Andy Blunden on Sen's 'critical voice'

Andy Blunden, an Australian Marxist, published a book titled 'Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky' last year which has a chapter on Sen.  

I suppose, if Blunden had taken up William Lawvere's category theoretical representation of the Hegelian dialectic, suitably updated by notions of 'naturality' as emergent on a specific type of 'learning', then- if Sen was actually saying anything substantive- what follows would be worthwhile. But Sen is entirely vacuous. Blunden has wasted his time. 

Amartya Sen on well-being, critical voice and social choice theory

The Critique of Distributive Justice

The problem of inequality, and the exclusion of a large proportion of the world’s population from a share of enjoyment of the world’s products and a share in deciding how the world’s products should be distributed, is as great a problem today as it has ever been.

However, this problem pales into insignificance compared to the exclusion of a large proportion of sentient beings in the Universe from a share of enjoyment in internet porn. No doubt, Andy could point to a time when the Australian aborigine wasn't excluded from nice banquets at the Court of King Arthur. The Denisovans were constantly being sent a share of the wealth accumulated by Neanderthals. Then, because of evil Capitalist bastards, suddenly starving beggars were excluded from acquiring a controlling interest in Microsoft or Amazon. 

However, movements for distributive justice have been demobilised and even marginalised.

Voters thought they were childish and stupid.  

Movements for cultural recognition, which have been most prominent in recent decades, seem no longer able to speak to the problems of the most downtrodden sections of the world.

Because they were childish and stupid. 

A new paradigm of justice centred around concepts of democracy and freedom seems to be emerging but the relation between a number of very different paradigms remains unclear.

This was a false dawn. The more the West banged on about Democracy and Human Rights the more evil and stupid shit it did to innocent Muslims in far away countries.  

Amartya Sen is a development economist

he may have started out that way. But the 'Sen-Dobb' thesis was stupid shit. You have to raise real wages for peasants and proles to raise their productivity. Otherwise there is no 'surplus' which can be confiscated to invest in the capital-goods sector. Obviously, you could just starve people and use forced labour till people drop dead. But they might kill you instead.  

who has been conducting a relentless ‘internal criticism’ of concepts of distributive justice and equality over the past thirty years.

He has been babbling nonsense. This is funny because he is a brown monkey.  

Whilst retaining the form of a distributive theory, he has successively interrogated what it is which ought to be distributed more equally, to a point where the content is now closer to that of the politics of recognition, than to that of a traditional theory of distributive justice.

Sen's contribution is to say 'we must do nothing till we have consulted impartial observers from other galaxies.' This is cool if you sit on a UN Committee of some sort.  

As a youngster in Bengal in 1943, Amartya Sen

who was from East Bengal which experienced its last big famine in 1974. Both famines were caused by Democracy.  

witnessed India’s last famine, during which two to three million people died. He also witnessed the sectarian murder of a poor Muslim labourer, who had been forced to risk death by seeking work in a Hindu area.

Unless he had been sent to spy out the land for the Muslim majority who soon slaughtered all the Hindus and took their property. 

Although Sen has lived most of his life in Britain and the U.S.,

he eloped with his best friend's wife. For this reason, he moved to the UK 

he has never been away from India for longer than six months, and there is no doubt that the problems and achievements of independent India have been the central concern of his life.

He was part and parcel of a citation cartel of useless Bengali economists whom the country was glad to export. Punjabi economists- like Manmohan, Minhas and Montek were welcome to stay because they genuinely wanted the country to get richer and stronger. 

Sen was a PhD student at Cambridge when Kenneth Arrow published his famous theorem on ‘social choice’ theory in 1951.

No. He was an undergrad in Calcutta.  

Sen has remained fascinated with this highly mathematical theory ever since.

It is nonsense not mathematics.  

His academic supervisors at Trinity College, Cambridge however ‒ Joan Robinson and Maurice Dobbs ‒ were not so ‘excited’ by this theory,

There was no theory. It was just the voter's paradox. Everybody already knew there can't be a perfect voting rule. Dummett & Farquharson, being Civil Rights or anti-Apartheid activists, wanted to see if maybe a voting scheme which safeguarded minorities could be discovered. They came close to proving something like the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem which is equivalent to Arrow. But Indians already knew that monkeying about with voting rules- which is what happened in the Twenties and Thirties- exacerbates the underlying problem. You improve Social Choice when you make Society more cohesive. Chichilnisky has a useful result in this respect. This involves making ordinary people more productive and getting rid of 'wedge issues' or 'multiple dimensions' in decision spaces so you don't get 'agenda control' or concurrency problems. This raises the pay-off for cooperation and promotes non-coercive correlated equilibria.  

and Sen wrote his PhD thesis, Choice of Techniques, on the alternative paths of development open to the newly independent former colonies.

