In his recent, intelligent contribution to Ethics & International Affairs, Professor Chatterjee has offered a resounding defense of Amartya Sen’s critique of John Rawls’s liberal internationalism expressed in The Law of Peoples (1999). The debate between Rawls and Sen has become a staple in professional discourse about international political ethics, most recently exemplified in Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, ed. Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). But Chatterjee’s contribution to this debate does not go beyond liberalism or whatever conundrums one associates with it; it remains within it. Indeed, Amartya Sen’s critique of Rawls, fairly represented in Professor Chatterjee’s piece, simply exacerbates the defects of liberalism as a political perspective—particularly in the arena of global ethics.
Liberalism is a constitutively incomplete political perspective, whether articulated by those on the left or the right, because a philosophy that primarily concerns liberty does not address questions of power–let alone the “justice” that Chatterjee seeks to promote. Instead, it presumes that the fulsome, popular liberty of the left or the individualistic, market-oriented liberty of the right provides a sufficient basis for dealing with any political problems that arise—a presumptuous assumption at best.
In the case of Sen or Chatterjee, the liberal assumption morphs into defenses of “pluralism” or “diversity,” which assume that all groups or differences can be automatically accommodated or “balanced”—another presumptuous assumption. Moreover, it suggests that enlarging the tent of liberalism to include greater depth will promote harmony rather than conflict. It even presumes that the universality of liberalism could persist once the number of those norms expands, even though negotiations among them would occur only via a notion of “public reasoning” articulated by Sen (and implicitly the author) that is even more utopian than Rawlsian public reasoning built from original positions.
The conundrum of liberalism is that liberals want to solve problems of injustice and inequality without doing anything about them—like challenging the privileges of corporate power or the military bias in governmental priorities. Neither Rawls, nor Sen, nor Chatterjee touches the radical sources of social injustice. They don’t because they’re liberals. The only way to approach issues of global justice is to put everything on the table and attempt as peaceably and sensibly as possible to rearrange the conventions of power so as to benefit the powerless—not because the powerless are automatically virtuous but because there is much more evidence to indicate that the powerful are not.