BoholAnalysis

In 2009, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen published his philosophical enquiry on the need for a theory of justice entitled “The Idea of Justice”. Deviating from the famous Rawls document in 1971 “A Theory of Justice”, the book proposes ‘comparative realization’ as an alternative approach to John Rawls’ ‘transcendental institutionalism’. Sen’s conceptualization, as reviewed by Osmani (2010), requires at least 8 elements. In this essay, however, I will focus on at least one element, the process by which we judge how just or unjust our society is. Sen contends that we evaluate the justness of a society, not by the justness of its institutions but by the “justness of the realization of a social state as determined by the interaction of institutions with social norms and the behaviour pattern of individuals living in a particular society” (Osmani, 2010; 604). In his book, Sen argues that it is very difficult to define a perfectly just society. The plurality in the conception of the t