Volume 12, 2018
Ethics
Ramkhok Raikhan
Pages 281-287
Moral Reasoning
Rethinking Rawls’ and Sen’s Approaches to Justice
The moral reasoning of Rawls tends to follow Kant in so far as Rawls assumes reason as the primary faculty which decides moral action of what to do and how to do it. By assuming reason as the primary faculty neglecting interests and inclinations which are not encompassed by the primary goods, Rawls searches for an impartial principles of justice to safeguard the priority of ‘right’ over ‘good’. While in Sen’s moral reasoning well-being takes the central place and somehow reason as a faculty is subsumed as an instrument of our wants. When wellbeing takes the primary attention in moral discourse it becomes difficult for Sen to evaluate and rank different alternatives, since wellbeing can be understood differently bsy different people and people value different lives. However, Rawls’ abstraction (as in the case of the hypothetical situation) from the actual situations of life seems to face theoretical as well as practical problems.