neglects the historical process through which the abstract, impartial human at the
centre of the theory is formed. If we now have theories of global justice that can
make a good case for improving the life chances of women, that is in large part
because of the struggle of feminists. Few today would want to live under
nineteenth century conditions of social justice. The fact that such projects are no
longer on the table is not just through the refinement of our obligations of justice,
but because discretionary action has built up a broader sense of the demands of
human solidarity.
The key point here, though, comes with the critique made recently by
Amartya Sen, drawing on social choice theory, of the dominant Rawlsian mode of
theorising justice, what he calls the transcendental approach. For Sen,
Even if we think of transcendence not in the gradeless terms of ‘right’ social
arrangements, but in the graded terms of the ‘best’ social arrangements, the
identification of the best does not, in itself, tell us much about the full
grading, such as how to compare two non-best alternatives, nor does it
specify a unique ranking with respect to which the best stands at the
pinnacle; indeed, the same best may go with a great many different rankings
at the same pinnacle.^90This has radical implications for justice, especially in so far as it applies to thinking
about humanitarian action, which by definition takes place under less than ideal
conditions. Sen goes further, arguing that we neither need the best to rank non-
best alternatives, nor do our rankings yield a “best”. What is central, for Sen, as a
starting point, is the “identification of redressable injustice”.^91 He considers “that
we can have a strong sense of injustice on many different grounds, and yet not
agree on one particular ground as being the dominant reason for diagnosis of
injustice”.^92
When Condorcet and Smith argued that the abolition of slavery would make
the world far less unjust, they were asserting the possibility of ranking the
world with and without slavery, in favour of the latter, that is, showing the
90
91 Sen, The Idea of Justice , 100-101.
92 Ibid., vii.
Ibid., 2.