Water injustice Paper

Welcome to our short Lecture 2.

In this lecture, I want to talk

about some ideas and approaches

to justice.

In the video you

watched by Al Jazeera,

you heard several contributors

question the idea that there

was too little water.

One contributor,

Tim [? Forsyth, ?]

argued that there is too

much emphasis on limits.

And in fact, we will

see in the declaration

we read in a little while that

the issue of a global scarcity

of water is a prevailing idea.

All of the contributors

in the Al Jazeera video

agreed that water could

be used more effectively.

Then at several

points, questions

of inequality and injustice

began to be raised.

Who is able to buy water?

Why is it women who

are carrying water?

Why do cities get more

water than rural areas?

These are questions of

power, inequality, and gender

relations.

As I said in the last

lecture, one idea

running through this course

is that water and sanitation

are so fundamental to

the making of society

and its many inequalities that

they deserve consideration

as questions of justice.

In this case, we are referring

to an idea of social justice

which is broader than systems

of law, courts, and punishments.

We are connecting

to ideas of what

is fair, equitable, or just.

One idea of social

justice for example,

is that everyone deserves equal

economic, political, and social

rights and opportunities.

In the last lecture,

I asked you to think

what it might be like if you

had to collect all the water

you use from a source

some distance away.

If you had to do that

while others living nearby

could draw water from

a tap in their home,

you might think that

situation is unjust.

In reality, we saw examples

of this in the video.

That is the situation

facing many people.

What you are doing in

this thought experiment

is to build an idea of what

is unjust from the idea

that you have to carry

the water you need,

while people around you do not.

This is a key idea in the

first reading by economist

and philosopher Amartya Sen.

He argues that ideas

of justice should not

be built from abstract,

universal examples

of a perfect society, but

from the lives of real people.

This first reading

is dense, so I

want to talk you through

some of the main points.

Amartya Sen is an Indian

economist and philosopher.

He won the Nobel Prize

in Economics in 1998.

He is best known for his

analyses of famine and poverty,

leading into a

theory of justice.

His ideas of justice

and injustice

were built through an

analysis of this most

terrible of injustices--

death from starvation.

Most simply, he showed that

famine did not arise directly

from food scarcity,

but from the breakdown

of social relationships

through which

people were able to get food.

He described those relationships

as capabilities and freedoms,

the ability to get work,

health care, education,

and to be heard in

society most generally,

but to get food, in particular.

In this paper on

the idea of justice,

Amartya Sen is

reflecting on the work

of his friend and

collaborator, Mahbub ul

Haq, who had recently died.

Haq simplified,

synthesized, and developed

a set of Sen's

ideas about justice

to make a new index of justice

and social progress that

has become influential

across the globe.

This Human Development Index

has been taken up by the United

Nations Development Program.

It combines three elements--

a measure of life expectancy,

a measure of income per capita,

and a measure of education.

Sen describes Haq's

impatience with the idea

of economic growth,

with the idea

that economic growth would

bring adequate social progress

or justice.

This is an idea that

led to that index.

20 years of growth,

Haq says, would

bring incomes in

India and Pakistan

to the level of

incomes in Egypt.

Haq asked, "Sen, is

that all you and I want?

Can't we do better by

taking more immediate action

against the deprivations, the

miseries, and the injustices

in the world?"

So Haq had an

impatience that you

may share about social

problems around the world.

And both Sen and Haq

used that impatience

to develop ideas of justice.

The Human Development

Index was one way

that Haq used to highlight the

pressing need to take action

on these questions.

The key idea running

through Amartya Sen's paper

is that justice

is about the lives

of real people and their

capabilities and freedoms

to live lives that they value.

So in general, this

is the fun bit.

You may not see

this immediately,

but Sen is saying the

major philosophers

who thought about justice

didn't get it right.

I find that interesting.

Sen argues in Section 5 that

prevailing ideas of justice,

such as those of

philosopher John Rawls,

start from some vision

of a perfect society.

Instead, Haq and Sen argue

that ideas of justice

should emerge from

people's lives

and what is important to them.

