Ideal theory who?

In our tutorial discussion of Elizabeth Anderson's symposium on Sen, we recognized that Sen is unusual among political philosophers as he does not base his theory of justice on an ideal, nor does he believe in the existence of a perfectly just political state. Comparatively, Marx imagines an ideal society free from the harmful ideologies of religion and capitalism. But for Sen, there is no such place to go or even make sense of. The question then is never whether a certain arrangement meets an ideal, but whether the people who live in it have more or less freedom to live lives they value. 

Instead of defining an ideal society, Sen defines development as "the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency." (14) Freedom to Sen serves as both the ultimate objective of development and the method for attaining it. He distinguishes between "the intrinsic importance of human freedom as the preeminent objective of development" and "the instrumental effectiveness of freedom of different kinds to promote human freedom." (37) There is no need to imagine a perfect society for either position; both are based entirely on what real people can or cannot do right now.

This puts him at odds with much of the liberal tradition. Rawls constructs his principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. Nozick defends an ideal of libertarian rights. Even utilitarians are chasing an ideal endpoint. Sen's evaluative method, by contrast, is comparative as he does not need a perfect society to make valid judgments but only needs to be able to say that one arrangement is better than another. Expanding access to education is better than restricting it; Eliminating famine is better than letting it continue; guaranteeing basic healthcare is better than leaving people to preventable death; etc..  These judgments require no ideal to be valid, only an honest look at the world as it is. His comparisons of India versus China on social provision, the democracy-famine argument, Britain's mortality reduction work by comparing two imperfect realities against each other and asking which produces more freedom for the people living within them.

However, a Marxist reading would argue that capability-expansion within an unjust system may simply reproduce that system in a more stable form. If workers gain literacy and political participation but remain structurally dependent on capital, have their substantive freedoms genuinely expanded—or have the conditions of their unfreedom merely become more tolerable? Sen's framework is well-designed to see the symptoms of injustice—the child who cannot read, the woman without a political voice—but it may not be designed to see injustice at the level of structure.

This matters because how we theorize justice shapes how we pursue it. Sen's implicit non-idealism is a reminder that people who cannot read, cannot eat, and cannot participate in political life do not have the luxury of waiting for a perfect theory—but they may equally have little use for a framework that makes their conditions more bearable without asking why those conditions exist in the first place. Whether Sen's capabilities approach can bridge that gap remains an open question. 

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