And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political ...

I am most grateful to Elizabeth Anderson (2000), Philip Pettit (2000) and Thomas Scanlon (2000) for making such insightful and penetrating comments on my work and the related literature. I have reason enough to be happy, having been powerfully defended in some respects and engagingly challenged in others. I must also take this opportunity of thanking Martha Nussbaum, for not only chairing the session in which these papers were presented followed by a splendid discussion (which she led), but also for (...) taking the initiative, in the first place, to arrange the session. (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

Amartya Sen; XII*—Plural Utility, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 81, Issue 1, 1 June 1981, Pages 193–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/.

Based on the 1972 Radcliffe Lectures, this book presents a systematic treatment of the conceptual framework as well as the practical problems of measurement of inequality.

Illustrations: 1 B/w Illustration Description: Pranab Kumar Sen, Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University in whose honour this volume has been prepared was one of the leading philosophers of our country and a highly respected teacher. It carries thirty-five articles which deal with different branches of philosophy,viz., philosophical logic, philosophy of language, ontology, theory of knowledge, Kant exegesis, moral philosophy, social philosophy, philosophy of art. As Sen's philosophical interests and expertise were wide the authors had ample freedom in their choice of topics. (...) This volume will be of interest to those who are acquainted with sophisticated literature in analytic philosophy, scholars working in different branches of philosophy and also general readers of modern philosophy. (shrink)

In the summer of 1997, I was asked by a leading Japanese newspaper what I thought was the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century. I found this to be an unusually thought-provoking question, since so many things of gravity have happened over the last hundred years. The European empires, especially the British and French ones that had so dominated the nineteenth century, came to an end. We witnessed two world wars. We saw the rise and fall (...) of fascism and Nazism. The century witnessed the rise of communism, and its fall (as in the former Soviet bloc) or radical transformation (as in China). We also saw a shift from the economic dominance of the West to a new economic balance much more dominated by Japan and East and Southeast Asia. Even though that region is going through some financial and economic problems right now, this is not going to nullify the shift in the balance of the world economy that has occurred over many decades (in the case of Japan, through nearly the entire century). The past hundred years are not lacking in important events. (shrink)

Without denying the importance of the postmodernist approach to the narrative form and rhetorical strategies of historiography, the author, one of Germany's ...

How valuable is the market mechanism for practical morality? What is its moral standing? We can scarcely doubt that as individuals we do value tremendously the opportunity of using markets. Indeed, without access to markets most of us would perish, since we don't typically produce the things that we need to survive. If we could somehow survive without using markets at all, our quality of life would be rather abysmal. It is natural to feel that an institution that is so (...) crucial to our well-being must be valuable. And since moral evaluation can hardly be indifferent to our interests and their fulfillment, it might appear that there is nothing much to discuss here. The market's moral standing “has to be” high. (shrink)

This paper is a revised version of the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Annual Lecture, 2016. It discusses the demands of critical reasoning in ethical arguments, and focuses in particular on the assessment of justice. It disputes the belief that reasoning about choice remains unfinished until an optimal alternative has been identified. A successful closure of a reasoning may identify a maximal alternative, which is not judged to be worse than any other available option. A maximal alternative need not be optimal (...) in the sense of being ‘best’. Critically sound reasoning can lead us to a partial ordering yielding a maximal alternative that is not optimal. The compulsive search for an optimal alternative needlessly limits the reach of reasoning in ethics. (shrink)

What is unique about art genres? In this paper, I will show that genres are best understood as clusters of regulative rules for appreciation. Evaluation, interpretation, and other appreciative responses to a work of art are sensitive to how the work is categorised, and genres are the categories that play a normative role in this context. Genres as rules have social foundations and arise from a speech act that I distinguish from classification and call framing. Based on this account, I (...) will illustrate genre practices as social practices in which we declare and propose rules of appreciation to each other. (shrink)

The concept of business responsibility, usually termed as corporate social responsibility (CSR), originated in the early 1930s after the Wall Street crash of 1929 exposed corporate irresponsibility in large organisations. The understanding of CSR has evolved since then and its scope has now broadened from mere compliance to corporate laws to active alignment of internal business goals with externally set societal aspirations. Unfortunately, the significance of this multidimensional concept within the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector has continued to be (...) overshadowed by its application in large and multinational organisations. More importantly, this has led to the practice of judging SMEs, which are experiencing increasing pressure to engage in social activities, as if they are no different from their larger counterparts. This study therefore investigates CSR from the perspective of SMEs in Australia without any theoretical presumptions and then comments on the relevance and applicability of the two theories that have been commonly used to investigate business responsibility, namely, stakeholder theory (ST) and social capital theory (SCT). The research findings indicate that CSR within the SME sector is more aligned to the fundamentals of SCT, mainly owing to the unique resource and survival challenges that they face, and which are, arguably, not so pronounced in large organisations. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1992, given by Amartya Sen, an Indian philosopher.

