Contributions of Professor Amartya Sen in the Field of Human Rights, The

Abstract

"This paper analyses the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Professor Amartya Sen from the perspective of human rights. It assesses the ways in
which Sen’s research agenda has deepened and expanded human rights discourse in the disciplines of ethics and economics, and examines how his
work has promoted cross-fertilisation and integration on this subject across traditional disciplinary divides. The paper suggests that Sen’s development of a
‘scholarly bridge’ between human rights and economics is an important and innovative contribution that has methodological as well as substantive
importance and that provides a prototype and stimuli for future research. It also establishes that the idea of fundamental freedoms and human rights is itself an
important gateway into understanding the nature, scope and significance of Sen’s research. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of the challenges to be addressed in taking Sen’s contributions in the field of human rights forward."

Sen's contributions can be summarised as follows:



Ethics

• Critique of ethical frameworks with other informational focuses (i.e. utility, formal freedoms and rights/liberty ‘primary goods.’
• Elucidation of a class of fundamental freedoms and human rights (and associated obligations) that focus on the valuable things that people can do
  and be.
• Support for the admissibility of poverty, hunger and starvation as ‘freedom restricting’ conditions.

Economics

• Critique of standard frameworks in theoretical and empirical economics that focus on income
  and utility.
• Development of a ‘freedom-centred’ economics that takes a direct account of valuable things
  that people can and do achieve.
• Support for the intrinsic and instrumental valuation of fundamental freedoms and human rights in economic analysis.