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The Idea of Justice
Sen's 2009 alternative to Rawlsian transcendental theory — a comparative approach to justice that focuses on identifying and removing remediable injustices rather than specifying the perfectly just society.
The Idea of Justice is Sen's 2009 treatise on political philosophy, advancing a comparative approach to justice as an alternative to the transcendental institutionalism of John Rawls and his successors. Rather than asking 'what would a perfectly just society look like?', Sen argues that the urgent question is 'what injustices are currently remediable?' — a question that can be addressed through public reasoning and comparative judgment without requiring agreement on ultimate ideals. The book extends the capability approach into political philosophy and provides the analytical foundations for applying capability theory to AI governance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's central methodological move is the distinction between transcendental and comparative approaches to justice. Transcendental approaches — Rawls's most prominent — attempt to specify the ideal just society and judge actual arrangements by their distance from the ideal. Comparative approaches ask which of two or more actual arrangements is more just, without requiring specification of an ultimate ideal. Sen argues that