Showing papers by "Amartya Sen published in 2005"

Human Rights and Capabilities

Abstract: The two concepts — human rights and capabilities — go well with each other, so long as we do not try to subsume either concept entirely within the territory of the other. There are many human rights that can be seen as rights to particular capabilities. However, human rights to important process freedoms cannot be adequately analysed within the capability framework. Furthermore, both human rights and capabilities have to depend on the process of public reasoning. The methodology of public scrutiny draws on Rawlsian understanding of 'objectivity' in ethics, but the impartiality that is needed cannot be confined within the borders of a nation. Public reasoning without territorial confinement is important for both.

The Argumentative Indian

Abstract: Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 for his contribution in the field of welfare economics. He is Lamont Professor at Harvard. This text forms the opening sections of the first essay in Sen’s book of the same title published in 2005. The sub-title of the book is ‘Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity’. Sen argues in this essay that in India there has been a long tradition of questioning the truth of ideas through discussion and dialogue.

Public Health, Ethics, and Equity

Abstract: Preface Introduction I. HEALTH EQUITY 1. The Concern for Equity in Health 2. Why Health Equity? II. HEALTH, SOCIETY, AND JUSTICE 3. Social Causes of Social Inequalities in Health 4. Why Justice is Good for Our Health: The Social Determinants of Health Inequalities 5. Health Equity and Social Justice III. RESPONSIBILITY FOR HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE 6. Justice, Socioeconomic Status, and Responsibility for Health 7. Relational Conceptions of Justice: Responsibilities for Health Outcomes 8. Just Health Care in a Plurinational Country IV. ETHICAL AND MEASUREMENT PROBLEMS IN HEALTH EVALUATION 9. Disability-adjusted Life Years: A Critical Review 10. Ethical Issues in the Use of Cost Effectiveness Analysis for the Prioritization of Health Care Resources 11. Deciding Whom to Help, Health-Adjusted Life Years, and Disabilities 12. The Value of Living Longer V. EQUITY AND CONFLICTING PERSPECTIVES ON HEALTH EVALUATION 13. Health Achievement and Equity: External and Internal Perspectives 14. Ethics and Experience: An Anthropological Approach to Health Equity 15. Equity of the Ineffable: Cultural and Political Constraints on Ethnomedicine as a Health Problem in Contemporary Tibet

Pathologies of power : health, human rights, and the new war on the poor : with a new preface by the author

Abstract: Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.

Generalizing the generalized Chaplygin gas

Abstract: The generalized Chaplygin gas is characterized by the equation of state $p=\ensuremath{-}A/{\ensuremath{\rho}}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, with $\ensuremath{\alpha}g\ensuremath{-}1$ and $wg\ensuremath{-}1$. We generalize this model to allow for the cases where $\ensuremath{\alpha}l\ensuremath{-}1$ or $wl\ensuremath{-}1$. This generalization leads to three new versions of the generalized Chaplygin gas: an early phantom model in which $w\ensuremath{\ll}\ensuremath{-}1$ at early times and asymptotically approaches $w=\ensuremath{-}1$ at late times, a late phantom model with $w\ensuremath{\approx}\ensuremath{-}1$ at early times and $w\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\infty}$ at late times, and a transient model with $w\ensuremath{\approx}\ensuremath{-}1$ at early times and $w\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$ at late times. We consider these three cases as models for dark energy alone and examine constraints from type Ia supernovae and from the subhorizon growth of density perturbations. The transient Chaplygin gas model provides a possible mechanism to allow for a currently accelerating universe without a future horizon, while some of the early phantom models produce $wl\ensuremath{-}1$ without either past or future singularities.

Why exactly is commitment important for rationality

Abstract: Gary Becker and others have done important work to broaden the content of self interest, but have not departed from seeing rationality in terms of the exclusive pursuit of self-interest. One reason why committed behavior is important is that a person can have good reason to pursue objectives other than self interest maximization (no matter how broadly it is construed). Indeed, one can also follow rules of behavior that go beyond the pursuit of one's own goals, even if the goals include non-self-interested concerns. By living in a society, one develops possible reasons for considering other people's goals as well, which takes one beyond an exclusive concentration on one's own goals, not to mention the single-minded pursuit of one's own self interest. The recognition of other people's goals may be a part of rational thought. If rational behavior may depart from the relentless pursuit of one's own goals, commitment has to be important in a theory of rationality. Furthermore, seeing the role of commitment in human behavior can have explanatory importance in allowing us to understand behavior patterns that are hard to fit into the narrow format of contemporary rational choice theory. Commitment is, thus, important both for practical reason and for causal explanation.

Supernovae constraints on models of dark energy reexamined

Abstract: We use the Type Ia Supernova gold sample data of Riess et al in order to constrain three models of dark energy. We study the Cardassian model, the Dvali-Turner gravity modified model, and the generalized Chaplygin gas model of dark energy--dark matter unification. In our best-fit analysis for these three dark energy proposals we consider the flat model and the nonflat model priors. We also discuss the degeneracy of the models with the XCDM model through the computation of the so-called jerk parameter.

