Development as Freedom (61 page)

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Authors: Amartya Sen

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36.
Aside from the imperative need to reject coercive methods, it is also important to promote the
quality
and diversity of noncoercive means of family planning. As things stand, family planning in India is overwhelmingly dominated by female sterilization, even in the southern states. To illustrate, while nearly 40 percent of currently married women aged thirteen to forty-nine in southern India are sterilized, only 14 percent of these women have
ever
used a nonterminal, modern contraception method. Even the
knowledge
of modern methods of family planning other than sterilization is extraordinarily limited in India. Only half of rural married women aged thirteen to forty-nine, for instance, seem to know what a condom or an IUD is. On this see Drèze and Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(1995).

37.
On this see the references cited in Drèze and Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(1995). See also Gita Sen and Carmen Barroso, “After Cairo: Challenges to women’s Organizations.”

38.
On this see Drèze and Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(1995), pp. 168–71.

39.
On this see the demographic and sociological literature cited in Drèze and Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(1995).

40.
On this see my “Population and Reasoned Agency: Food, Fertility and Economic Development,” in Lindahl-Kiessling and Landberg,
Population, Economic Development, and the Environment
(1994); “Population, Delusion, and Reality,”
New York Review of Books
, September 22, 1994; and “Fertility and Coercion” (1996).

Chapter 10:
Culture and Human Rights

1.
Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Practical Reason
(1788), translated by L. W. Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956).

2.
“Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” by Fareed Zakaria,
Foreign Affairs
73 (March/April 1994), p. 113. See also the rebuttal of this position by a pro-democracy Asian leader, Kim Dae Jung, now the president of the Republic of Korea, “Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia’s Anti-Democratic Values—A Response to Lee Kuan Yew,”
Foreign Affairs
73 (1994).

3.
Information Please Almanac 1993
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 213.

4.
On this see Isaiah Berlin,
Four Essays on Liberty
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. xl. This diagnosis has been disputed by Orlando Patterson in
Freedom
, volume 1:
Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
(New York: Basic Books, 1991). His arguments do indeed point to the political freedom in Western classical thought (especially in ancient Greece and Rome), but similar components can also be found in Asian classics, to which Patterson does not give much attention. On this see my Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, “Human Rights and Asian Values” (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1997), published in a shortened form in
The New Republic
, July 14 & 21, 1997.

5.
See
The Analects of Confucius
, translated by Simon Leys (New York: Norton,
1997), and E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks,
The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

6.
See the commentaries of Brooks and Brooks,
The Original Analects
(1998). See also Wm. Theodore de Bary,
Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian Communitarian Perspective
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

7.
Leys,
The Analects of Confucius
14.22, p. 70.

8.
Leys,
The Analects of Confucius
14.3, p. 66.

9.
Leys,
The Analects of Confucius
13.18, p. 63.

10.
Translation in Vincent A. Smith,
Asoka
(Delhi: S. Chand, 1964), pp. 170–1.

11.
On this see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen,
Hunger and Public Action
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 3–4, 123.

12.
Kautilya’s Arthashastra
, translated by R. Shama Sastry, 8th edition (Mysore: Mysore Printing and Publishing House, 1967), p. 47.

13.
See R. P. Kangle,
The Kautilya Arthashastra
(Bombay: University of Bombay, 1972), part 2, chapter 13, section 65, pp. 235–9.

14.
Translation from Vincent A. Smith,
Akbar: The Great Mogul
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 257.

15.
In the analysis here, I draw on a paper I prepared for UNESCO, “Culture and Development: Global Perspectives and Constructive Scepticism,” mimeographed, 1997.

16.
Some scrutiny of the Darwinian concept of progress is provided in my “On the Darwinian View of Progress,”
London Review of Books
14 (November 5, 1992); republished in
Population and Development Review
(1993).

17.
If the crusty old guard is offended at the popularity of MTV, or of Kentucky Fried Chicken, even after people have had a chance to consider the choices, there is not much comfort we can offer to the resenters, but the opportunity of examination and choice is quite a central right that each citizen should have.

18.
From Rabindranath Tagore,
Letters to a Friend
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1928).

19.
On this see my “Our Culture, Their Culture,”
New Republic
, April 1, 1996.

20.
Howard Eves,
An Introduction to the History of Mathematics
, 6th edition (New York: Saunders College Publishing House, 1990), p. 237.

21.
John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty
(1859; republished, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974).

22.
See the letter of Edward Jayne in
The New Republic
, September 8 & 15, 1997; my reply appeared on October 13, 1997.

23.
A quick introduction to this literature can be found in
A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy
, edited by S. Radhakrishnan and C. A. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), in the section “The Heterodox Systems,” pp. 227–346.

24.
English translation from H. P. Shastri,
The Ramayana of Valmiki
(London: Shanti Sadan, 1952), p. 389.

25.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
2.4, 12.

