In Search of Social Justice

Proposals, Compulsion and Possible Overcoming in the Face of Incommensurability

Abstract

Based on the fable of the wooden flute told in the book The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen illustrates the debate, still in dance, about social justice in the contemporary world. Firstly, this work takes up the narrative again and, from there, presents the three classic ideas of social justice: (i) justice as economic efficiency, (ii) justice as distributive equality and (iii) justice as retribution for work. Secondly, it shows the immeasurability between them which, strictly speaking, is the immeasurability of its basic principles. Each one has necessary and sufficient reasons to keep the flute. But that is not possible since there is only one flute. Clearly, the flute represents resources that are scarce by definition, and so the problem that the fable illustrates is about the criterion of distribution. Taking the liberty to increase the number of protagonists in the tale, we propose, in the third section, a fourth idea of social justice that evades the difficulty shared by the original three; namely, their failure to contemplate or include the concrete other; i.e., the transcendental type of justice. This type is what we denominate ‘justice through historical retribution’. However, we optimize this fourth type by proposing a fifth, and final, type of social justice: the communitarian, whichwe evaluate as being potentially overcoming, since it encompasses the other four.