20 quotes
Globalization is not in itself a folly: It has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well.
To ask how things are going and whether they can be improved is a constant and inescapable part of the pursuit of justice.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race seemed to give way — quite suddenly — to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.
No less importantly, intellectual probing is needed to identify deeds that are not intended to be injurious, but which have that effect...
The Idea of Justice (2009)
Being smarter may help the understanding not only of one’s self-interest, but also how the lives of others can be strongly affected by one’s own actions.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
To what extent reasoning can provide a reliable basis for a theory of justice is, of course, itself an issue that has been subject to controversy.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
Democracy has to be judged not just by the institutions that formally exist but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
Given what can be achieved through intelligent and humane intervention, it is amazing how inactive and smug most societies are about the prevalence of the unshared burden of disability.
The continuous cries for help - from children and women and men - ring in my ears, even today seventy-seven years later. (pg. 115)
The impoverishment of economics related to its distancing from ethics affects both welfare economics (narrowing its reach and relevance) and predictive economics (weakening its behavioural foundations).
On Ethics and Economics (1991)
It is arguable that a closer contact between ethics and economics can be beneficial not only to economics but even to ethics. Many ethical problems have what we have been calling 'engineering' aspects, and some of them do, in fact, involve economic relations.
On Ethics and Economics (1991)
Even though in the approach presented here principles of justice will not be defined in terms of institutions, but rather in terms of the lives and freedoms of the people involved, institutions cannot but play a significant instrumental role in the pursuit of justice.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
Smith had no illusion that this would be easy to do, nor did he suffer from the delusion that such an exercise would, in any sense, be perfect. But he did have the conviction that the exercise could still be very useful, and the best should not be made into an enemy of the good.
What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
John Kenneth Galbraith doesn't get enough praise. The Affluent Society is a great insight, and has become so much a part of our understanding of contemporary capitalism that we forget where it began. It's like reading Hamlet and deciding it's full of quotations.
I personally have great skepticism about the theories extolling the wonders of "Asian values." They are often based on badly researched generalizations and frequently uttered by governmental spokesmen countering accusations of authoritarianism and violations of human rights (as happened spectacularly at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993).
Foreword to The Passions and the Interests by Albert O. Hirschman (1996)
When Hobbes referred to the dire state of human beings in having ‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives, he also pointed, in the same sentence, to the disturbing adversity of being ‘solitary’. Escape from isolation may not only be important for the quality of human life, it can also contribute powerfully to understanding and responding to the other deprivations from which human beings suffer. There is surely a basic strength here which is complementary to the engagement in which theories of justice are involved.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
Rather, it is the firmly ‘open’ outlook, which Smith’s ‘impartial spec tator’ invokes, that may be in some need of reassertion today. It can make a substantial difference to our understanding of the demands of impartiality in moral and political philosophy in the interconnected world in which we live.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
Hugely engaging as this longing is for hope and history to rhyme together, the justice of transcendental institutionalism has little room for that engagement. This limitation provides one illustration of the need for a substantial departure in the prevailing theories of justice. That is the subject matter of this book.
The Idea of Justice (2009)
Smith distinguishes with great sophistication the different kinds of reasons people have in taking an interest in the lives of others, separating out sympathy, generosity, public spirit and other motivations. Even though he acknowledged the role of mental attitudes and predispositions, he went on to discuss how reasoning, which is at the heart of rationality, must have a big role in preventing us from being – consciously or unconsciously – too self-centred, or thoughtlessly uncaring.