The wellbeing of a society cannot be judged by national income indicators alone, even when these are augmented by so-called happiness measures. And it is worth removing specific injustices on a piecemeal basis even if it is impossible to construct a perfectly just society or even agree on what such a society would look like. These two propositions might seem blindingly obvious, but they go against the grain of much recent political philosophy and highbrow economics.

This seems to me the central message of The Idea of Justice by the Nobel-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. The tradition of English-language political philosophy used to be firmly utilitarian. Put bluntly, it judged states of affairs by a happiness criterion. When John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian philosopher, spoke of higher and lower pleasures he was being inconsistent with his own doctrine. As the old clerihew runs: