On a personal level, some form of mutuality.

On the state level, some form of individual rights and minimal /basic income and
resources.

On the state level, holding in check the ability - and the desire - of the wealthy
and powerful to monopolize resources and control government and wealth.

She’s blindfolded, too, which gives that sword a certain extra zap.

I thought Justice was the lady who was blindfolded.

You’re describing grace, not justice.  Justice is the lady with the sword.

Do you want somebody to treat you kindly?  Treat them kindly.
Do you want somebody to steal from you?  Don’t steal from them.
Do you want somebody to say nasty things about you? Don’t say nasty things about them.
Do you want to get enough to eat?  Help everybody to get enough to eat.
Do you want somebody to tell you lies?  Don’t tell lies.
Do you want somebody to kill you?  Don’t kill anybody.

This kind of simple-minded pablum doesn’t cover everything in the world, but it goes a surprisingly long way toward creating a better world without killing anybody or taking over their country or spending huge sums of money blowing up mountains, dragging out the coal and dumping pollutants on innocent bystanders.

“I know it when I see it” doesn’t work in the case of justice, because if you look around you’ll observe that people have substantially different ideas of justice.  I mentioned one case before.  I can mention many much more horrific cases, such as the numerous gangs of thugs who think slaughtering people of other ethnic or religious groups is “just” because of events that supposedly happened years, sometimes centuries before.

Amartya Sen is one of those who thinks he can reason his way out of the dilemma (I guess—I haven’t read the book).  I don’t know if that’s possible because, as I said, the idea of justice is tied up with non-rational ideas, like one’s idea of the gods, that is, “I know it when I see it.”  Reason requires a set of common observations and beliefs before it can operate.  But that’s not what we have here.

Gerard;

I think you’ve reduced the idea of justice to something most can understand (and that’s a compliment). Frankly, I found reading the review a waste of time—nor am I an admirer of Mr. Sen. Mr. Sen is a Indian from the state of Bengal and a Hindu. He subtly pushes his theological and cultural background in his writings. Nothing wrong with that, as long as people realize that Mr. Sen is not speaking or writing from Mt. Olympus.

There will be a lot of intellectualizing on “justice.” Well, I guess, justice is like porn, one knows when one sees it.

Superman killed himself.  That’s what is wrong with
the world.  No one left to defend the physically
weak from the bullies of the world.

Justice, like all qualitative concepts, is perceived according to one’s position with regard to the barrel; i.e.,in or out. There is no justice in the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Wealth, or lack thereof, is also a determinant of what kind and how much of which one receives. A true oxymoron is Justice Scalia, et. al. as applied to anyone remotely humanistic. I still wonder to this day if Superman ever figured what he actually stood for. Was it Truth, Justice, OR the American Way?

Justice can be thought of in a couple of different ways.  As found in the
administration of the law, or as a quality of being just or fair to one
another or to a group.  It doesn’t do to give a facile answer as it leaves
too much out and too much up to personal opinion.  Surely this topic
warrants more than a biff bam comment?

As an abstract idea, Justice with a capital J represents all those
interactions between individuals where one (or a group) takes
advantage of another (or another group) or to whatever degree of
fairness that might be the social convention.  Justice with a capital J is
the “idea” and where lower case j justice is evaluated in actual
experience and defines all the individual incidents of fair treatment is
measured against.  What is fair treatment?  Agreement as mentioned
already among the members of any level of society must be derived,
even if that society is global composed of all sub-societies as found in
nations, then more subsidiary societies within nations. This reduction
into smaller and smaller groups occurs all the way down to the way two
individuals treat each other. 

If reason is just a disguise to make actions ‘seem’ reasonable, then to
what is insanity measured?  If insanity is the norm, then that ascends
to the throne of reason.  How is one to judge reason and
reasonableness?  How are reasonable men determined to be reasonable
and by whom are they so determined?  G. Anderson makes the age old
argument of the individual vs. the society and taking the side against
the individual.  But there are good arguments for the maintenance of
the individual.  This website is one example.  If there was no self-
indulgence, I highly doubt anyone would be posting here.  Little
creativity would emerge as well.

In a society, a world society really, where the ancient superstitions
evolved into religions are dwindling and shrinking its membership, in
spite of the desperation of missionary groups to attract members, one
even going so far last week as to pay people to go to their church, to
win car to go to church, there is a trend that eventually religion will
nearly disappear.  That is why learning to be moral people without
religion is the new imperative.  Whether there is a god or not is not the
argument.  It is how people consciously agree to treat one another. 
That is not to say that religion has not provided a colossal benefit to
societies and gave an external control, albeit an omnipotent deity, to
those who were not able to control themselves because they had not
yet fully developed an abstract understanding or altruistic sensibilities. 
Hence the birth of morality.  But as humankind’s consciousness of the
world expands as well as their knowledge, their reliance on
extraterrestrials will disappear.

For a philosophical exploration, Plato’s Republic is the classic
demonstration of using the paradigm of a city to help define justice as
a virtue for the individual.  He explored the question “Is it always better
to be just than unjust?”  Offering no final answer, he presents several
views to answer this question and one must come to their own
conclusion.  He is not the only one however who has investigated this
question.  John Rawls talks about the social contract which he named
The Difference Principle that offers an alternative distributive principle
and does not conform to strict equality so long as the inequality has
the effect that the least advantaged in society are materially better off
than they would be under strict equality.

