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Sen's Case against Perfection

In his stimulating and wide-ranging book The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen argues against the project of ‘transcendental’ theorising about justice and in favour of the social choice approach.1 He describes transcendental political philosophy concerning justice as the effort to elaborate and justify a conception of a perfectly just society (6). Sen contrasts the transcendental approach with the social choice approach to justice. A social choice approach essentially takes people’s disparate preferences and tries to aggregate them into a social preference in accordance with a set of constraints on aggregation. Instead of attempting to identify a uniquely best society, it focuses on giving reasoned comparative assessments of different social states. Sen’s main discussion of the idea of perfect justice is confined to the major representatives of the social contract tradition (15). So, he associates transcendental theorising with closed societies as well as with an essentially institutionalist conception of justice. But I want to abstract from Sen’s discussion of institutionalism and focus just on the arguments against transcendental political philosophy. This theoretical tradition goes back to Plato and Aristotle and is quite independent of contractarianism or institutionalism. Sen gives two arguments against what he calls ‘transcendental’ political philosophy about justice: the ‘feasibility’ argument and the ‘redundancy’ argument. I will query each argument in turn.