As Mirlees pointed out, it was confused shite- though mercifully concise- and theoretically underpowered. Perhaps it motivated Sen's turning away from 'Development' to a faux mathsy Utilitarianism and his giving up on extractive Marxist models. Still, at this time, he was seen in India as an orthodox camp-follower of Mahalanobis. The Sen-Dobb thesis was that you should fuck over the poor so as to squeeze 'surplus' out of them which you then then transfer to the Capital Goods sector. This was extremely silly. India needed to raise real wages to raise productivity. Also, in a poor but democratic country, only budgets matter. You choose the technique which enables you to earn a profit quickly. The Government must put precious foreign exchange into those industries where there is a quick turn-around so more foreign exchange comes flooding in. This means concentrate on agriculture and 'wage goods' (textiles, bicycles, etc) where India has comparative advantage and economies of scale. Sen was utterly useless. He and his best friend wrote a paper saying in effect  'if you are hired to do Project Appraisal, just write whatever the people funding the thing want you to write. The whole thing is a sham.'  But this was already obvious. Then Sen ran away with this best friend's wife. 

In this work, completed in only twelve months, Sen advocated that former colonies should use their relatively low labour costs to promote basic health care and literacy, rather than pursuing rapid industrialisation through capital investment.

Nonsense! Sen knew that 'basic health care and literacy' can only be promoted if guys with a bit of education are prepared to live in rural shitholes. In Kerala this was possible. But teachers and Doctors aren't constantly being raped or kidnapped in Kerala. 

Rapid industrialisation is only possible if your industries aren't shitty. They must produce things which lots of people want to buy. Also, you need to be able to export so as to import raw materials and technology. This means you need competition so as to raise quality and lower prices. Economists should be told to fuck off. Only entrepreneurs and arbitrageurs can play a useful role. Sen took the hint and fucked off. After his father died, he started babbling ignorant nonsense about how the Bengal famine was created by factory worker who decided to eat five times as much rice as they usually did so as to have the pleasure of watching rural folk starve to death. 

All his subsequent work has continued to focus on these, his “old obsessions,”

he thriftily recycles his old lecture notes. He is also very economical with the truth. 

and his other abiding concerns: inequality, the emancipation of women, and democratic government.

Sadly, he has not been able to prevent equality rising or women rising or democratic governance improving in India.  

Sen claims: In line with the importance I attach to the role of public discussion as a vehicle for social change and economic progress ... I have, throughout my life, avoided giving advice to the ‘authorities.’ Indeed, I have never counselled any government, preferring to place my suggestions and critiques ‒ for what they are worth ‒ in the public domain. 

Bardhan says he and Sen met with Left Front leaders and gave them advise. Still, it is true that nobody wanted Sen's vacuous shite. Indira only put his pal, Sukhomoy, on the Planning Commission because he was a rubber stamp for corruption.  

By contrast, Punjabi economists were useful. Manmohan was a two term Prime Minister. It is ridiculous that Sen thinks he is part of some 'public discussion' in India. 

I consider Sen’s expressed position to be a misrecognition of the actual positioning of his
theoretical interventions.

They look a bit Left-liberal but are just bureaucratic bullshit. 

In this article, I argue that there is a theoretical tension in Sen’s work, reflected in the ambiguity of delivering advice to government via the public domain, speaking both from the standpoint of social movements and, hypothetically so to speak, from the standpoint of
government, a tension between ethical principles which corresponds to two different subject positions.

No ambiguity is involved in saying 'you are an evil piece of shit, Manmohan, because you are trying to make India an economic superpower without first sending every poor person to Harley street to be treated for any diseases they may have. After that, you should ensure they get PhD from Cambridge. How can poor women like Mamta ever rise up if they haven't got even MPhil in Development Studies from Cambridge? Incidentally, I have met Rahul Baba. He isn't stupid at all.' 

This ambiguity is shown, for example, in Sen’s contradictory positions in relation to social choice theory,

he thinks it can fit an Arrow-Debreu framework- i.e. no Knightian Uncertainty obtains. But the only reason we have 'capabilities'- i.e. potentialities- is because we evolve on an uncertain fitness landscape. 

in his concept of ‘comprehensive outcome’ in which process is included as part of outcome,

nothing wrong in that.  A process is an outcome. It is like an 'intermediate good'. Competition can make it better and cheaper.

in his attempt to introduce agency into the utilitarian conception of the person

where it already exists 

and an element of consequentialism into otherwise deontological libertarian ethics.

You can have a duty of care, as is the case in Tort law, such that third party consequences must be taken into account.  

I think Sen’s ambiguous subject position reflects the contradictory subject positions inherent in a social justice movement which has become the government,

in which case it is a political movement which now has the duty of governance. Either it does sensible things and continues to govern or things turn to shit.  

and in that sense, is an ambiguity with a thoroughly objective and progressive basis.

No ambiguity is involved in scolding people.  

I will return to the question of ‘social choice’ theory and Sen’s subject position later. The first issue on which I want to focus is his conception of social justice and human needs.

Human Needs and Social Justice

Wealth

After a period of work on social choice theory, urged by his wife to involve himself in more ‘practical issues’, in 1973 Sen wrote On Economic Inequality.

This makes no sense. 'Practical issues' had to do with making Land Reform more effective, reducing bonded labour through Cooperative Banking, etc, or, from the 'macro' perspective, seeking to improve Trade or Fiscal policy.  

