Amartya Sen Quotes on Justice
Sen's capabilities approach reframes the metric of distributive justice. Conventional welfarist and resource-based accounts — Sen argues across Inequality Reexamined (1992), Development as Freedom (1999), and The Idea of Justice (2009) — measure the wrong thing, since the same primary goods or income do not yield the same effective freedom for differently situated individuals. Justice should be assessed in the space of capabilities — what people are actually able to do and to be — and the proper aim of public action is the expansion of substantive freedoms rather than the maximization of resources or utilities. The framework, developed jointly with Martha Nussbaum, has shaped the United Nations Human Development Index and contemporary philosophical work on global justice.
Quotes
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Attributed to Amartya Sen:
“Famines are caused by failures of entitlement, not by failures of food production alone.”
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Attributed to Amartya Sen:
“The pursuit of justice begins with attention to clear and remediable injustices.”
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Attributed to Amartya Sen:
“What people are actually able to do and to be is the proper space for justice.”
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“I personally have great skepticism about the theories extolling the wonders of " Asian values ." They are often based on badly researched generalizations and frequently uttered by governmental spokesmen countering accusations of authoritarianism and violations of human rights (as happened spectacularly at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993).”
Amartya Sen, Foreword to The Passions and the Interests by Albert O. Hirschman (1996) -
“Amartya Sen, "Human Rights and Asian Values" Sixteenth Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture on Ethics and Foreign Policy, May 25, 1997; Republished in: Tibor R. Machan (2013), Business Ethics in the Global Market. p. 69”
Since the conception of human rights transcends local legislation and the citizenship of the person affected, it is not surprising that support for human rights can also come from anyone—whether or not she is a citizen of the same country as the person whose rights are threatened. A foreigner does not need the permission of a repressive government to try to help a person whose liberties are being