Abstract

Amartya Sen’s theory of enhancement of justice bears an insurmountable blind side that impairs and makes it incomplete, if not parochial. It dismisses coloniality as the veiled face of modernity (and of capitalism) without which any understanding of a theory of justice in a globalized world is impossible. Constructing a theory outside the complex frame of coloniality makes the theory vulnerable to severe hindrances. The duality (coloniality/modernity) produces a twofold but interdependent reality: for the western world it means the achievement of values such as liberty and prosperity; for the non-western world, racism, extraction and exclusion. Since colonialism has been rearticulated into coloniality, these two categories cannot be isolated for they presuppose one another. Democracy remains a fallacy as long as real power depends on capitalism, which is the inextricable way of coloniality itself. Henceforth, free public discussion and free social choice remain chimerical, obtainable only when democracy as a true, unresolved conflict is a reality through the destruction of coloniality. Finally we propose a third principle of justice that would correct both Rawls’ and Sen’s conceptions of justice. Such corrections pinpoint the void in their approaches thus inverting the panoptic.