This work focused entirely on real income as the measure of advantage and well-being, examining problems like the setting of the ‘poverty line’ and measuring degrees of poverty and inequality. Sen’s idea here was that if a society was to make a decision about the degree of inequality it would tolerate, then it needed a suitable, agreed measure of inequality.

Sen was wrong. People were fine with an 'absolute' poverty line which became the basis for eligibility for means-tested benefits. They didn't want 'equality' at all.  

In using real income as the measure of well-being, Sen was only doing what everyone else in the field was doing, and in most cases still is doing. Indeed, there can be no escaping the fact that, in societies where most goods are acquired through the market, real income is indeed a good first approximation to social welfare and the freedom a person has in determining their own life.

If you include imputed elements for housing etc, sure.  

Sen had taught with John Rawls at Harvard from 1970, and partly in response to the debate over what constituted the ‘basic goods’ a person needed in order to participate in democratic social life (which Rawls had conceived in terms of basic human needs), Sen set out to more closely investigate the nature of what people really need by way of ‘basic goods’. (The debate between Sen and Rawls led to both writers further developing their conceptions.)

Those conceptions were shit. Their students voted for Thatcher and Reagan and made lots of money in private equity. A Revolution might be cool coz you'd meet this hot chick and the sex would be amazing and then the Bastille would be blown up and Mummy would repent her saying you didn't have the personality to make it big in Dry Cleaning store management the way your big-shot cousin has done. 

Functioning

This led to the seminal paper published in 1980 entitled Equality of What? in which Sen put forward the concept of ‘functioning’. The commodities over which a person had command were, after all, only a means to an end, and that end was a level of functioning in life, being able to live the kind of life that one values.

But functionings and capabilities too are merely means to an end as are having values or living. If Evolution is a true theory. The purpose of genes is the survival and spread of those genes according to the extended phenotype principle. 

This ‘functioning’ was subject to objective measurement as well: life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, morbidity, political participation and so on.

But these were measured for other reasons. Actuaries and Medical professionals and Political strategists have 'Structural Causal Models' which can be improved on the basis of high quality information of this sort. Sen-tentious buffoons aren't adding any value here. 

An example of the indicators to which this approach draws attention was the statistic that the average life expectancy of a resident of a poor neighbourhood in New York was less than that of a citizen of Bangladesh, despite the fact that not only incomes, but real incomes, were many times higher in Harlem than in Dhaka.

This statistic was false. The life expectancy for Bengalis was and is higher in Harlem than Dacca because the US is richer and has much better medical care. On the other hand, Bangladeshi gangsters and drug addicts had lower life expectancy than African American males at least partly because of 'three strikes'- i.e. a larger proportion of the relevant population was incarcerated.

Sen frequently uses the well-being of someone with a disability to illustrate the point that what someone can achieve with a given amount of wealth, depends on certain conditions, and any measure of inequality has to take these ‘conversion factors’ into account, focusing on outcomes rather than means.

No statistical measure of inequality need bother provided such disabilities are randomly distributed.  Moreover, things like good looks, charm, wit, sexual ability etc. may not be fully captured by higher earnings. It makes sense to have collective insurance for disability though there will be a moral hazard. It does not make sense to get people to pay higher taxes because they claim to be gorgeous hunks who are irresistible to women. Why? The answer is because everybody, including me, secretly believes they are gorgeous hunks. Moreover, you can always say to the tax-man, 'you are so gorgeous, I look like a troll compared to you. Thus you should shoulder the entire tax burden.' 

On the other hand, Sen doesn't like it when people say to him 'even getting the Nobel prize leaves you one of the most disadvantaged people in the world because you have a fucking horrible personality.' I think that is why he refused my generous offer of a bursary to attend the Institute of Socioproctology. 

Further, even though we value real income as a means to overcome challenges, a person who spends money in order to fend off the dangers of rampant crime and endemic disease, is obviously less well-off than a person who enjoys good public health and security, and has no need for such expenditure.

We gain utility by acting prudently so as to preserve 'functionings'. Thus eating healthy, learning martial arts, and getting vaccinated against various diseases, makes you feel better about yourself even if you never have to use your skills to beat up assailants.  

Thus, the perspective of functionings also brings into account the benefits a person receives from public goods, not just private labour and the market.

No it doesn't. Sen can't put a value to the benefit received by anyone from the existence of the Army. Voters may, however, decide that they don't want to pay for forever wars. Social Choice is best done by guys who want value for their tax dollars.

Capability

However, on closer inspection, the measure of functionings misses an important dimension of wellbeing, namely freedom.

No it doesn't. Freedom is a 'functioning'.  

When Gandhi chose to fast,

he was exercising the same type of functioning as guys who fast for religious reasons 

he was clearly not suffering the same level of deprivation as someone starving as a result of poverty, because although Gandhi had the opportunity to eat, he chose to use his freedom to not eat.

These stupid cunts don't get that Gandhi fasted because the Prophet Muhammad had fasted.  

Sen may have also had in mind comparisons between India and China: even though, overall, China had far surpassed India in its achievements in overcoming illiteracy, ill-health and hunger, this had been achieved at the cost of choice.

