Inr 4075
Week 8 Capabilities & Human Rights
INR 4075
Professor Maslanik
Amartya Sen
Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard
Nobel Memorial Price in Economic Sciences
Bengali Baidya
Welfare Economics and Famine.
Through the analysis of policy, looks at outcomes relating to the wellbeing of a community.
Development as Freedom (Reintroduced Ethics into Economics).
Capabilities & human rights
Human rights have been debated in virtually every country
Intellectually and lacking.
Bentham: rhetorical nonsense—Anarchical Fallacies.
Are human rights entitlements?
Can capability perspective provide a comprehensive coverage of the content of human rights?
How can we go about ascertaining the content of human rights and of basic capabilities when our values are supposed to be quite divergent?
Capabilities Cont’d
Human rights and Capabilities have to depend on public reasoning.
Sen rejects wealth happiness and basic needs as the best measurements for determining a ”good” outcome.
Capabilities as a positive option (the choices people have that they are free to realize)—what can they do? What is in their grasp? One outcome offers better capabilities to the citizens of a region than another, then we can judge that to be the better outcome.
It is an absolute concept, not a relative concept (it doesn’t depend upon comparing the options of one person to another).
Sen cont’d
Respects Human Diversity—not about just sending resources, but more, what can people do with these resources?
Bicycle…
HDI—Life Expectancy, Adult Literacy & School Enrollment in judging how developed a country is.
What capabilities should be universal? Hard to Operationalize HDI-–but how useful is it?
Dev As Freedom
Should economic development be concerned with increasing the freedom of ppl in developing economics?
Raising incomes is not useful if citizens still suffer from poor health and poor education.
5 Main Human Freedoms
Political
Economic
Social
Transparency guarantees
Protective Security
Comparative overview of Work v. Productivity and Happiness
Increase Freedom to gain more useful skills.
Increasing freedom is more beneficial in the long term.
Forcing productivity has poor performance, e.g., worse efficiency.
The four day work week?
The French (as well as a more European) Approach to Life/Work balance.
Follow uP
According to Sen, what is equally, if not more important than increases wages?
In what way, does Professor Nussbaum describe the relationship between capabilities and human rights? (Section IV) of her article.
Beyond Life and Health, which of her Central Human Capabilities do you find to be the most important? Do you disagree with any of these, or have further recommendations of your own?
Why should international agencies, such as the UNDP measure “quality of life” on capabilities, instead of more traditional measures?