and moral philosophers have extended the ethical principles underlying human rights to issues of animal welfare and rights and environmental conservation. These are relevant, but missing, in the otherwise valuable chapters 'Rationality and Other People', 'Human Rights and Global Imperatives', and 'Justice and the World'. This may seem harsh, but until Sen can integrate these views of economics and justice with the stellar advances in fields of biology, anthropology, animal behaviour, and moral philosophy, he remains, not a polymath as some have called him, but like most other economists, mostly a 'math'.
Finally, Sen brings Asian philosophy to bear rather sparingly in the book. This includes, besides the niti-nyaya gradient, description of some essential ideas from Kautilya's Arthashastra, the famous debate between Krishna and Arjuna on duty and consequence in the Bhagavad Gita episode of the Mahabharata, about Akbar and Ashoka, and sound bytes from the Buddhist sutta nipata. That's it? That's all that thousands of years and billions of people have to contribute to the idea of justice? Or is this a deliberate choice by the author to keep the focus on the John Rawls and Kenneth Arrows of this world? I can't really tell.
In sum, this is an important book for the core idea it contains. For those who don't wish to wade through the whole book, four chapters are still worth reading that present the essentials: the Introduction, Chapter 4 on 'Voice and Social Choice', Chapter 11 on 'Lives, Freedoms, and Capabilities', and Chapter 15 on 'Democracy as Public Reason'. There are some interesting books and literature cited in the bibliography that can lead one to a wider reading (e.g., Jonathan Glover, Barry Holden, Jon Elster). One wishes, however, that Sen will enlarge his view and shrink his text in his next offering.
So it goes.