Sublime

Amartya Sen – work for which he won a Nobel-Memorial prize. The focus of development, Sen argues, should be on ‘advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live’.20 Instead of prioritising metrics like GDP, the aim should be to enlarge people’s capabilities – such as to be healthy, empowered a

Sen is the father of the Capability Approach, a critical contribution to welfare economics which has been hugely influential since the 1980s. Instead of crude financial measures or naive hedonism, Sen argued that the highest good was the freedom to choose a life one has reason to value—to have options, and thus be able to live deliberately.

philosophy

can human beings come to understand their own well-being as linked to that of others, in wider and wider circles, beyond family and tribe?