Amartya Sen: The Idea of Justice II – learning to trust the individual?

I measure the quality of a book on the slowness of the read rather than for its page turning quality. Slowness is a function of the amount it makes me stop and think. I am conducting a project on Adult Social care which sits right at the intersection of his thesis and approach – what are the barriers to individuals taking control of their own social care (budget and services) and what are the opportunities which would justify the initial investment required to make that all happen?

Essentially, the answer is that the institutions that define and provide ‘care’ (i.e. the state, the various departments with social objectives, the local service providers, and importantly the third sector) need to learn to trust individuals. The problem is that this requires an almost Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ to move from abstract managerialism with its implicit moral structures and negative risk assumptions to a more concrete ‘lived’ philosophy; no longer framing the question for the state vs. the individual as ‘what is the life he/she/we ought to live?’ but instead asking ‘what is the best life he/she/we can live?’.

Sen appears to be advocating a type of social existentialism – championing the individual in the face of normative state sponsored programming which assumes it has all the answers; if only people would listen to what they had to say! Just as Sartre wanted to wake us up to the reality of freedom and choice and the implications of ‘not choosing’ (i.e. following the herd), so Sen’s book can be read as a wakeup call to examine the implications of the state feeling it must be ‘providing choice’ to its citizens – i.e. setting out the paths we must follow to a ‘good life’.

The problem is that the state provides choice in the Hegelian sense of ‘both/and’ – this creates the double speak and contradictions inherent in the third way. The state doesn’t want to offer real choice but a safe choice. However, you cannot talk about individuals being responsible for their actions and then take away responsibility for their choices. What people at the sharp end lack is not institutions but practical examples – role models – from which they can identify the best life for them to follow. In fact, the more institutions take responsibility for those individuals the more they become programmed that freedom = negative risk; the risk of failure, rather than freedom = positive risk; the risk of success. No wonder they call being on benefits ‘living in the waiting room of life’.