Adding links, adding persons, and adding structures: Using Sen's frameworks

Abstract

This essay is a comment on “Sen on Freedom and Gender Justice,” by Mozaffar Qizilbash, which appeared in Feminist Economics Volume 11, Number 3, November 2005.

Building on the 2003 double special issue of Feminist Economics entitled “Amartya Sen's Work and Ideas,” this paper responds to the review essay by Mozaffar Qizilbash. It identifies and illustrates various possible evaluations of a theoretical system, including that it has acknowledged strengths, unrecognized strengths, remediable gaps or failings, or structural faults. The paper then looks at Sen's system as a theoretical basis for “human development”– in particular in relation to personhood, emotions, and psychological interdependence – and argues that it points in directions required for economic and social analysis, including towards theories of care, but is not itself a sufficient treatment. The paper suggests deepening Sen's system by connecting to other important languages of analysis concerning the structuring of attitudes, emotions, felt well-being, public reasoning, and politics.

Keywords:

• Amartya Sen
• theory assessment
• human development
• personhood
• sympathy
• care ethics
• JEL Codes: B59, A12, A13

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Irene van Staveren, Diana Strassmann, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft, and to Thanh-Dam Truong for educating me in care ethics.

Notes

¹ Deirdre McCloskey's The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (2006) constitutes one extended conscious example.

² Duncan Green (2003), for example, treats how neoliberalism in Latin America employed this rhetoric.