Amartya Sen
Development means expanding what people are really free to do and be – and justice improves by comparing real alternatives, not dreaming up an ideal.
Placement
Economist and philosopher: development as freedom; thinking about justice comparatively rather than ideally.
Key ideas
- Capability approach
- Development as freedom
Influence
Influenced by 3
Aristotle
influenced by
Sen cited Aristotle’s remark that wealth is merely useful for the sake of something else and linked capabilities to Aristotelian functioning (Development as Freedom, 1999). A. Sen, Development as Freedom (1999); “Capability and Well-Being”, in M. C. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds.), The Quality of Life (1993); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.5
Evidence: AI draft
Aristotle › 384–322 BCE
Adam Smith
influenced by
Sen took up Smith’s impartial spectator for an ‘open impartiality’ that hears voices from afar, against Rawls’s closed contract (The Idea of Justice, 2009). A. Sen, The Idea of Justice (2009); introduction to A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (2009)
Evidence: AI draft
Adam Smith › 1723–1790
Rabindranath Tagore
influenced by
Sen, who grew up at Tagore’s school in Santiniketan, defended Tagore’s cosmopolitan reason and his critique of nationalism in “Tagore and His India” (1997). A. Sen, “Tagore and His India”, New York Review of Books, 26 June 1997; The Argumentative Indian (2005), ch. 5
Evidence: AI draft
Rabindranath Tagore › 1861–1941
Influenced 2
Martha Nussbaum
influenced ✓
Nussbaum took up Sen’s capability approach, which they developed together at WIDER in Helsinki (The Quality of Life, 1993), and gave it a list of central capabilities. M. C. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds.), The Quality of Life (1993); M. C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (2000)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Martha Nussbaum › b. 1947
Elizabeth Anderson
influenced
Anderson used Sen’s capability approach to define democratic equality as access to the capabilities needed to function as an equal citizen (‘What Is the Point of Equality?’, 1999). E. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?”, Ethics 109 (1999); A. Sen, Inequality Reexamined (1992)
Evidence: AI draft
Elizabeth Anderson › b. 1959
Criticism
Criticizes 1
John Rawls influenced by
influenced by
Sen dedicated The Idea of Justice (2009) to Rawls’s memory and kept his demand for impartial public reasoning, while shifting from ideal institutions to comparisons of real lives. A. Sen, The Idea of Justice (2009); J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
criticised
Sen objected that Rawls’s primary goods ignore how people differ in converting resources into capabilities (‘Equality of What?’, 1979; The Idea of Justice, 2009). A. Sen, “Equality of What?”, Tanner Lecture (1979); The Idea of Justice (2009)
Evidence: AI draft
John Rawls › 1921–2002
Works
Development as the expansion of real freedoms.
Comparative rather than transcendental justice – with Smith's impartial spectator.
Position
Sen connects economics with moral philosophy. His studies of famines argued that they arise less from a lack of food than from a collapse of people’s entitlements to it – and that no major famine has occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press. Against measuring welfare only in income or utility, he developed the capability approach: what matters is what people are actually able to do and to be – to be healthy, educated, to take part in public life. Development, he argued, is the expansion of such real freedoms. In The Idea of Justice he criticised Rawls’ search for a perfectly just society and proposed comparing real alternatives to reduce manifest injustice. His work shaped the UN’s Human Development Index.
Life & context
Sen was born in 1933 in Santiniketan, Bengal; as a child he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943. He studied in Calcutta and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and taught in Delhi, at the London School of Economics, Oxford and Harvard; from 1998 to 2004 he was Master of Trinity College. In 1998 he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Further main works
- Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970)
- Poverty and Famines (1981)
- Identity and Violence (2006)
Appears in
- Journey ‘What Is Just?’ · Stop 10 of 10
- Debate ‘Justice and Equality’
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