Book on Amartya Sen reviewed by C.T. Kurien

Capabilities and social Justice: The Political Philosohy of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussabaum by John M. Alexander, Ashgate,Burlington, US, 2008. pages 187
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One of Amartya Sen’s greatest achievements has been to shift the focus of development from things to people, demonstrating the philosophical underpinnings of that shift. Sen did this by situating the development problematic in the discourse on the hoary theme of justice, going back to Socrates and Aristotle in the distant past and the utilitarians in the 19th century (Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill), but revived in the second half of the past century primarily by John Rawls in his 1971 publication, A Theory of Justice.

What John Alexander attempts in this volume is to make a critical inquiry about the link between Sen’s approach to development and a theory of social justice. Being a student of philosophy and ethics, he approaches the theme from the perspective of justice. “A theory of justice,” he says at the outset, “cannot be tantamount to a theory of well-being. Judgments regarding claims of justice invariably acquire not only identifying and delineating certain aspects of well-being [i.e., development even in its broadest materialistic sense] but also finding the appropriate normative principles by which to treat people as equals in society.” What he finds significant in Sen is a “plural and public conception of justice intimately tied to democracy and public reasoning”.
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In a series of writings, particularly Poverty and Famines (1981), Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), Commodities and Capabilities (1987), On Economic Inequalities (1997) and Development as Freedom (1999), Sen put forward his concept of human capabilities. He was ably supported by Martha Nussbaum, who also authored many studies on capabilities with a pronounced feminine perspective. Since the theme of John Alexander’s work is a critical evaluation of the contribution of the capabilities approach to social justice, a further scrutiny of the concept of capability as propounded by Sen and Nussbaum is necessary. read it all

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