From Perfect Justice To Manifest Injustice

It's a eternal question about what is justice for human beings, and there isn't a definite answer. For thousands of years, countless people with lofty ideals made unremitting efforts to realize it. Amartya Sen, an India-born scholar with a multidisciplinary knowledge background,classifies the traditional thought of justice since the Enlightenment into two factions:“Transcendental Institutionalism” and “Realist Comparativism”. Transcendental Institutionalism, with John Rawls as its representative, is the mainstream though of justice in today's political philosophy. Sen opposed to the approach in which seeking for absolute justice is the purpose, he thought that it is over-keen on theoretical construction, and lack of patience for human real life. A variety of injustice in the real world beyond the reach of ideal theory is still spreading. Therefore, Sen criticizes Rawls' s theory of justice and points out limitations of the Transcendental Institutionalism, he advocated along the path of “Realist Comparativism”put forward by Condorcet and Smith, to reach a consensus based on reasoned scrutiny about the apparent injustice. In this context, the paper will illustrate the characteristics of Sen's theory of justice from three aspects, Firstly, we need to redefine our theoretical starting point of thinking. Sen turns attention from the absolute justice to the obvious injustice in the real world, which is the basic perspective of research; Secondly, Sen presents the realist comparative method which justice evaluations are based on, and puts social choice theory as its reasoning framework, allowing the partial orderings. Meanwhile, with the aid of Adam Smiths' s “Impartial Spectator”, Sen puts self-reflection into rational categories and achieves reasoned scrutiny, getting rid of the positional objectivity to reach open impartiality. Finally, Sen focuses on the capability approach to promote justice, after criticizing three kinds of informational basis, He puts the capability as a new basis for the justice evaluation, and clarifies freedom and equality from capability perspective. Sen's theory of justice, is a new attempt to change the direction of “justice” thinking, which has a theoretical and practical significance for our study of the problem of justice.