No. China started to rise when it gave its people more choice than sclerotic, Socialist, India. They responded by working hard, saving money, starting all types of enterprises and laughing heartily when nutters and fanatics were shot or 're-educated'.  

Thus, the real measure of well-being had to be not the actual functioning which a person exercised, but capability ‒ the set of functionings from which one can choose.

Very true. My functioning is poor because I keep choosing the wrong lottery ticket number even though I have the capability to randomly hit on the right combination. Thus, though functionally I'm as poor as fuck, nevertheless, from a capabilities point of view, I'm a billionaire.

So for example, the university graduate who is serving tables has an unmistakable advantage over their uneducated colleague,

Nope. The cunt had his chance and blew it. He has massive student debt and people make fun of him. His 'uneducated colleague' may be chosen for the management program because he is 17 years old and not as thick as shit. 

for they have a choice,

had a choice. Once people know you wasted four years at Collidge and are now a fucking waiter, they treat you like a cretin. 

just as the adventurer who suffers exposure while mountain climbing is obviously more advantaged than the slum-dweller who freezes out of necessity.

Fuck off! The slum-dweller can go to the Mall or ride the buses and get warm. The adventurer freezes to death and his body is discovered a couple of years later by Yetis. They thaw out his body and then commit necrophilia upon it. They also post a hilarious video of their doing so on Youtube. The slum-dweller has become rich by employing graduate students to wait tables at bar mitzvahs so as scare middle class kids straight. Posing as a radical on Campus may get you laid for a year or two. But it means a lifetime of drudgery. 

How to measure capability? Sen’s relentless concern with measurement, even when the problem appears insoluble, is a great strength.

Measuring your dick won't make it bigger. Getting hotties to do it might- but only up to a point.  

Measurement is integral to all conceptions of distributive justice and social choice, and Sen never tires of subjecting the most intractable concepts to quantification and ranking.

His methodology is simple. Suppose poverty has declined greatly. You say it has increased greatly. Then you imply that all the other economists are evil bastards. Also, neo-liberalism is very evil.  

There are two basic approaches to measurement of capability. On one hand, the functioning which a person chooses from those available to them can be taken, ipso facto, to be the most valued functioning, and therefore a measure of the value of the capability set from which it was eventually chosen. However, a person may choose a functioning for all sorts of reasons (for example, a person may choose to give up their freedom in order to care for a sick friend, but this hardly proves that such a life is their favoured choice).

They are not giving up any freedom. It is merely the case that their choice has an opportunity cost.  

Consequently, capability needs to be measured as a set according to the whole range of functionings it contains.

Which is why every guy who buys a lottery ticket becomes a millionaire.  

This is a challenging technical task of course, but conceptually it is clear enough: well-being is properly measured neither by wealth (which is but a means to an end) nor by functioning (which fails to reflect the valued choices which have been forgone) but by capability.

But well being itself is merely a means to an end viz. reproductive success. There is a trade-off between the two. It is likely that the poor will demographically replace the affluent. This may be one reason why affluent countries showed higher time preference on environmental issues. If you are unlikely to have grand or great-grand children, the Price equation says you will have a lower commitment to future generations. 

Measuring wealth is worthwhile. Smart people get paid to do it. But smart people don't do Sen-tentious shite because it easier just to lie. 

It is these concepts (functioning and capability) for which Sen is most famous,

they are completely empty. Nobody knows what their own capabilities are. Let alone those of anybody else. 

but in the late 1990s, driven perhaps by his critique of utilitarianism and a growing conviction that women’s emancipation is the central issue in development,

which was realized by everybody else a hundred years previously. Incidentally, Beveridge of the Beveridge Report, had a Mum who came to India to teach Indian women so as to catalyse development. She soon came to hate the Bengalis and was a fanatical opponent of the Ilbert Bill because she didn't want 'native' magistrates passing sentences on White women.  

Sen took this determination of human needs two steps further.

both were vacuous bullshit 

Voice

Sen’s central critique of utilitarianism is that by reducing human motivation to the maximisation of a person’s utility (however defined), utilitarianism effectively eliminates agency.

How? The agent does the maximizing by choosing.  

The capacity of a person to choose to do one thing and not another Sen saw as an essential ingredient of well-being. But so long as choice was confined to selection between options determined by others‒ so long as a person’s capability set was determined by social arrangements in which one had no say ‒ then there is no real freedom.

Nor is there any real unfreedom. There is nothing save an arbitrary assertion. So long as Sen has no alternative but to eat dog turds, because I say insist that this is the case, Sen eats only dog turds.  

In Development as Freedom (1999), Sen further determined advantage from wealth to functioning to capability to voice:

... the general enhancement of political and civil freedoms is central to the process of
development itself.

There is no evidence of this whatsoever. When Bangladesh gained democracy and a free press it pursued Socialist policies and experienced a big famine. Development can occur under dictatorships who do sensible things and it can fail to occur under liberal democracies which do stupid shit. 

Economic freedoms can speed development. Political freedoms tend to reduce it because they lead to more laws restricting what people can do with their property. The more laws, the more there is corruption.  