They emphasize the importance

of looking at human lives

themselves, rather than

the commodity possessions

and other facilitating

factors that have

some influence over our lives.

In Section 2, Page 33, Sen

outlines four special features

of Haq's and Sen's

work that contribute

to this focus on people's lives.

First, there is a focus

on lives and freedom.

Second is linking responsibility

to effective power,

third, a comparative rather than

a transcendental assessment,

and fourth, a

globally unrestricted

coverage of ideas of justice.

The following sections

of Sen's paper

elaborate on these features.

Some of this, as I have said,

is fun and straightforward,

but much can be heavy going.

I found Section 5 fun, because

it lays out this argument

that justice is about

the lives people want,

rather than some abstract,

transcendental idea of justice

built from, as they say,

a lumped-together view

of the world, with all

social arrangements seen

as either unjust or just.

The approach of Haq and Sen

builds an idea of justice

from people's real

needs and wants.

Take a look at Section 6.

Here, Sen is arguing

that a theory of justice

should apply to the whole world,

not just to a particular nation

and its institutions.

Justice should have globally

unrestricted coverage.

And by implication, he

is also making a case

against ideas of justice drawing

primarily on the global North

or West and its institutions.

Haq and Sen are

arguing that justice

is about the freedom

and capabilities

that allow people to live lives

that they have reason to value.

This idea is

influential, particularly

in studies of development

and social change

in the global South.

But not everyone agrees

with the approach.

One line of criticism

is that a focus

on individual

capabilities and freedoms

leaves out collective action

and historical processes.

So for example, Berkeley

sociologist Peter Evans asks,

what does it have to say

about collective action?

Organized collectivities

are left out, he says.

Unions, political

parties, village councils,

and women's groups

are fundamental,

he says, to people's capability

to choose the lives they

have reason to value.

Nonetheless, I think the idea

of capabilities and freedoms,

even with these limitations,

is a decent starting point

for thinking about water

and sanitation justice.

How does this play out

later in the class?

These ideas connect to

the class in many places.

Here are three-- the key idea

of basic justice on the lives

and needs of people, rather than

the abstract or transcendental

idea of justice, deriving

from Hobbes and Rawls,

runs through the whole class.

The direct relation to

the lives that people want

and the capabilities and

freedoms enabling their lives

provides a more

appropriate foundation

for considering justice

in getting water

and using sanitation.

Then there is a parallel

between a focus on capabilities

and freedoms to live

lives that people value

and the idea of human rights--

that is, to the individual

rights to food and education,

to adequate work

and decent housing

contained in the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights.

We explore in a later work

how the Universal Declaration,

written after World

War II, has now

been strengthened with the

addition of the human right

to water and sanitation.

So human rights to

water and sanitation

are also specifically

regarded as human rights.

These rights, when

they can be achieved,

provide people with the capacity

to live lives that they value.

And later in this course,

I will be describing

links between water

and poverty using

Sen's idea of

capabilities and freedom

coming out of notions of

justice described in this paper.

So Sen says, poverty can

be seen as a deprivation

of capabilities and freedoms.

And I will come

back to that later.

Next, I want you to read

the Santa Cruz Declaration

on the Global Water Crisis.

This declaration

makes an argument.

It comes out of a conference on

equitable governance of water

held at UC, Santa Cruz in 2013.

And it argues, as we've seen

earlier in the Al Jazeera

video, that the global

water crisis may not

be one of scarcity,

but of social justice.

This Declaration is simpler and

easier to read than the paper

by Amartya Sen, but it draws

on similar ideas about justice.

I want you to look out for

the manifestations of water

injustice listed in the

paper, and the diverse range

of injustices arising with

different contexts of water

use, including irrigation,

mining, and urban conditions.

Let me just say a paragraph or

so about your main assignment.

Your main assignment this

week is a portfolio essay

looking at a news account of

some water or sanitation event.

The assignment is described

in detail on Canvas.

I want you to begin looking

for some news or media

event that interests you.

It could be an event

in the United States

or somewhere else in the world.

I will return to this

task in Lecture 4.

For now, I want you to read

carefully the assignment

details on Canvas, and

begin looking around

for a suitable news event.