John Rawls e Amartya Sen em busca da justiça

Abstract

Abstract : The current discussion on justice is widely influenced by John Rawls?s thesis, developed in his books A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993) that renewed political philosophy. Among them are included the problem of justice, impartiality criterion, peoples motivations to justice and the object of justice, understood within a conception of justice that articulates moral and political values. Recently, those thesis were criticized by the economist Amartya Sen?s book The Idea of Justice (2009). It?s offered on it an approach to justice answering what it regards to be the genuine question of justice according to the peoples actual motivations, that is, the perception of injustices in world which can be removed. In order to answer his question, Sen rejects the necessity of a complete ordering of our values and beliefs about justice in a theoretical conception. Institutions as subjects of justice give way to an evaluation of justice focused on people?s life conditions and the impartiality criterion is understood in a ?open? way. This disagreement is accessed as a debate of thinkers answering different problems concerning different objects, pursuing a common goal, that is: to make justice compatible with peoples actual motivations in order to bring it about within our social, political and economical reality. Recognizing the relative merits of both theoretical proposals, Rawlsian proposal is advocated against Sen's accusations through the thesis that bringing about justice involves appealing to reasonable values and behavior historically consolidated in democratic societies. It is also emphasized the importance of reflection on the role of institutional procedures in the production of injustice.