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LIT-286: Review of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-261); worth reading only as a three-page, page-referenced map of the book. It is too slight to support any claim beyond "the book argues X at p. Y". It says almost nothing about the capability chapters and offers no criticism.
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Tagsethics, society-and-governance
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-261 — Review of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-434 — Rawls's theory of justice is transcendental only in the formal sense that its principles state when a society is perfectly just; it already yields comparative judgements, prescribes no single set of institutions and sits inside a revisable reflective equilibrium, so Sen's case against 'transcendental institutionalism' misses Rawls, and what it shows is that the theory is incomplete, not that a new paradigm is needed

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Zwolinski (2010), The Review of Metaphysics 63(4) (2010), per the author’s CV (pp. 45–47 as listed there, unverified); read as the author’s web version (“Forthcoming”) — https://home.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski/Review%20-%20Sen%20-%20The%20Idea%20of%20Justice%20-%20web%20version.pdf

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-09-28 at the owner’s request, as one of nine texts assembled to represent Amartya Sen’s capability approach without a full reading of The Idea of Justice. published: is the first appearance (ADR-002).

It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-261 is the close reading of 2026-09-28, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading only as a three-page, page-referenced map of the book. It is too slight to support any claim beyond “the book argues X at p. Y”. It says almost nothing about the capability chapters and offers no criticism.

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