A Research On Amartya Sen’s Economic Ethics Thought

The impoverishment of modern economics due to its distancing from ethics is an importantsubject matter which has been concerned heavily. Human behaviors can be influenced bymorality or ethics. So, it is damage for economics to reject ethical or moral considerationscompletely, which will reduce its value and practical relevance. In recent decades, as a negativeresponse to this impoverishment, some scholars have advocated to restore the relevance of ethicsto economics by some proper way, in other words, to reconstruct the ethical dimension ofeconomics. Amartya Sen, winner of the1998Nobel Prize in economics, is the soul of thisapproach. In recent four decade years, he has led this intellectual cause into a completely newrealm through a series of creative researches.Sen’s researches in this approach, in fact, can be reread or interpreted as a economicethics system. It consists of five parts which are both independent relatively and interrelated.The first part is Sen’s critique of the conception of rationality—especially, theinterpretation of rationality as “self-interest maximization”—held by neo-classical economics,along with his “broad conception of rationality”. According to him, human can have a variety ofmotivations and the practical rationality has the nature of freedom and openness. Can a personnot only behave out of self-interest, but for other goals beyond self-interest, and even makechoice beyond self-goal. So, it is a mistake to try to capture the human rationality by any narrowformula. On the contrary, we should regard human rationality as “reasonable self-scrutiny”widely. This broad conception of rationality is rebellion to the alternative ones held by bothneo-classical economics and contemporary moral or political philosophy. Sen’s another great ideais that there is an interdependence or reciprocity relationship between human rationality and thefreedom enjoyed by him. This idea provides a basis for another significant view point containedin Sen’s famous conception of development: the driving force for development is human agency.The second one is Sen’s critique of three kinds of normative ethics: Utilitarianism, JohnRawls’s justice theory, and the “constraint-right” theory by Robert Nozick.The third part is the framework of normative evaluation, put forward by Sen, which isdifferent from both traditional consequentialism (exemplified by Utilitarianism) and deontology. Sen call it “broad consequentialism”. It has three basic features. First, it takes the so-called“comprehensive outcome” including more information as the right focus of the consequentialevaluation, instead of the so-called “ultimate outcome”. Second, it replaces the conception of“position-independent objectivity” with the “positional” one, and can accommodate all kinds of“agent-relative” value. Third, rejects to take the completeness of value-ranking as a priorrequirement that can be imposed on consequential evaluation, and justifies the admissibility ofthe incompleteness. In Sen’s economical ethics thought, this “broad consequentialism” occupies acentral or “meta-theory” position.The fourth part is Sen’s pluralist theory of the moral values or goodness, in which fourdistinct values are included. They are personal “welfare achievement and freedom”, and “agencyachievement and freedom”. These four values can be related to each other in some complicatedway. Particularly, the concept of “capability” usually used as representation of the “welfarefreedom”, is the cornerstone for Sen’s famous conception of development—development asfreedom.The last one is Sen’s conception of development as freedom or capability. According to it,to enrich the substantial freedom or capability enjoyed by people is the final end and evaluationcriterion. On empirical level, different kinds of freedoms or basic capabilities can casuallycorrelate to each other through necessary institutional arrangements. It means that the essentialdriving force for development is human agency, and the main means are five types of“instrumental freedoms”. With the view point of capability, different problems like famine,poverty, social exclusion, economical inequality and injustice, and different institutions likemarket, public action and democracy, can be assessed in a reasonable way.There are three essential points throughout this system. First, Sen highly stresses theopenness nature of human rationality and proposes to establish an “ethics-related view ofmotivation”. Second, Sen advocates to focus on capability and establish an “ethics-related viewof social achievement”. Third, Sen underlines the significance to take seriously the “interpersonaldependence” and appeals to a practice-oriented economics and ethics.Sen’s system of economic ethics, provides a wide-view framework deserving seriousconsideration to those who try to reestablish the internal relationship between ethics andeconomics, and who try to make critical reflection to contemporary moral or political philosophy.