Thinker · TH-0055
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher, born in Santiniketan, who has taught at Delhi, the London School of Economics, Oxford, Cambridge and…
অমর্ত্য সেন
b. 1933 · Santiniketan, Calcutta, Cambridge, Delhi, London, Oxford, Harvard
Traditions: Analytic
Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher, born in Santiniketan, who has taught at Delhi, the London School of Economics, Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for work on welfare economics and social choice. He pioneered the capability approach, later developed also by Martha Nussbaum, which assesses well-being and justice by what people are actually able to do and be, rather than by resources or utility alone.
Key ideas
- Well-being and justice should be measured by capabilities: the real freedoms people have to achieve valued functionings.
- Purely self-interested 'rational fools' are a poor model of human agents.
- Development is best understood as the expansion of freedom.
- Justice is advanced by comparing feasible improvements, not only by designing a perfectly just society.
Major works
- Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970)
- "Equality of What?" (1979)
- Development as Freedom (1999)
- The Idea of Justice (2009)
In the conversation
- Question Capabilities or the social model: which better tells a city what it owes disabled residents?
- Debate Calling an outcome ‘efficient’ always smuggles in a value judgement
- Question Do capabilities measure a good life better than happiness surveys do?
- Discussion Four ventilators, seven patients: is triage consequentialism with a human face, or something else?
- Discussion Two people with the same income and different lives: a wheelchair user’s case for capabilities
- Reading group Reading group: Sen’s ‘Rational Fools’ and the problem of commitment