26.
See also Chris Patten,
East and West
(London: Macmillan, 1998).

27.
See Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds.,
On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993
(New York: Basic Books, 1993); Henry Steiner and Philip Alston,
International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics and Morals
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Peter Van Ness, ed.,
Debating Human Rights
(London: Routledge, 1999).

28. See Irene Bloom, J. Paul Martin and Wayne L. Proudfoot, eds.,
Religious Diversity and Human Rights
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

29.
See Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, “Internal Criticism and Indian ‘Rationalist Tradition,’ ” in
Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation
(South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), and Martha Nussbaum,
Cultivating Humanity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

30.
Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds.,
The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Chapter 11:
Social Choice and Individual Behavior

1.
Both the
Nicomachean Ethics
and the
Politics
of Aristotle take up the task of examining the kinds of reasoning that can be sensibly used.

2.
Kenneth Arrow,
Individual Values and Social Choice
(New York: Wiley, 1951; 2d edition, 1963).

3.
See particularly Friedrich Hayek,
Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 96–105, and also the references cited there.

4.
This line of reasoning is more fully presented in my
Collective Choice and Social Welfare
(San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970; republished, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979), and
Choice, Welfare and Measurement
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1982; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982; republished, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), which examine the interpretational issues as well as the constructive possibilities that exist. See also the critical survey of the literature in my “Social Choice Theory,” in K. J. Arrow and M. Intriligator,
Handbook of Mathematical Economics
(Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986), and the references cited there.

5.
I have elaborated this argument further in my Nobel lecture, “The Possibility of Social Choice,”
American Economic Review
89 (1999).

6.
These connections are examined in my presidential address to the American Economic Association, “Rationality and Social Choice,”
American Economic Review
85 (1995). Pioneering attention was focused in this area in the work done by James Buchanan, “Social Choice, Democracy and Free Markets,”
Journal of Political Economy
62 (1954), and “Individual Choice in Voting and the Market,”
Journal of Political Economy
62 (1954). See also Cass Sunstein,
Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

7.
Indeed, technically speaking, even “maximization” does not require a
complete
ordering, since a partial ordering permits us to separate out a “maximal” set of alternatives that are no worse than any of the available options. On the analytics of maximization, see my “Maximization and the Act of Choice,”
Econometrica
65 (July 1997).

8.
Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759; revised edition, 1790), republished, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 184.

9.
Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776), republished, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 26–7.

10.
Smith,
Wealth of Nations
(in the 1976 edition), pp. 453–71. On the interpretation and role of the “invisible hand” in Smith’s reasoning, see Emma Rothschild,
“Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand,”
American Economic Review
84, Papers and Proceedings (May 1994).

11.
See Hayek,
Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
(1967), pp. 96–105.

12.
I have argued elsewhere that there is perhaps more insight in Albert Hirschman’s points about the importance of
intended
consequences that are
not
realized. See my foreword to the twentieth-anniversary edition of his
The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; twentieth-anniversary edition, 1997). See also Judith Tendler,
Good Government in the Tropics
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

13.
On this see my joint book with Jean Drèze,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

14.
On this see Drèze and Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
, chapter 4.

15.
I have discussed the issues involved fairly extensively in
Choice, Welfare and Measurement
(1982; 1997);
On Ethics and Economics
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); and “Maximization and the Act of Choice” (1977).

16.
The classic characterization of the competitive market by Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu and Lionel McKenzie has provided much insight despite the parsimonious nature of its structural assumptions. See Kenneth J. Arrow, “An Extension of the Basic Theorems of Classical Welfare Economics,” in
Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Symposium of Mathematical Statistics
, edited by J. Neyman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); Gerard Debreu,
Theory of Value
(New York: Wiley, 1959); Lionel McKenzie, “On the Existence of General Equilibrium for a Competitive Market,”
Econometrica
27 (1959).

17.
See Hirschman,
The Passions and the Interests
(1977; twentieth-anniversary edition 1997). See also Samuel Brittan,
Capitalism with a Human Face
(Aldershot: Elgar, 1995).

18.
These connections are explored in my essay “Economic Wealth and Moral Sentiments” (Zurich: Bank Hoffman, 1994). See also Samuel Brittan and Alan Hamlin, eds.,
Market Capitalism and Moral Values
(Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995), and
International Business Ethics
, edited by Georges Enderle (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

19.
Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels),
The German Ideology
(1846; English translation, New York: International Publishers, 1947); Richard Henry Tawney,
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
(London: Murray, 1926); Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1930).

20.
A central issue is the importance of what Bruno Frey has called “intrinsic motivation”:
tertium dater
. See his “Tertium Dater: Pricing, Regulating and Intrinsic Motivation,”
Kyklos
45 (1992).

21.
Adam Smith, “History of Astronomy,” in his
Essays on Philosophical Subjects
(London: Cadell & Davies, 1795); republished, edited by W.P.D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 34.

22.
Michio Morishima,
Why Has Japan ‘Succeeded’? Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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