However, it was not clear to me what you meant by the following sentence (which was part of your fourth question, concerning Sen’s response to the challenge of incommensurability): “Granted that the kinds of metrics that utilitarianism or ‘primary goods’ afford are unavailable without doing violence to what it is that people actually value…”

I think that I can understand how utilitarianism can be understood as doing some kind of ‘violence’ to what people actually value, in that utilitarianism is committed to an account of intrinsic value (hedonism) that most people find (at least initially) implausible, given what they do value, and how they experience that valuing. However, Rawls’s account of primary goods involves no commitment to any theory of intrinsic value. Rather, the view simply holds that there are certain things (liberties, opportunities, resources, and the social bases of self-respect) that all persons would want instrumentally, irrespective of what particular ends they have or what they regard as having intrinsic value. So if I value my friendships intrinsically (not because they are instrumentally conducive to my happiness), it does not seem to do any kind of ‘violence’ to my understanding of the value of these relationships to note that liberties, resources, etc., are instrumentally helpful in realizing (promoting, respecting, etc.) the value inherent in them (as well as the other things that I value intrinsically, whatever they happen to be).

Regarding your comment that Sen’s approach to thinking about justice “risks transforming it into a theory of deliberative democracy,” I think that this is spot on. Even when presenting his account of capabilities, Sen seems remarkably reluctant to say anything substantive about what justice or injustice is. Instead (as I noted in an earlier remark), it seems that he is advancing not an account of justice but rather an account of political legitimacy – that is, a theory about how to make morally acceptable political decisions (given the existence of value pluralism and disagreements concerning the nature of justice), not a theory that helps us to identify justice requires of us. Perhaps the title of the book should have been: The Idea of Deliberative Democracy.