Walsh on Sen after Putnam

Abstract: This note responds to Vivian Walsh's 2003 essay, in this journal, on aspects of my work.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary!

Abstract: It is argued here that Mary Wollstonecraft's pioneering contributions to the social sciences in general and to feminist studies in particular deserve fuller recognition. Her critiques of the leading conventional philosophers of her time, such as Edmund Burke, bring out the distinctive nature of her approach, in which the deprivation of women is linked with other social deprivations, and the roots of social progress are seen not only in legislatitive change but through societal processes involving the expansion and enrichment of basic education and more public engagement on issues of inequality and neglect.

How Does Development Happen

Abstract: This conference would seem to have two purposes. First, we are celebrating the memory of a great economist who was also a personal friend of many of us here--I had the remarkable privilege of having Peter Bauer as a close friend for nearly half a century. Second, we are examining a very central issue in the theory and the practice of development: How does development happen? Happily--and not of course by accident--a good way of addressing that question is to ask what made Peter Bauer such an exceptional economist. How development happens was indeed one of the questions that engaged Peter profoundly, and in many ways, he devoted a large part of his life to clarifying how that question may be answered. I start, however, not with Peter Bauer's intellectual contributions, but with his remarkable character, in particular his self-confidence in sticking to his deep skepticism, his courage in being a lonely voice in expressing disagreement with the then intellectual establishment, and also--no less important--his willingness to try to understand and to respond to arguments on the other side. When I first met Peter during my first undergraduate year in Cambridge, England (it was 50 years ago), Peter was recognized as a challenging thinker but often described around the cloisters as being "way out." He certainly found what we may call "the Cambridge consensus" to be basically wrongheaded. Bauer's Unconventional Views Peter Bauer was convinced that there was (1) an overemphasis on the limitation of resources in the poorer countries, a limitation he thought could be overcome much more easily than the established views tended to assume, (2) an underemphasis on the role of exchange, both in general and domestic trade in particular, and (3) an inadequate recognition of how institutions influenced economic behavior, with profound effects on the economy and the society. It was clear to me--even as a radical student who was on the "left" of the Cambridge consensus and had some other reservations about it--that Peter Bauer stood, through his insights and vision, head and shoulders above all the others who were teaching development economics in Cambridge at that time. I learned, of course, much from Peter's ideas, both in general and in the field of my own work, particularly from the institutional insights in his earliest book, The Rubber Industry, which greatly influenced my Ph.D. thesis on "choice of techniques." But there was also an extraordinarily important lesson that I got from Peter on why one must not be overpowered by what looks like the formidable force of seamless consensus. Peter was quite unusual in his willingness to give a remarkable amount of time to an unknown undergraduate with very different political persuasions and who--we must not forget--was a student at a different college from his own (the gap between Caius College and Trinity was no less important than the political chasm). My conversations with Peter were educational both in terms of economic understanding and in what they taught me about character and behavior, in particular the importance of not allowing oneself to be overawed by established fashions of thought. But Peter was also insistent that one must remain genuinely willing to listen to arguments on the other side and to respond to them with involvement and patience. Dialectical engagement was very important for Peter, not just for the pleasure it gave him (it was always wonderful to see Peter's face light up when he detected a new argument), but he also had a strong belief that this is exactly how we come to understand better the world in which we live (I shall return to that general issue presently, in the context of considering different ways of thinking about "how development occurs"). Many years later, but still more than 45 years ago, I encountered the chairman of today's session, Jim Buchanan, and had a similar sense of rapid learning. …

Indian Traditions & the Western Imagination

Abstract: Daedalus Fall 2005 This essay is concerned with Western images of Indian intellectual traditions and the interactions between those representations and a contemporary “internal” understanding of Indian culture.1 I focus particularly on the elementary diversities that characterize Indian society and its intellectual traditions, as well as on the biases that result from paying inadequate attention to them. In an obvious way, this applies to seeing India as a “mainly Hindu” country (as Western newspapers often describe India, as do the newly powerful Hindu political parties within India); this “mainly Hindu” country is also the third-largest Muslim country in the world (with nearly 110 million Muslims). Less conspicuously, the contrast applies also to Indian intellectual traditions. This home of endless spirituality has perhaps the largest atheistic and materialist literature of all the ancient civilizations. To be sure, this accounting of the amount of unorthodox writing may be a little misleading, since Indian traditions are characterized by some prolixity. For example, the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, which is often compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, is in fact seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. One of the more striking Bengali verses I remember from my childhood is a lamentation about the tragedy of death in a nineteenth-century poem: “Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. / Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to respond.” But even this extreme fondness for speech is associated with an enormous heterogeneity of programs and preoccupations. Irreducible diversity is perhaps the most important feature of Indian intellectual traditions. The self-images (or “internal identities”) of Indians have been extremely afAmartya Sen