The relevant freedoms include the liberty of acting as citizens who matter and whose voices count, rather than living as well-fed, well-clothed and well entertained vassals.

The only relevant freedom is that of watching Sen eat dog turds because otherwise we are just 'well-clothed' vassals. The problem with ipse dixit pronouncements is that, with equal truth, anyone can make them.  

The instrumental role of democracy and human rights, important as it
undoubtedly is, has to be distinguished from its constitutive importance. (Sen, 1999, p. 288)

In which case we must also distinguish the instrumental role of Sen eating dog shit from its constitutive importance.  

In India: Development as Participation (2002), Sen shows that women’s well-being, fertility and child survival all depend on

whether her family has money and access to good medical care.  

women’s agency (which I am taking as synonymous with ‘voice’ at this point)

didn't matter at all. Ceylon gave women the vote 14 years before France. Swiss women only gained the vote in Federal elections in 1971. But French and Swiss women had far better health care and outcomes than Indian or Sri Lankan women.  

including access to employment, women’s literacy and property rights ‒ independently of the overall level of opulence, industrialisation or literacy.

This simply wasn't true. It didn't matter if women had zero voice. All that mattered was that if there was an incentive to look after their health and prevent them from having babies like crazy, then they were better off even if they didn't have the vote or, as in contemporary Japan, faced a much harsher 'glass ceiling' than Indian women.  

This advantage shows up, for example, in gender differences in child survival and longevity. Women’s voice (as for example in the Indian state of Kerala where there is a long tradition of women’s education and property rights) proved more effective in lowering fertility than China’s one-child policy, and more effective in increasing longevity than the greater wealth and industrialisation of northern India.

Kerala was a remittance economy which also exported nurses. Poverty meant the luxury of 'purdah' had to be dispensed with. More recently, rising affluence means female participation is falling. Part of the problem is Kerala's reputation as a Communist bastion. Tamil Nadu has much higher female participation because there is much more manufacturing industry. Babbling on about woman's agency is utterly useless. Either there is a profitable way to exploit female labour power or they are left to fend for themselves. On the other hand, it is true that if women come into the streets to protest against rape, then rape stops occurring. The same is true of protests against War, Poverty, the Law of Gravity and the fact that Sen eats only dog turds. 

With Development as Freedom (1999), Sen moved from including freedom as instrumental to well-being,

economic freedom may be. Political freedom may not.  

to seeing freedom as an essential ingredient of well-being,

one may see a cat as a hat but it will try to scratch you if you try to wear it on your head. One can promote the well-being of prisoners or the criminally insane. Some people may be better off if you release them from captivity. Some others may die quickly and horribly as a result.  

to conceiving of well-being as freedom:

Sadly, there is no relationship between the two. One may as well conceive of beauty as well-being as freedom as truth as the dog turd Sen eagerly devours when nobody is looking.  

freedom to lead a life that one has reason to value,

you don't need a reason to value anything nor do you need to place any value on reason. True, if you teach stupid shite, you may be obliged to pretend otherwise.  

including both positive freedom (real opportunities) and negative freedom (freedom from constraints and interference), actualised as achievement.

Bullshitting is an achievement, Sen deserves a Nobel. No Chinese economist has got a Nobel. But it is China which is the great economic miracle of the last 30 years. Incidentally, it is run by an actual Communist party.  Marx said 'to each according to his contribution'. Ensure folks get a chance to make a bigger contribution- i.e. raise their productivity and transfer earnings- and you get development. You may get certain freedoms but not others. It depends on what people do with them.  

In Sen (2002), he shows how those sections of society which have more than their fair share of voice in the determination of government priorities

which, in India, is those who represent the rural poor 

(men rather than women,

unless they are the widow of the last PM and the mother of the Dynastic heir 

city people rather than rural people,

in China, maybe. In India, city people are screwed.  

the middle classes, the military elite) enjoy capability sets larger than others, because they are able to see to it that social arrangements are geared to meeting their needs and providing them with opportunities.

So what? All that matters is whether they use their power to get extra resources in which case their 'endowment' or 'budget set' changes. The 'capabilities set' is irrelevant.  

While voice is therefore instrumental in the formation of real freedom,

Voice isn't instrumental. It is the threat of Exit or the decrease in 'Loyalty' which matters. But the 'real freedom' is captured by a change in the endowment set. Thus if raging mobs force the Government to lower taxes or increase subsidies, then endowments or 'budget sets' have changed.  But this may only be possible in the short run. 

it is also constitutive of freedom, an achievement, an end in itself.

Freedom is a means to an end. We would like to be free of disease, death and the threat of destitution. Nobody wants the freedom to be fucking miserable.  

We thus have a fourth concept in the series of determination of human needs: wealth (or opulence), functioning (or real living standards),

which is just the use of wealth or 'endowment'

capability (or real opportunity)

ditto  

and voice ‒ the say that someone has in determining the social arrangements to which they are subject.

Which changes endowment. 

However the most important thing is 'Breath' because without taking breath, you can't exercise voice or capability or functioning. 

