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A quote from Amartya Sen

 


Amartya Sen, an economist/philosopher, was born in November 1933 and he is still with us. He may be the single most important philosopher alive. 

One of his works is COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE. Or, perhaps, you might count this as two of his works.  The first book of that title was published in 1970, then a much expanded and re-written version appeared in 2017.

I'd like today to quote a bit from the 2017 edition, in which Sen is with some sympathy discussing the work of John Rawls.  He says (this is a footnote):

A half-jocular, half-serious objection to the criteria of fairness of Rawls and others often runs like this: Why confine placing oneself in the position of other human beings only, why not other animals also? Is the biological line so sharply drawn? What this line of attack misses is the fact that Rawls is crystallizing a rule of fairness that our value system does seem to have, rather than constructing a rule of fairness in vacuum based on notions of biological symmetry.  Revolutions do take place demanding equitable treatment of human beings in a manner they do not demanding equality for animals. "If I were in his shoes" is relevant to moral argument in a manner that "if I were in his paws" is not. Our ethical system may have had, as is sometimes claimed, a biological origin, but what is involved here is the use of these systems and not a manufacture of it on some kind of a biological logic.  The jest half of the objection is, thus, more interesting than the serious half.


I will just leave this here for now and perhaps come back to it tomorrow. 

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