Introduction: Landmarks and Direction‐posts

In September, 2007, the Annual Conference of the Human Development and Capability Association convened at the New School of Social Research in New York City to address the theme of ‘Ideas Changing History.’ This proved an apt rubric for gathering the tremendously diverse work of members of the Association, a small and not necessarily representative sampling of which is published here. We are pleased to print Amartya Sen’s inaugural Mahbub ul Haq Lecture, ‘The Idea of Justice.’ As Khadija Haq’s preface thereto reminds us, one aspect of the conference theme is backward-looking, calling for some celebration of the fact that Sen’s and Haq’s ideas came together to yield the Human Development Reports. Journal of Human Development Founding Editor Sir Richard Jolly’s eloquent address to the conference provided a cogent analysis of this history and a witty celebration of its accomplishments, but closed by urging those present to consider the conference theme in a forward-looking way. In one way or another, the papers published here take up that challenge. A central claim of Professor Sen’s lecture is that past philosophical efforts to set out ideals of perfect justice far transcending current circumstances actually impede our efforts to achieve justice and are not needed in order to map out a path to improved justice. What we principally need for the latter purpose, he argues, is a theory of comparative justice — one that allows us, on a more local basis better applicable to where we are now, to say what would count as moving in the direction of greater justice. What is needed to spur people to action is to set out, relatively concretely, what can be done now, from the place history has landed us in, to make people’s lives better. With or without a transcendent ideal to guide us, we inevitably find that the path from here to justice is rarely straight. As we seek to promote justice and human development and to track their progress, we must, for one thing, cope with ethnic, religious, and other cleavages. Identity-based politics threatens to divide societies, disrupt their progress, and promote retaliatory ‘justice’ rather than a fair and adequate opportunity for all. In his essay here, Kwame Anthony Appiah sets out to evaluate this danger, responding to Sen’s recent book, Identity and Violence (Sen, 2006). Sen there argues, in part, that a realistic recognition of the multiplicity of each individual’s identities and of the internal diversity of each culture’s Journal of Human Development Vol. 9, No. 3, November 2008