The fact is the only thing which matters is reproductive success. Wealth and Voice and so forth are only valuable in relation to it. 

Sen’s observation that no people which has had the vote has ever suffered from famine, aptly illustrates the point.

Bangladeshis voted overwhelmingly for Mujib in 1973. The following year a million or two of those voters were dead.  Had there been no democracy, America would have fed the Bangladeshis. It was stupid of Mujib to export jute to Cuba when the Americans were already pissed off with Muslim 'sand-niggers' and were talking of their 'food weapon' to counter the Arabs' 'oil weapon'. 

Critical Voice

In India: Development as Participation (2002), Sen goes one step further

though everybody else had taken that step twenty years previously 

as a result of his study of ‘son preference’. Son preference is the tendency of people in certain cultures to prefer a son to a daughter, resorting to abortion of female foetuses or simply neglecting the health of young girls. As a result of these practices, India and China are each ‘missing’ about 40 million women in their current populations. Sen observed that this tendency not only increases with industrialisation and rising real incomes, but increased even in those societies where women had a voice. Even educated women and women who have full control over the decision whether or not to abort a female foetus, may be active participants in exercising son-preference because they share their husband’s preference for a son.

Killing male foetuses is very good and holy. Abortion is only wrong if female foetuses are involved.  

This type of gender inequality [son preference] cannot be removed, at least in the short run, by the enhancement of women’s empowerment and agency, since that agency is itself an integral part of the cause of natality inequality.

I think Feminists would say that if women were indoctrinated properly they wouldn't permits any dicks on any body anywhere.  

The fact remains that 'agency' doesn't mean anything other than the ability to act according to one's preferences. 

This recognition demands an important modification ‒ and indeed an extension ‒ of our understanding of the role of women’s agency in eliminating gender inequality in India.

It has none. Either their productivity rises in which case they can do more to fulfil their preferences, or else nothing changes. It appears that participation rate falls as Income rises in India save where there are reasonably well-paid manufacturing or service sector jobs. Kerala doesn't have as much manufacturing as Tamil Nadu and has fallen behind. The Hill States tend to have higher participation and this may reflect lower returns to domestic services. 

The enhancement of women’s agency

only occurred if their productivity went up. If you can do more, you may be said to have more agency. But women as wives or daughters may have very good health and welfare outcomes even if they are behind purdah.  

which does so much to eliminate sex differentials in mortality rates (and also in reducing fertility and mortality rates in general)

This is foolish. If men do better so do women and vice versa. Banging on about gender and development doesn't actually help anybody.  

cannot be expected, on its own, to produce a similar elimination of sex differentials at birth and abortion, and correspondingly in the population of children.

Because it can't be expected to do anything. One may as well speak of 'soul force' as 'agency'.  

What is needed is not merely freedom and power to act, but also freedom and power to question and reassess the prevailing norms and values.

Which you can have without any fucking power to act. True, in Collidge, you may have to sit through lectures about how you should question prevailing norms and thus become amenable to sucking off your Professor, but only losers stay on for Graduate Studies in bullshit.  

The pivotal issue is critical agency.

Because plain or garden variety agency just aint pivotal enough- right?  

Strengthening women’s agency will not, by itself, solve the problem of ‘son preference’ when that works through the desires of the mothers themselves. 

It won't achieve shit- unless you have this really powerful Employment Agency which gets them great jobs.  

... the agency of women is effective in promoting those goals which women tend to value.

Substitute ability or power or strength or productivity for 'agency' and all you have said is women do stuff they value if they can.  

When those values are distorted by centuries of inequality, for example yielding the
perception that boys are to be welcomed more than girls,

That has nothing to do with 'values'. It was simply the case that some families benefited more from children with specific traits. This was an economic matter.  

then the empowerment of women can go hand in hand with persistent inequality and discrimination in some fields, in particular ‘boy preference’ in births (with possibly brutal results in the form of sex-specific abortions).

Ordinary abortions are cool. Only if a female is being aborted does brutality arise. 

Indeed, the agency of women can never be adequately free if traditionally
discriminatory values remain unexamined and unscrutinised.

But examination and scrutiny has zero effect. Still, it is undoubtedly the case that the agency of homosexuals can never be adequately free till Sen takes it up the arse in between devouring dog poo.  

While values may be culturally influenced (we have provided some evidence corroborating this presumption), it is possible to overcome the barriers of inequality imposed by tradition through greater freedom to question, doubt, and ‒ if convinced ‒ reject.

Everyone already has that right. We prefer it if they do the questioning, doubting etc, silently. Sen himself may not have done enough self-questioning to come out of the closet as a dog poo eater.  

An adequate realisation of women’s agency relates not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess. Critical agency is a great ally of development. (Sen, 2002, p. 274.)

Twenty years later, it is obvious that Sen was wrong. Girls in Kabul may have the freedom to question and reassess things in the privacy of the zenana. But their 'critical agency' is utterly useless because the  Taliban won the war.  

To reflect the fact that recognition as an equal participant in the social and political life of a society still leaves the person trapped within dominant customs, beliefs and modes of living, which for example, may include misrecognition of their personality or unjust constraints on their activity, Sen introduced the term ‘critical voice’.