Today, April 4th, there is an article on Kentucky.com
about the “justice” of one-and-done basketball
players.  Those who go to college one year to play
basketball then leave college for the NBA.  The
article is titled: “UK Notebook: One-And-Dones Pose
Quandry For Todd(President of the University of
Kentucky).” I wrote the following comments after the
article which seem appropriate for Easter Sunday.

Christian96 wrote on 04/04/2010 10:34:51 AM:
What do you expect from these youngsters? They are raised in a society
that places extremely high value on “Fame and Fortune.” I’m one of few
Counseling Psychologists who believe in the Bible. I’ve studied it for
32 years since my father’s heart attack on Good Friday, April 8, 1977.
I’m convinced the Bible was written by men who were inspired by the
Holy Spirit. I’m presently writing a book for young people to explain
how the Bible relates to their everyday lives. For those of you who
don’t know much about the Bible, one concept it strongly teaches is that
“you can’t worship God and money.” You have to make a choice. I was born in a coal mining town in Muhlenberg County Kentucky and raised in a
coal mining town in West Virginia. Because of the cruel way coal mine
owners treated the miners they had to fight to form a union. During that fight there was a popular song among the miners that ask the question, “Who’s side are you on brother? Who’s side are you on?” Well, it’s that way now in society with it’s worship of money. Since
you can’t worship God and money, “Who’s side are you on brother? Who’s
side are you on?” Appropriate questions for today, Easter Sunday!

gerard - “If we are half-way human, we each recognize injustice unless we try not to recognize it”  Bravo.

As an example of what justice isn’t, America decided long ago that violence begets justice. First off, it is just to bomb, invade and occupy a country because justice will have been rendered and justice will prevail when we leave - if ever. Seems to me, at least as far as American foreign policy is concerned, that rather than worry about the rendering of justice, we’d better work on defining it.

And perhaps it’s easier to determine what isn’t just. Forty million Americans, the vast majority of whom work, are poor. In the as-advertised richest nation in the world, most of us can “recognize (this)injustice” - unless of course “we try not to recognize it.”

G. Anderson—You seem to be making a rational argument for rational behavior.

Welcome to Cloudcuckooland…

Reason, is just a disuise to make actions seem reasonable, when often they are insane…yet when insanity is perptrated by madmen who are foaming at the mouth, it’s so much easier to lock them up.

It’s when insanity is perpetrated by reasonable men, that people become confused, because we are taught to believe that reason, and logic should be trusted.

This is why ideologies often become twisted by people, to cause horrendous crimes against us all, because they often are just a disguise, sitting on top of some digusting impulse, or predjudice..

No ideals, no social justice, for us, as long as we worship self indulgence, and live in our heads, justifying our actions with reason, instead of facing ourselves for what we really are.

People don’t agree about what is just.  For instance, some people believe it is just to have a Welfare system—they call this social justice—while others believe that it is unjust, because it takes wealth away from those who produce it and gives it to those who don’t.  Others think only communism is just.  The disagreements lead to a lot of excited discussion, to which philosophers are irresistibly attracted.

The word justice itself etymologically refers to gods or oaths—the ju- part is the same as the ju- in Jupiter (“god-father”)—and as people do not agree about the gods, they are unlikely to agree about things they derive from the gods.

Well, I have to admit that this review article is beyond me. So I should be smart enough to refrain from commenting?

Look at it this way:  Most of the people in the world who are physically or mentally suffering from injustice due to deprivation will wait for justice till hell freezes over before the administrators of justice reach agreement on theories of distribution.

If we are halfway human, we each recognize injustice unless we try not to recognize it. We don’t need to agree on a theory to know that it is not fair to kill people, not fair to exploit people and resources, not fair to cheat, lie, steal.  Do unto others went a long way toward solving this problem a long time ago. 

Still we refuse to acknowledge and act on the basis of this simple adage.  How, then, are we to make use of Amartya Sen’s rather high-flown theorizing?  Thank God, human decency isn’t that complicated!  It’s human behavior which is gnarly.

This reviewer seems to have gone outside of the Nobel Laureate’s current book to find fodder for his gristmill. When he says “As Amartya Sen has shown elsewhere”, it is a dead give-away that he is writing about things beyond the titled subject. I have not read this book, but this review makes me quite unsure of the reviwer and tells me nothing I trust about Amartya Sen’s brilliant thought on the human condition.

I had the idea that the reviewer was not doing original theory but attempting to replicate his experience of reading the book for out possible amusement.  The fact that the ruling class buys off the rest of the population with Welfare when in soft-cop mode seems to have very little to do with any notion of justice and a great deal to do with considerations of power, however it may be dressed up in fancy garb.

In any case, this review, with its rather surrealist vocabulary play, piqued my interest, whereas most of those I found following the link to Amazon were deeply discouraging, containing such leaden weights as comparisons to Habermas, excuse me, “German philosopher Jürgen Habermas”, as if one were not enough.  Twenty dollars is twenty dollars, and one’s budget and one’s time are finite.