Download Renй Daval (Universitй de Reims, Champagne

René Daval (Université de Reims, Champagne-Ardenne)
Ethics and Economics, pragmatism and theory of justice.
The economic crisis is not only strictly economic, but ethic too. The question of social justice is
implied in the events. The great book of John Rawls A Theory of Justice had tried at the end of
the twentieth century to build a theory of justice a priori, which owed at the philosophies of
Rousseau and Kant. One of the great merit of the book is to link ethics and economics:the two
principles of justice are not only economic principles but ethic principles. The question of liberty
and of equality is an ethical question. The philosophy of Rawls , just like the philosophy of Kant,
asserts that it is not possible to identify propositions which use the verb “is” and that who use the
verb “ought”. Rawls thinks about ideal conditions of justice and of equity. The great pragmatist
philosopher Hilary Putnam thinks that it is necessary to claim “the end of a dogma”. We cannot
separate the propositions which describe facts and these which asserts values , in spite of the
recommendations of David Hume, Emmanuel Kant or Johann Fichte.Putnam has studied the
consequences of the opposition between facts and values in economic sciences like in other
sciences. Putnam has made this choice because the question of knowing if values can or not be
the object of a rational discussion has been treated in economics. This question is one of the most
important for Amartya Sen that Putnam quotes here. I wish in my study develop an a posteriori
theory of justice with the last book of Sen: The Idea of Justice (2009).
Sen wants to eliminate the injustice. His book is not only a treatise of economics science, but a
book of ethics. We can discuss with rationality about values. Sen agree with pragmatism and
Putnam about this question. It is necessary to identify injustices which it is possible to put right.
We need of a theory of justice. But the theory of justice that Sen wish to build is not an a priori
one, just like that of Rawls. Sen wish to determinate how we must proceed to promote justice . It
is not necessary to think what is in the ideal a society perfectly just, like Rawls wanted to do, but
to study the life that people can live. Sen makes the methods that G.E.Moore thaught to be the
best one in ethics: a translation into the concrete.
Sen reefers to the European Enlightenment, to Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and to the French
mathematicians and philosophers Condorcet and Borda. The theories of contract are important,
but so the theories of philosophers who compare the ways of life of people who live in different
countries which have different political powers and different economical organisations.It is
necessary to study the concrete behaviour of people in social interactions. Sen does not quote the
great book of G.H.Mead Mind, Self and Society, but his work is in the same direction. Sen
quotes Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Marx and J.S.Mill. Amartya Sen does not
assert that all society is a society where the struggle of social classes is the first propriety, but he
thinks that Marx has studied social injusticies in nowdays and in history.
I Think that Sen is right when he wants to describe concrete means to struggle against injustice.
It was good to define justice a priori just like Rawls. It is now a necessity to study concrete
political and economical decisions to make disappear injustice.
An important thesis that I wish to defend with Sen is the following one: reasoning is crucial to
understand justice, even in a word which is full of unreasonable decisions. Justice is not a
question of sentiment, but of reason. One of the requirement of a theory of justice is to use
reason. It is not the sentiment which condemn the war in Irak in 2003, but the reason. Sen does
not wish to define a trancendantal justice, like Kant has done in The Doctrine of Law, but to
know if an option is less injust than an other. Sen recommands a comparative method. It is not
necessary to define first strictly just institutions.