Thus, if Rishi Sunak- who has been recognized as an equal participant in British social and political life- uses 'critical voice' to demand that voters stop thinking he is a rich twit with zero political skills, he might actually win the next election.

The problem here is that a voice which says stupid shit is ignored by everybody except stupid shitheads. On the other hand, saying sensible things can get you power to do sensible things which in turn can give you yet more power to hire sensible people to say and do sensible things. 

This concept of critical voice is thus the fifth in a series of determinations of advantage: wealth, functioning, capability, voice and finally, critical voice.

But only wealth matters and even then only if sensible things for its conservations are being done. We don't listen to a spendthrift who is burning through his inheritance. We do listen to a guy who started with nothing and has built up a great fortune.  

Critical voice is the capacity of a person living ‘inside’ a society to form views available from a position ‘outside’ that society:

It helps to suffer from a mental illness or to have studied stupid shite at Collidge to develop such views.  

... virtually every society tends to have dissenters, and even the most repressive
fundamentalist regimes can ‒ and typically do ‒ have dissenters .... Even if the perspective of the dissenters is influenced by their reading of foreign authors, the viewpoints and critical perspectives of these members are still ‘internal’ to the society. (Sen, 2002)

Sadly, they tend to be completely crazy.  Smart peeps keep quiet and go to where they can do sensible things and thus grow rich.   

Critical agency refers “not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess.” The answer to the question Sen asked in 1980 ‒ Equality of what? ‒ seems increasingly to be ‘critical voice’. This does not imply that the demand for equality of critical voice necessarily has traction as a normative demand, any more than does equality of wealth. But ‘critical voice’ does more truly determine the essence of human need and is the true measure of inequality in a society.

If you are a nutter and think that 'critical voice' will cause people to question why they don't themselves incessantly suck off hobos the way God intended then you will think true equality and true liberty and true social welfare will only be achieved when 'dissenters' get us to question why the Jews are disguising themselves as the Illuminati who are disguising themselves as my neighbour's cat? Think about it for a second. Why would the Jews- whom everybody knows are actually Jesuits in disguise- go to all this trouble? The answer is obvious. If you look carefully at Da Vinci's 'Last supper' you will see that Judas is actually sucking off a homeless dude so as to turn into a Dracula. That's right! The semen of hobos is the elixir of immortality long sought by the alchemists! The true measure of inequality in a society is entirely a function of fellatio.  

Critical voice is both instrumental, in that it is needed in order to sustain the other elements of well-being, and constitutive, in that only the person with critical voice is truly free.

More particularly if he is being tortured in a prison cell. However, compared to critical voice, sucking off hobos is far more instrumental and constitutive.  

That which is the means to well-being, not just apparently, but essentially, comes to be an end in itself, constituent of well-being.

Only by arbitrary assertion. One could say the same thing about sucking off hobos.  

Thus, for example, while education is valued initially for its contribution to job-seeking, over time it comes to be valued for itself.

It may be that rent-boys becoming habituated to their profession and value being sodomized as something good in itself. In the case of education, I suppose there are some people who, after having made their pile, return to Uni purely from love of arcane studies. But the same may be true of fellatio.  

Conversely, that which is formally the end, can only be real to the extent that it is supported by appropriate means. Thus, for example, even though everyone in a parliamentary democracy formally has an equal voice, without an adequate capability set, without an adequate functioning and wealth, this right is no more than formal.

No. We notice that some people who speak well and who say smart and sensible things can end up running the country. Look at Modi. Then look at Rahul. He may be the hereditary leader of the oldest national party but he is a moron. 

So it is not just a question of Sen having ‘changed his mind’, and abandoned an economic
conception of well-being and a paradigm of distributive justice in favour of a political conception of justice and a recognition paradigm.

He stopped even pretending to do Econ long ago. 

Each step in the further determination of well-being both overcomes and maintains the previous determination, including it within a yet deeper determination.

Those determinations were meaningless.  

Thus advantage conferred by command over commodities is by no means done away with in the determination of well-being in terms of critical voice ‒ witness the influence exerted in academia, the media and the legislature by big business!

Witness the ability of cretins in all three to extort money from big business- or even crazy peeps with enough cash to buy crazy books on Amazon.  

The capability to choose the functioning of one’s own choice retains functioning as the substance of well-being.

In which case the capability to choose the farting of one's own farts retains farting as the substance of well-being. 

The voice needed to secure an adequate capability for oneself is actualised only in the enjoyment of that capability.

The fart needed to secure an adequate fart for oneself is actualized only in the enjoyment of that fart.  

And conversely, voice can only be exercised to the extent that a person enjoys a wide capability set, of which the exercise of voice turns out to be the essential component.

Farts can only be farted to the extent that a person can fart. The exercise of farting turns out to be an essential component of farting.  

Critical voice is the truth of voice:

Smelly farts are the truth of farts- though loud ones can be very funny

critical voice can exist only in and through voice,

smelly farts can only exist in and through farts 

but voice proves to be of little value unless it is critical.

but farts prove of little value unless they are smelly if your intention is to stink out the place. Otherwise a loud fart, even if it is appreciative rather than critical, can be very useful. 

