Amartya Sen’s Cohesive View of Development

In this post I will sketch out the conception of justice that Amartya Sen puts forth in his 1999 book Development as Freedom.

Sen makes two overarching and interconnected arguments in Development as Freedom: a philosophical argument, and a practical argument

Philosophical: Human development should be seen as the increase of individual liberty, which is a multifaceted object

Practical: It is important to take into account all the facets of individual liberty when measuring or trying to improve a country’s development

The philosophical argument is a claim about the nature of justice in a society. Individual liberty under Sen’s conception is at its core tied to the opportunities we have. A free person is one who has more options about how to live her life. So being truly free means having a plethora of different kinds of freedoms such as political freedom, economic mobility, health, education, and access to open markets.

Sen sees his view of justice as being distinct from the 3 standard theories of justice (utilitarianism, libertarianism, and Rawlsian liberalism). Utilitarianism does not respect individual liberty except as a means to the end of welfare — Sen rejects this, seeing political rights as being important in themselves and not only as a means to greater human happiness. Libertarianism has the opposite problem, viewing liberty as the end-all and be-all without regard for what the consequences (e.g. the economic consequences) of individual liberty are. And Rawls views certain individual rights as always taking precedence over other types of well-being, while Sen says that it would be better for someone to be well-fed and oppressed than starved and free to vote (though he argues that real instances of these kinds of tradeoffs are rare).

This practical argument says basically that we should not collapse down our view of individual liberty into one metric to be used to compare countries along a linear scale of “how developed they are”. You could try to make such a metric by taking measures of each component of individual liberty (life expectancy, infant mortality, democracy index, GDP per capita, median years of schooling, etc.), assigning each of them weights, and summing them. But to simply try to maximize this metric would be to bake in the assumptions you are making about the relative importance of each of these factors in a manner that is not very transparent. Sen instead says that when making decisions, we should look at how our decision will affect each of the components of individual liberty that we care about, and consciously make any necessary tradeoffs.

I admire the nuance Sen uses when approaching both the philosophy and application of development principles. I understand that, out of a desire to quickly communicate about complex issues, people often use shorthand measurements for development, such as GPD or health indices. But I believe that on balance, discussions around development could use the kind of nuance Sen brings. I’d love to see more economics papers framed within this cohesive view of human development, emphasizing that any one particular developmental metric we look at is only part of the story.