There is a close relationship between public understanding and awareness, on the one hand, and the nature, forms and vigour of state action in pursuit of public goals, on the other.

... public enlightenment may, thus, have the role of both drawing attention to problems that may otherwise be neglected, and of precipitat­ing remedial action on the part of governments faced with critical pressure....

Dreze and Sen (1989: 19)

Amartya Sen is well known for highlighting the failures of the standard framework of welfare economics, in particular what he has called ‘welfar­ism’ (Sen 1977,1979), which can be broadly interpreted as the focus on one kind of predefined information (Baujard and Gilardone 2020). His work has greatly contributed to making normative economics and political philosophy evolve in a direction which takes seriously persons’ agency (see for instance Peter 2003; Burchardt 2009; Crocker and Robeyns 2010; Alkire 2010; Davis 2012). In contrast to most of these articles, we will neither study Sen’s interest in agency strictly in relation to his capability approach¹ nor argue that personal agency shall be understood as a notion of individual advantage. Our view is rather that Sen’s increasing focus on agency is a means to acknowledge theoretically: (1) people’s ‘ability to reason, appraise, choose, participate and act’ rather than viewing them only in terms of their needs (Sen 2009:250); and (2) the basic human abilities ‘to understand, to sympathize, to argue’ rather than viewing them as ‘doomed to isolated lives without communication and collaboration’ (Sen 2009: 415). The scope is thus different from a mere widening of the informational base for appreciating personal situations within a social state^[149] because it takes us on the territory of the procedural aspects of injustice removal.^[150] If we were to consider the views of critics, such as Ben Fine (2004: 101) who has argued that ‘the social, the contextual and the empirical’ clashes absolutely with ‘the individual, the formal and the a priori’ that character­izes the reasoning within social choice theory, such a perspective would be surprising.

Before making these points, it is important to recall that Sen’s non- welfarist perspective has gradually been clarified within a debate between welfare economists and political philosophers that started in the late 1960s. Arrow’s (1950) pessimistic result regarding the possibility of a democratic social choice from a set of individual ordinal preferences had a profound impact. For instance, it led some authors to propose a return to utilitarian­ism (Harsanyi 1955), others to develop an ideal but anti-utilitarian theory of justice (Rawls 1971) and others to oppose a libertarian and process- oriented approach to justice instead of a consequentialist construction of welfare (Nozick 1974). Under the influence of all these contributions, Sen (1970, 1977, 1979) began to question the standard assumptions of social choice theory, that is, the search for Pareto optimality and completeness,

the avoidance of interpersonal comparisons and value judgements, the exclusive focus on utility information however that is defined and the absence of considerations of justice. His long-running attempt to reformu­late the latest embodiment of welfare economics ultimately resulted in the proposal of a novel theory of justice.

Although it was not Sen's purpose from the outset, his mature writings on justice (Sen 2009, 2012) clearly assume, and indeed claim, a ‘social choice' approach to justice against a ‘social contract' approach that char­acterizes mainstream theories of justice, including in the first place that of Rawls.⁴ Sen above all opposes the idea that the principal task of a theory of justice is the characterization of ‘just institutions' (2012: 103). He defines his own alternative approach through three main departures from the social contract theories (2012: 103): (1) ‘the identification of clear cases of injustice on which agreement could emerge on the basis of reasoning' (e.g., slavery, famines, chronic undernourishment, preventable epidemics, etc.); (2) the examination of ‘the nature of lives that people are actually able to lead', with a special attention to their ‘quality of lives and freedom' viewed as ‘social realizations'; and (3) including in the search of ‘reasoned agreement' the views of ‘people from anywhere in the world', making reasoning on ‘global justice' possible (e.g.

Sen stated very early that welfare economics is concerned with policy recommendations (1970: 56). Although he has been particularly shy about

For an exploration of the theoretical debate between the two philosophers and the progressive modification of Sen's theoretical ambition, see Gilardone (2015).

being involved in governments, he did not remain confined to Universities and accepted working for international organizations - principally for the ILO^[151] and later for the UNDP.^[152] In those organizations, his recommenda­tions were directly concerned not so much with state policy as with some changes of focus to better understand extreme poverty and persistent inequalities, and thus with new types of reasoning to address these prob­lems and provide fuel for public discussion regarding appropriate action. Sen strongly believes that ‘public action is neither just a matter of state activity, nor an issue of acting from some “privileged ground”’ (Dreze and Sen 1989: 61).

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