Conclusion
From the middle of the 1970s, Sen's exploration of the limits of the welfarist framework began to be fuelled by the results of his research in empirical studies, notably concerning famines but also gender inequalities or the evaluation of development.
Such a statement is not meant to deny that most of his work was devoted to exploring theoretical problems, especially in the fields of social choice theory and moral philosophy, which eventually gave rise to a novel approach to justice. It is rather meant to contest a common view according to which Sen is only a theoretician, whose ideas are difficult to ‘work out' (e.g. Pressman and Summerfield 2002).31 Indeed, we have shown that Sen's approach to justice is clearly political and impregnated with practical sense due to his research dedicated to public action.Sen has been strongly driven by his awareness of his privileged condition in a world with much poverty and inequality as well as by the feeling that he owes something to others (Barsamian 2001:13). His empirical research not
opportunity - think, assess, evaluate, resolve, inspire, agitate, and, through these means reshape the world' (Sen 2013: 7). This implies to have a definition of sustainability broad enough to be enliven by people seen as ‘the ultimate agents of change' (Sen 2013: 9), in the same way that human development has been thought to influence public discussion with broad information on people's lives, and conversely been influenced by the priorities determined by public reasoning.
31 For an overview of the commentators' expectations regarding what is frequently called ‘operationalization' and Sen's position on this issue, see Baujard and Gilardone (2017). Like in the present chapter, but through another perspective, it is shown that Sen's contribution to the theory of justice should not be remembered for having provided a capability theory, but for something very different: a theory of human agency and public reasoning.
only persuaded him that it would be irrelevant to tackle those crucial issues directly without paying sufficient attention to the role of theorization but confirmed that public action against injustice cannot be decided from some ‘privileged ground’ (Dreze and Sen 1989: 61). It does not entail that theorists have no role to play in the setting of public action. On the contrary, ‘a discriminating economic analysis... can have a significant informative and activist role’ (Sen 1987: 16).While he declined numerous invitations to advise the Indian government, he considers it a part of social scientists’ task to choose important subjects to work on and develop analysis that can serve public debate and put governments under pressure. It seems that for him, advising governments directly without public approbation would be counterproductive. Public understanding and appropriation of economists’ results is a necessary stage in social choices. Through this strategy, Sen’s work eventually had a major effect on politics. In particular, his work on the causes of famine changed public perception by showing that hunger is not caused by a failure in food supply, but by a decrease of people’s ability to buy food. His analysis of inequality and poverty translated into the United Nations’ Human Development Index and other similar gender-related indexes has also been very influential, providing an authoritative international source of welfare comparisons between countries, competing against the simple measure of GNP. Above all, Sen’s analysis of the male-female conflict coupled with the cooperative aspects of family life urges us to make room for the perceptions underlying ideas of obligation and legitimacy in the formulation of the gender inequality problem - and more generally in the formulation of any inequality problem. When it clearly appears that one group systematically receives a lower share of the benefits of cooperation than another, there is good reason to examine the value system that implicitly leads to such unequal cooperative outcome.
And in this respect, defining the so-called right informational basis for welfare evaluation like the welfarist tradition proposes would not be very helpful.Sen’s strong support for values such as personal freedom, democracy and pluralism led him to challenge welfarism by introducing the concepts of agency, public reasoning and incompleteness. In Sen’s non- welfarist approach to social justice, not only do economists need to broaden their informational basis and use multidimensional criteria, but they also need to give up their ‘expert’ posture or paternalist views. Relevant consequential evaluations are important, but they must be preceded and followed by adequate democratic processes. Beyond mere participation, people need to be involved in identifying the problems that matter and defining public action for addressing them. All Sen's contributions to applied economic problems support the view that the economist's role is not to provide precise evaluations of how justice will be advanced or hindered. He sees the economist's role as being to offer an objective - even if potentially incomplete - basis for public reasoning in defining policy strategy and different types of public action to improve living conditions. For each empirical problem he has tackled, Sen elaborated a specific theoretical framework in order to give the most objective picture of it given his observations of people's experiences and understanding of the situation. He formulated the entitlement approach, and then the capability approach, to analyse problems of hunger and poverty. He formulated the cooperative conflict approach for distribution problems within the family, and a mixture of indexes inspired by the capability approach and explicit discussion of the value judgements for different evaluations in development studies. In this way, his work aims to inform and enlighten public action in a broad sense. Not only does Sen claim that state policy has to be supplemented by public involvement in a way that is both ‘collaborative' and ‘adversarial', but he also defends the idea that public understanding of common perception biases is key for a removal of injustices that relies on changes of behaviours and social norms, as well as institutional arrangements.