Reiko Gotoh

More than 50 years have passed since the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) and Amartya Sen's Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970). This chapter introduces the following three purposes of this book. First, this book seeks to obtain clues for the critical development of the theory of justice and the welfare state by capturing the overlaps and differences between Rawls's political philosophy and Sen's normative economics. Second, this book examines the concept of dignity, which has not received much attention in liberalism. Neither a free competitive market system nor a wage-income redistribution system will be sufficient to protect and respect “dignity”. To protect and respect values stocked and sustained within an individual, it is necessary to pay attention to his/her capability for dignity and capability for utilizing the right to liberties. Third, this book cross-pollinates the methods of liberal social sciences and philosophy, working from existing connections between these two areas. Throughout this book, the reader will find that theories of liberal social science and philosophy contain clues of ideas and methods that critically develop themselves.

The first purpose of this chapter is to examine dignity from a perspective of economic philosophy and theories of justice. Specifically, I will analyze the following three conceptual distinctions that have been controversial related to dignity (Sects. 3–5). They are (1) “price” versus “dignity;” (2) “individual dignity” versus “human dignity;” and (3) “equality of human rights” versus “respect for dignity.” The second and more important purpose of this chapter is to use the concept of dignity to illuminate certain conundrums that liberalism has left behind and to reexamine the reach and limits of liberalism. Thus, this paper explores theoretical possibilities of the concept of dignity based on relevant literature. Section 2 introduces the concept of dignity in John Rawls’ theory of justice. Section 6 reviews relevant literature on the attempts to critically develop the concept of dignity in Rawls’ theory of justice.“From my perspective, it is just that soul and spirit, with all their dignity and human scale, are now so complex and unique states of an organism…. And this is of course the difficult job, is it not: to move the spirit from its nowhere pedestal to a somewhere place, while preserving its dignity and importance, to recognize its humble origins and vulnerability, and yet still call upon its guidance (Damasio, 2005).”

Building on Rawls’s philosophy of contingency and Sen’s normative economics, this chapter seeks a theory of justice that incorporates the hard cases from the beginning. Furthermore, it tries to reconstruct the value assumptions of liberalism, taking the concept of dignity as a clue. The disparity in status between the right to work and the right to well-being and the disregard of the utilization ability to use the rights to liberties are criticized. Furthermore, based on Rawls’ philosophy of contingency and Sen's normative economics, the logic of “public reciprocity,” which incorporates both hard and normal cases, will be explored. Finally, while standing on the inviolability and incomparability of the dignity inherent in the individual, this chapter sought a logic in the capability approach to denounce actions that violate the obligation to respect dignity and to measure the damage for compensations. The discussion here indicates the possibility of a contribution of economics to the theory of value in a new way completely different from the price theory, which helps us to envision the future of the welfare state.

This is an open access book. Modern society is characterized by the fact of contingency, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The purpose of this book is to transform this phenomenal fact into a hopeful norm. As a clue, the book examines the concept of dignity and looks forward to a new definition. So far, the concept of dignity has been peripheral to the concerns of liberal social sciences. This book uses the concept of dignity as a source of light to illuminate the fundamental critique of liberal social sciences and philosophy. Can the theory of justice or discourse ethics truly realize the well-defined society it envisions in a fundamentally contingent, uncertain, and ambiguous situation? Can societies be inclusive of minorities relegated to the periphery with their dignity undermined? Can we resist the temptation to construct huge hierarchical stairs, forcing individuals to place themselves on one of its steps, and thus lining up different and diverse entities in a long sequence, and eventually bringing about totalitarianism? This book has a three-level telescopic structure. At the very front, there is a scope of reexaming the political liberalism in the light of dignity. Behind it is a scope of reconstructing a theory of justice in modern society. Further behind it, there is a scope encompassing reflection on the methodology of liberal social sciences and philosophy. We leave it to the reader's imagination as to which scope to read this book through, and what image will emerge from the three scopes taken together. It is our hope that this book helps readers envision as a "realistic utopia" a society in which "no one is left behind," including wounded little birds.

The purpose of this paper is, first, to investigate the interconnections of substantive freedoms, which are indispensable for every individual to “lead the kind of lives they have reason to value”, and which have legitimate and ethical reasons to be publicly secured, second, to investigate a conception of public-provision unit that embodies “the right to well-being freedom”, and a conception of decision-making unit that corresponds to it, based on the perspective of Sen’s capability theory and its extension, comparing with that of Rawls’ Theory of Justice and A Law of People. If we intend to construct such a public-provision unit, which conducts redistribution as a whole, and which receives every individual who cannot belong to any fixed local group, what kind of a body should we assume as a public-provision unit? And further, what kind of a body should we assume as a decision-making unit, which is responsible for deciding or revising the basic conceptions of public provision unit?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the direction which the Japanese welfare state has pursued and what it has left behind, by contrasting the points of view of two representative approaches in economics: the traditional income approach and the capability approach which has been newly proposed by Amartya Sen. In extracting the structure of the tax-social security system, the paper refers to the framework of John Rawls, precepts of “common sense of justice” and their higher principles in his theory of justice. The main conclusion is that Japanese welfare state has followed universal liberalism based on continuity, the essential characteristic of the income approach, and has left behind the equality of the differences. This paper indicates that the capability approach which makes it possible to analyze the discontinuity within an individual’s life by focusing on her doings and beings is also suitable for understanding the differences among individuals.