Development As Freedom

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was one of the most prolific and influential philosophers of the ancient world. A student of Plato, he went on to become an original thinker and renowned teacher in Athens and elsewhere in the Greek world. His works helped set the terms for analysis in fields ranging from physics, ethics, and economics.

Sen draws on Aristotle’s holistic approach to knowledge. Both of them see fields that are now distinct (such as ethics, economics, and political science) as interconnected. Sen approvingly quotes Aristotle’s dictum that wealth is merely a means to the end. At the same time, Sen uses Aristotle’s ideas to demonstrate how Western values have morphed over the centuries. Aristotle viewed women as inferior and enslavement as natural. Though Aristotle valued liberty, he did not have as broad a sense of it as most modern democratic societies.

Modern utilitarian philosophy traces its roots to Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who was an English Enlightenment thinker. The ethical thought of his time sought to apply principles of justice derived from philosophy and competing Christian denominations. Bentham, a skeptic of religion, argued instead for judging actions based purely on their consequences for society and individuals in this world. Calling an action or law good or bad is, in his system, simply a judgment of whether it increased or decreased total “utility”—that is, the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

While Bentham focused on legal and political policy, he also applied his philosophy to social and economic issues related to poverty. Many contemporary theorists continue to argue for versions of utilitarianism to guide development policy (usually with updated definitions of utility based on preference or choice). Sen is sympathetic to Bentham’s social concern and to some of his other ideas, including the importance of judging a policy by its effect on people’s quality of life. Like other earlier and contemporary critics of Bentham’s theories, Sen has concerns about the measurement of utility, the lack of intrinsic human rights, lack of protections for minorities, and the possibility for a utilitarian system that tolerates an unfair level of inequality.

Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) was the founding prime minister (1959-1990) of the modern state of Singapore. Born to a Chinese family and educated in Britain, he entered politics while Singapore was still a crown colony with a local legislature. He founded the People’s Action Party, became leader of the legislature, and guided Singapore through its independence from Britain and then its exit from the Federation of Malaysia. Lee began his career sympathetic to socialism, but he gradually became more centrist and took a firmly anti-communist stance.

Singapore’s economy flourished under his leadership, becoming the second richest country per capita in East Asia. His policies combined industrialization and attracting foreign investment with programs to improve health, education, and other social capital. His government sought to build a culture of hard work, cooperation, austerity, and discipline. This growth, however, came at the cost of creating a mildly authoritarian government that restricted dissent, censored some news media, and curbed civil liberties. Lee’s single party dominated the government for decades.

Lee publicly defended his government’s restriction of civil rights as necessary to achieve Singapore’s extraordinary economic success. He derided critiques as a neo-colonial attempt to impose individualistic Western cultural values on an Asian society that valued community. Sen includes Lee in this book mainly to refute the “Lee thesis” of authoritarian rule as a key to economic development. Sen argues that the same level of success could have occurred in a system that fully respected personal liberty. Sen also rejects Lee’s cultural argument by pointing out that many Asians do in fact embrace democratic values and that Asian religious traditions can support personal liberties over deference to authorities.

Few modern thinkers have had as much influence on the 20th century as Karl Marx (1818–1883), the father of communism. His critique of the exploitation of workers in capitalist systems laid the foundation for an all-encompassing theory of society and history as driven by material concerns. He saw history as a series of cycles in which the rich took the fruits of the labor of the poor until that socio-economic system (such as enslavement or serfdom) collapsed under its own internal contradictions. He theorized that the working class (the proletariat) inevitably would overthrow their oppressors and create a stable, just system, in which all shared the fruits of their labor according to need. Before achieving this utopian communist society, the workers would have to create an intermediate system in which a socialist worker’s political party would run the government. This socialist government would own all means of production (such as factories and farmland) and run them for the benefit of the workers. In the mid-20th century, many colonial subjects embraced versions of Marxist socialism as an ideology justifying their struggle against exploitation by Western nations and as a blueprint for just economic development that would benefit the average worker.

Sen believes in a free market and capitalism (albeit with regulation), so he disagrees with most Marxist thought. He wrote Development as Freedom in the 1990s, when the USSR had collapsed and China had embraced many aspects of capitalism. With the two major communist powers turning their backs on communism, and with continued economic struggles in African, Asian, and Latin American countries that had embraced some form of socialism, Sen could confidently state that pure communist systems had been discredited. For his readers who are still attracted to Marx’s ideas, Sen notes a handful of occasions where Marx made observations that fit Sen’s own views, such as the superiority of selling labor on the free market over enslavement. Sen avoids condemning states (such as China) that incorporate socialist elements or ideas; he simply insists that they be judged according to their people’s freedoms and capabilities.

John Rawls (1921- 2002) was an influential American political philosopher and professor at Harvard (overlapping for several years with Sen’s tenure there). Rawls is best known for his idea of “justice as fairness” which envisions society as made up of fundamentally equal citizens. Any inequalities in the distribution of goods have to be justified on the basis of how this helps society, particularly the least advantaged, and this also cannot reduce another person’s liberty. Race, gender, birth, and other such considerations should have no role in giving a person an advantage over another. Rawls proposes that when a person pictures an ideal society, they do so under a veil of ignorance about who they would be in that society (the “original position”). A proposal would be “fair” only if a person would agree to that society without knowing what gender, race, or social status they would have in it. Liberal political decision-making can happen on a rational basis as people find congruent values, even if they believe in them for different reasons.

Sen finds much to admire in Rawlsian justice and uses him extensively in his consideration of the ethics of development (especially Chapter 3). He particularly approves of Rawls’s practical approach to resolving the diversity of citizen’s value systems and of the focused set of civil rights included in Rawls’s “priority of liberty.” Sen, however, highlights consequentialism (judging an action by its effect rather than its principles) more than Rawls does.