Sen’s critical examination of distributive justice took the form of

running off with his best friend's wife. In life, you have to actively redistribute stuff you want so you end up having it  

asking himself the question:

“Equality of what?”

He was originally going to talk about 'Equality of how?' All his fellow Professors kept saying how great it would be if equality obtained. Sen's genius was to see if all how questions were equal then by proving how great it would be if everybody was rich you would be considered truly great because you would also have shown how everybody could be rich. 

But ‘critical voice’ is surely the key claim of the politics of recognition.

Till everybody recognizes that only lunatics bother to talk that stripe of bollocks. 

In arriving at a determination of well-being which is appropriate to the subject position of the representative of a social movement who demands to be heard, Sen retains his concern for the consequences of policy for the majority and for the need to critically weigh the preferences and wellbeing of all citizens, irrespective of their social position ‒ an ethical concern appropriate for the representative of a democratic government.

Only if that is what voters want. But it would be foolish for them to want their representatives to listen to nutters. Approach the courts or get Scientists or other smart peeps to endorse your views and then you might a hearing. Thus, when I approach my MP to ask him to help me establish my claim to the Kingdom of Iyerland he doesn't tell me I'm a cretin because, for all he knows, I sway the votes of my fellow Iyers. Instead, he gives me the name of some Irish barristers who could advise me on how best to pursue my claim. 

Although it is not spelt out at this stage, it appears that Sen has arrived, by means of a successive critique of egalitarianism, at an ethic which places recognition within a paradigm of distributive justice.

No. The guy is a verbose babu who babbles the sort of vacuous virtue signalling shite failed bureaucrats go in for.  

Utilitarianism and Positivism

In the light of this reconstruction of Sen’s theoretical journey, we can understand why, as Sen became the dominant current of ‘welfare economics’,

because it was dead.  

utilitarianism became Sen’s nemesis

it was his starting point. The Tagores were Benthamites back in the 1820s. Utilitarianism was pretty much the official ideology of the Raj- or so a book by Eric Stokes published in 1959 suggested. The Planning Commission was supposed to be the omniscient Benthamite planner. Project appraisal and Cost Benefit Analysis was supposed to be the bread and butter of the economist. The enemy was the lawyer and the judge both of whom were believed to be on the side of private enterprise.

and the subject of a sustained critique over several decades. Sen’s critical relationship to utilitarianism is quite complex however, and can only be understood in relation to how utilitarianism has changed in parallel with economic science, in response to positivist criticism.

Getting rid of 'interpersonal comparisons' such that you need to take money away from the rich coz they don't really enjoy it very much. 

Utilitarianism is political economy translated into the language of ethics. Utilitarianism originated with the ‘first positivism’ of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, the positivism of law-governed social progress. Accordingly, Bentham

who was almost 50 years older than Comte 

formulated the principle of Utilitarianism effectively as an apology for political economy, identifying capital accumulation with social progress.

Not really. Bentham was more like Count Rumford- i.e. a guy a nobleman might hire to increase the profitability of his vast estates.  

As Sen points out, the early literature of utilitarianism is replete with careful distinctions
between economic and ethical value, but such declarations cannot detract from the factual affinity between utilitarianism and political economy.

Because politics is about choosing between 'mixed' statements in which there is both an imperative and an alethic element.

For example, the definition John Stuart Mill gives of ‘utility’ in Utilitarianism (1861) is entirely consistent with the definition he gives in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), and in the chapter on exchange, he demonstrates that every act of free-market exchange increases the sum of utility, thus establishing the fundamental principle of utilitarianism as a law of political economy.

What matters is if useful things are produced. Free market exchange does not by itself produce utility. Mill understood that if you restructured your portfolio because you suddenly needed to be more liquid, then no new utility would necessarily be created. Indeed, the transaction could be reversed by prior arrangement so as to avoid stamp duty. We might say that there was utility from reduced risk exposure, but that was not the common view at that time.   

It might be observed that since a dollar makes more difference to a pauper than to a millionaire, it necessarily follows that utilitarianism demands greater and greater inequality of wealth (See Sen, 1973 p. 19.), but this is, after all, nothing but what is required by the laws of political economy.

No. The millionaire might give the pauper a couple of quid and feel happy at the thought of the joy he was bringing that drunken oaf. 

The laws of political economy. regardless of regime, are based on the same  basic laws. If everybody is allowed to take anything they wanted on the plea that they would enjoy it more, then there would be no fucking economy to talk about.  

In the late 1860s, a new wave of positivism, the positivism of anti-metaphysics, began within political economy itself, giving rise to the marginal revolution in economics and ultimately the Mach/Einstein revolution in physics. The ‘second positivism’ banished the concept of ‘value’ from economic science, confining economics to the phenomenon of price.

Nonsense! The notion of 'diminishing returns' gives you convexity which in turns means you can apply calculus which in turns means price is where marginal utility equals marginal cost. All that is left is to calculate elasticities and define economic rent  You can now prove the two fundamental theorems of welfare econ. In Germany, