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Apr 24, 2024 · Amartya Sen is famous for his significant contributions to welfare economics (for which he was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics), including his development of more sophisticated measures of poverty, and for his work on the causes and prevention of famines.
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The Capability Approach is defined by its choice of focus upon the moral significance of individuals capability of achieving the kind of lives they have reason to value. This distinguishes it from more established approaches to ethical evaluation, such as utilitarianism or resourcism, which focus exclusively on subjective well-being or the availabi...
Within academic philosophy the novel focus of Capability Approach has attracted a number of scholars. It is seen to be relevant for the moral evaluation of social arrangements beyond the development context, for example, for considering gender justice. It is also seen as providing foundations for normative theorising, such as a capability theory of...
This article focuses on the philosophical aspects of the Capability Approach and its foundations in the work of Amartya Sen. It discusses the development and structure of Sens account, how it relates to other ethical approaches, and its main contributions and criticisms. It also outlines various capability theories developed within the Capability A...
Amartya Sen had an extensive background in development economics, social choice theory (for which he received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics), and philosophy before developing the Capability Approach during the 1980s. This background can be pertinent to understanding and assessing Sens Capability Approach because of the complementarity between S...
The Capability Approach attempts to address various concerns that Sen had about contemporary approaches to the evaluation of well-being, namely:
An important part of Sens argument for the Capability Approach relates to his critique of alternative philosophical and economics accounts. In particular, he argues that, whatever their particular strengths, none of them provide an analysis of well-being that is suitable as a general concept; they are all focused on the wrong particular things (whe...
Our mental reactions to what we actually get and what we can sensibly expect to get may frequently involve compromises with a harsh reality. The destitute thrown into beggary, the vulnerable landless labourer precariously surviving at the edge of subsistence, the overworked domestic servant working round the clock, the subdued and subjugated housew...
Sum-ranking focuses on maximizing the total amount of welfare in a society without regard for how it is distributed, although this is generally felt to be important by the individuals concerned. Sen argues, together with liberal philosophers such as Bernard Williams and John Rawls, that sum-ranking does not take seriously the distinction between pe...
Resourcism is defined by its neutrality about what constitutes the good life. It therefore assesses how well people are doing in terms of their possession of the general purpose resources necessary for the construction of any particular good life. Sens criticism of John Rawls influential account of the fair distribution of primary goods stands in f...
Figure 1 outlines the core relationships of the Capability Approach and how they relate to the main alternative approaches focused on resources and utility. Resources (such as a bicycle) are considered as an input, but their value depends upon individuals ability to convert them into valuable functionings (such as bicycling), which depends, for exa...
Sen does suggest that in many cases a sub-set of crucially important capabilities associated with basic needs may be relatively easily identified and agreed upon as urgent moral and political priorities. These basic capabilities, such as education, health, nutrition, and shelter up to minimally adequate levels, do not exhaust the resources of the c...
Evaluating capability is a second order exercise concerned with mapping the set of valuable functionings people have real access to. Since it takes the value of functionings as given, its conclusions will reflect any ambiguity in the valuation stage. Assessing capability is more informationally demanding than other accounts of advantage since it no...
The capability approach in principle allows a very wide range of dimensions of advantage to be positively evaluated (what capabilities does this person have?). This allows an open diagnostic approach to what is going well or badly in peoples lives that can be used to reveal unexpected shortfalls or successes in different dimensions, without aggrega...
As well as being concerned with how well peoples lives are going, the Capability Approach can be used to examine the underlying determinants of the relationship between people and commodities, including the following (Sen 1999, 70-71):
(2) Local environment diversities, such as climate, epidemiology, and pollution. These can impose particular costs such as more or less expensive heating or clothing requirements.
(3) Variations in social conditions, such as the provision of public services such as education and security, and the nature of community relationships, such as across class or ethnic divisions.
The diagnosis of capability failures, or significant interpersonal variations in capability, directs attention to the relevant causal pathways responsible. Note that many of these interpersonal variations will also influence individuals abilities to access resources to begin with. For example, the physically handicapped often have more expensive re...
With regard to irreducibly social goods like culture, Sen argues that they not only enter into the analysis instrumentally (such as in the requirements for appearing in public without shame) but also as part of the lives people have reason to value. Nevertheless Sen is clear in his view that the value of social goods is only derivative upon the ref...
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- “the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute” ― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity.
- “A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.” ― Amartya Sen.
- “The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’, ‘you must commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).”
- “While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection” ― Amartya Sen.
Amartya Sen. Amartya Kumar Sen ( Bengali: [ˈɔmortːo ˈʃen]; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher. Sen has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States since 1972. In 1998, Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics. [5]
Among his forthcoming books are Identity and the Violence of Illusion and The Argumentative Indian . Interview conducted by AsiaSociety.org's Nermeen Shaikh. Some critics have suggested that development as it has been pursued in the last fifty years was poorly conceived and narrowly defined.
Dec 4, 2008 · It is a fitting tribute to Sen's own contributions to the discourse on ethics, welfare and measurement. Keywords: ethics, normative economics, welfare, aggregation, social choice, poverty, capabilities, identity, collective action, Amartya Sen.
Oct 6, 2019 · In a number of books, including “ The Argumentative Indian ,” from 2005, Sen has celebrated the multiculturalism of Indian existence and the capacious nature of the Indian constitution; both...
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