A CRITICAL ANALSIS OF AMARTYA SEN’S NOTION OF JUSTICE.

Abstract

Questions of social justice on who gets what, how the scarce resources should be distributed in any political community, has been an issue of concern right from the origin of the state to the present. It has signalled the inscrutable philosophers and logicians argumentations about nyaya (logic, principle, justice, equity, fairness, and so on) or as in the West, from Plato to Rawls and beyond, a discourse of order and management of inequalities and stations in life. Despite John Rawls contribution is widely acknowledged as seminal in this regard, Amartya Sen’s understanding of justice engages with the Rawlsian project and attempts to tease out an alternative conception of justice. Sen’s analyses  of justice concentrates on social realizations and not on the quest for perfect institutions, as he suggests that there is no universal theory of justice but that different societies will work out their own accounts if they allow deliberative and democratic procedures to flourish. However to what extent, Sen’s notion of justice is possible to achieve in a multicultural and multilingual state like India, where religion and superstitious beliefs of the people (like witch hunting, untouchability), determines the lives of the individuals in the society. The paper thus seeks to analyse critically this practical orientation in Sen’s understanding of justice.

Keywords: Social Justice, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Social Realization.