Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen spoke in front of a packed Owen L. Coon Forum in the Jacobs Center on Thursday evening. In the talk, organized by the Buffet Center, the economist spoke about his current work, “The Idea of Justice” in which he delves into academic interpretations of justice and traces their history.
Sen looked at the various perspectives on justice, examining the work of David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft. He argued for “the need for public reasoning rather than prompt rejection of public beliefs” and the “dual functions of indignation and reasoning.”
Sen compared the views on justice of various intellectuals from the European Enlightenment, comparing theories based on social contracts with those based on ideas pertaining to social interaction, institutions and actual behavior. He also stressed the need for global participation in justice.
“If the discussion of the demand for justice is confined to a particular locality–a country, or even a larger region than that–there is a possible danger of ignoring or neglecting many challenging counterexamples that might not have come up in local political debates or been accommodated in the discourses confined to the local culture but which are eminently worth considering in an impartial perspective,” Sen said.
Sen, despite recovering from cataract surgery, was not short of enthusiasm. He concluded the talk with a message of hope for justice in the world.
“The challenge today is the strengthening of this already-functioning participatory process [democracy] on which the pursuit of global justice will, I argue, to a great extent depend,” Sen said. “It is not a negligible cause, nor, I would argue, is it beyond our reach.”