"Do we get enough of a diagnosis of individual in poverty by comparing the individual's income with a socially given poverty-line income? What about the person with an income well above the poverty line who suffers from an expensive illness (requiring, say, kidney dialysis)? Is deprivation not ultimately a lack of opportunity to lead a minimally acceptable life, which can be influenced by a number of considerations, including of course personal income, but also physical and environmental characteristics and other variables...?" That is from Amartya Sen's New Introduction (2017) to the expanded edition of his classic COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE. The original edition of this work is dated 1970. The point Sen is making in that quote is in a sense a trivial one. OF COURSE, you might want to say, the mere numerical fact of an income level, contrasted with some arbitrary poverty-line number does not give us a full picture of the condition of any particular "...
Posts
How "fluid" (to use a currently fashionable term) is my identification as a man? The metaphor of "fluidity" is nowadays used to convey the notion that it is a social construct, not a "solid" fact of biology like a Y chromosome or a penis. But philosopher Julian Baggini wants to expand our vocabulary a bit more. Beyond the contrast of fluid and solid, one can speak of degrees of viscosity. Sexuality and gender, Baggini writes, "have soft edges but they tend to keep their shape."
I think G,K. Chesterton's discussion of that mysterious fence is more clever than wise. Chesterton famously wrote: n the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. It is clever and the point, so far as it goes, is correct. If there really is no better reason for tearing down a fence than one’s inability to understand why it is there, there is no reaso...
In the previous two posts, I've given brief blurbs to each of two distinguished contemporaries in the world of social and political philosophy, Amartya Sen and Alan Thomas. Today I'd like to bring their views in contact with one another. The most obvious point to make is that Thomas identifies himself as, if not a 'Rawlsian' exactly, at least a member of the family. Sen, on the other hand, describes his own views in anti-Rawlsian terms. John Rawls is generally credited with reviving political philosophy in the Anglophonic philosophic world after a long period of neglect. Some say he did more, that he revived substantive moral inquiry itself in that world, after a period in which it had disappeared into meta-ethics. So it seems fitting that nearly half a century later, once should describe two major figures by where they stand vis-a-vis Rawls. Thus, I'm illustrating this post with his visage. Rawls' work mixes teleological and deontological elements. Of...
The Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow died recently (February 21). Let us give his work some thought on his way out of this world. Arrow was best known for the "Arrow Impossibility Theorem," a powerful and very influential argument that given certain assumptions and five (quite reasonable sounding) goals, there is no actual or possible system of voting that will work every time -- that will avoid violating one or more of those goals -- because the conditions themselves are incompatible. Arrow accomplished this result, one regarded every since as foundational to social choice theory and welfare economics, in his Ph.D dissertation in 1950, when he was 31. It might have been tempting to spend the rest of his scholarly career defending and expanding on the terrain of that theorem. But he left that work for others, and many others have stepped in, including Amartya Sen. Arrow moved on, and among much else helped Gerard Debreu develop a rigorous proof of the exist...