Sen's Idea of Transcendentalism

By Tarang Kapoor

In The Idea of Justice Amartya Sen has presented a realization focused approach to justice. This approach is in striking contrast to the transcendental institutionalism which focuses on the search for transcendental, ideal and perfectly just institutions. He criticizes Rawls and other Contractarians, according to whom the institutions chosen for the development in the society, assume some unique principle of justice i.e. Rawls accepts one transcendental idea of distributive equality over all others. However, in his later works Rawls himself accepted that there can be a disagreement in the version of political justice people accept as reasonable. (The Laws of people, 1999)

Coming back to Sen, we see that he focuses on the actual realizations (comparative approach) which a society undergoes in the process of advancement of justice.  This approach opens up different comparative approaches to justice on the basis of which different institutions can be chosen for development in the society.

His disagreement with the idea of transcendentalism is on two grounds, one of them is the feasibility argument. My attempt in this small piece of writing is to show the weakness of this argument. The argument claims that since there is no reasonable agreement on the nature of ‘ideal society’ among Contractarians themselves therefore a transcendental solution is not feasible. On these lines he goes on to conclude that no Contract theory can be a legitimate solution to the problem of justice. I believe that the argument as it stands is quite weak. As, only because different versions of Contract theory do not agree with each other and have differences among them does not provide us with a strong reason to declare that the approach is not workable altogether. There can be a second order disagreement amongst them i.e. one social contract theory is a better option over the other, but these second order disagreements do not allow us to take a big leap forward and conclude that there is a first order disagreement also. There is a logical gap between the two judgements and non acceptance of the former cannot lead to the non acceptance of the latter.