One approach to the analysis of ethical dilemmas in medical practice uses the “four principles plus scope” approach. These principles are: respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice, along with concern for their scope of application. However, conflicts between the different principles are commonplace in psychiatric practice, especially in forensic psychiatry, where duties to patients often conflict with duties to third parties such as the public. This article seeks to highlight some of the specific ethical dilemmas encountered in forensic psychiatry: (...) the excessive use of segregation for the protection of others, the ethics of using mechanical restraint when clinically beneficial and the use of physical treatment without consent. We argue that justice, as a principle, should be paramount in forensic psychiatry, and that there is a need for a more specific code of ethics to cover specialised areas of medicine like forensic psychiatry. This code should specify that in cases of conflict between different principles, justice should gain precedence over the other principles. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

I am embarrassed at being placed in the dizzying company of one of the truly great thinkers in the world. The similarities between Mill's ideas and mine partly reflect, of course, his influence on my thinking. But I also discuss some difficulties in taking Mill's whole theory without modification, since there are internal tensions within it. In a paper I published in 1967, I tried to discuss how Mill's willingness to hold on to some contrary positions depended on the nature (...) of his empirical reading of the world. I draw on that diagnosis in commenting on some of the articles here. There are some serious issues of misinterpretation in one of the articles, which I try to clarify. I also comment on Arrow's interpretation of what is involved in the idea of autonomy and on his own way of assessing freedom, and acknowledge the seriousness of the questions he raises about the value of freedom in normative political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that many of Adam Smith’s insights,particularly those in his Theory of moral sentiments, have a relevance tocontemporary thought about economics and ethics that is currentlyunderappreciated. In economics, for example, Smith was concerned notonly with the sufficiency of self-interest at the moment of exchange butalso with the wider moral motivations and institutions required tosupport economic activity in general. In ethics, Smith’s concept of animpartial spectator who is able to view our situation from a criticaldistance has much to contribute (...) to a fuller understanding of therequirements of justice, particularly through an understanding ofimpartiality as going beyond the interests and concerns of a localcontracting group. Smith’s open, realization-focussed and comparativeapproach to evaluation contrasts with what I call the “transcendentalinstitutionalism” popular in contemporary political philosophy andassociated particularly with the work of John Rawls. (shrink)

This paper is about three distinct but interrelated problems: (1) the role 0f rights in moral theory, (2) thc characterization 0f agent relative values and their admissibility in consequ<—:ncc—bascd evaluation, and ( 3) the nature 0f moral evaluation 0f states 0f aihirs.

Journal of Economic Methodology, Volume 19, Issue 2, Page 173-176, June 2012.

Although the following essay does not strictly fall within the discipline of classical Indian philosophy, in which our Journal specializes, we publish it here for two reasons: (1) K. C. Bhattacharya was an outstanding philosopher of India in the past generation, and his thought was deeply influenced by his thorough study of classical Indian Vedanta and Jainism, as well as by the study of Kant (four of our consulting editors were his direct students). (2) His view about the notion of (...) the speakable and philosophy is unique, and it has remained opaque to most of us. Hence some discussion will be illuminating. (shrink)

This paper reports the validation of a 6-item short form of the original 35-item Servant Leadership Behavior Scale, a widely used measure of servant leadership behavior. The holistic perspective of servant leadership and the inclusion of spirituality are two distinctive features of the SLBS relative to other servant leadership measures. Psychometric properties of the SLBS-6 were examined on the basis of seven studies. In the preliminary scale development, the factor structure of the new measure was tested using a combination of (...) all samples. The subsequent seven studies were aimed at building further its construct validity relative to observed variables within the servant leadership nomological network in direct, mediating, and moderating relationships. Analyses of all datasets using MPlus with maximum-likelihood estimation provided support for the 6-item structure and demonstrated its internal consistency reliability, criterion-related validity, and construct validity. As such, the study presents the SLBS-6 as the shortest holistic measure of servant leadership to date that can be used with confidence for research and training purposes. (shrink)

We construct a local \-epistemic hidden-variable model of Bell correlations by a retrocausal adaptation of the originally superdeterministic model given by Brans. In our model, for a pair of particles the joint quantum state \\rangle \) as determined by preparation is epistemic. The model also assigns to the pair of particles a factorisable joint quantum state \\rangle \) which is different from the prepared quantum state \\rangle \) and has an ontic status. The ontic state of a single particle consists (...) of two parts. First, a single particle ontic quantum state \|i\rangle \), where \\) is a 3-space wavepacket and \ is a spin eigenstate of the future measurement setting. Second, a particle position in 3-space \\), which evolves via a de Broglie–Bohm type guidance equation with the 3-space wavepacket \\) acting as a local pilot wave. The joint ontic quantum state \\rangle \) fixes the measurement outcomes deterministically whereas the prepared quantum state \\rangle \) determines the distribution of the \\rangle \)’s over an ensemble. Both \\rangle \) and \\rangle \) evolve via the Schrodinger equation. Our model exactly reproduces the Bell correlations for any pair of measurement settings. We also consider ‘non-equilibrium’ extensions of the model with an arbitrary distribution of hidden variables. We show that, in non-equilibrium, the model generally violates no-signalling constraints while remaining local with respect to both ontology and interaction between particles. We argue that our model shares some structural similarities with the modal class of interpretations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Investor recommendation is a critical and challenging task for startups, which can assist startups in locating suitable investors and enhancing the possibility of obtaining investment. While some efforts have been made for investor recommendation, few of them explore the impact of startups’ features, including partners, rounds, and fields, to investor recommendation performance. Along this line, in this paper, with the help of the heterogeneous information network, we propose a FEatures’ COntribution Measurement approach of startups on investor recommendation, named FECOM. Specifically, (...) we construct the venture capital heterogeneous information network at first. Then, we define six venture capital metapaths to represent the features of startups that we focus on. In this way, we can measure the contribution of startups’ features on the investor recommendation task by validating the recommendation performance based on different metapaths. Finally, we extract four practical rules to assist in further investment tasks by using our proposed FECOM approach. (shrink)