The Happiness Parameter Of Social Justice

Amartya Sen's book,Development as Freedom,has successfully focused the primary issue of justice on the "informational basis" of justice,which refers to information that help people make value judgments and value rankings.Sen insists that different theories of justice make different value judgments on different informational basis,for example,utilitarianism is based on "utility" and Rawls' “justice of fairness” is based on a catalogue of "primary goods".Sen argues that the "informational basis" determines the strengths and limitations of justice theories,and that neither utilitarianism nor Rawls' s theory of justice is based on an overly narrow informational basis,which leads to the limitations of their theories,such as the fact that utilitarianism leads to the sacrifice of the interests and rights of a minority.And Rawls' s theory of justice cannot justify a dignified life for the dispossessed in society.Therefore,Sen argues that the informational basis of his theory should be "substantive freedom" based on real life,and under the stipulation of the informational basis of "substantive freedom",his construction of the idea of justice takes an alternative path that is completely different from Rawls' s theory of justice.Amartya Sen's idea of justice is a liberating one from the realities of real life to uncover those real-life injustices,and he abandons the quest for a perfect theory of justice and a perfect political system,arguing instead for a non-perfect theory of justice.Amartya Sen's idea of justice brings a new intellectual reform to the exploration and construction of justice theory by,on the one hand,giving meaning to the distributive justice to "generate" and,on the other,denying that justice is motivated only by "mutual benefit".But if justice behaviors and social cooperation cannot be fully motivated by "mutual benefit",so what explains the justice motivation? However,Capabilities apprach is too individualistic to give a better answer to this question.So what do we need to look for? This paper holds that it is important to start with the concept of "happiness",which is as broad in vision as the concept of "life",and that no one can deny a life of happiness.However,in the history of political justice discourse,Western scholars,led by liberalist,have rejected the involvement of "happiness" into social justice discourse for two reasons: on the one hand,They argue that the concept of "happiness" is related with subjective feelings and preference satisfaction,which is too subjective to provide a basis for value judgments in the theory of justice;on the other hand,they believe that if "happiness" is interpreted in terms of “supreme good",then a doctrine of omnipotence will be created in the political field.After a brief review of the utilitarian concept of "happiness" and the communitarian concept of happiness,this paper argues that the concepts of "happiness" and "possible lives" proposed by ZhaoTianyang‘s book,On Possible Lives,can cope with the above two challenges.On the one hand,Zhao Tinyang interprets "happiness" from the point of view of the meaning of life,rather than a concept of "happiness" related to subjective emotions;on the other hand,Zhao Tinyang structures the concept of "happiness" in the form of "possible lives",in order to eliminating a strong meaning of the concept of "happiness" and avoiding the creation of the doctrine of omnipotence."Possible lives" extended the theory of social justice from the perspective of real-life and also demanded substantial freedom,as Capabilities Approach,but in contrast,"possible lives" has a broader perspective which lead a stronger explanation for people's justice behaviors and social cooperation.So this paper makes an attempt,in the framework of Amartya‘s idea of justice,to replace "capabilities" with "possible lives",and regards "happiness" as the ultimate value goal of the theory.In this theory,A just society means one that offers more possibilities for the individual to achieve happiness.So a new justice theory can serve to further broaden the horizons of social justice and better explain the hard-to-judge injustices that exist in society.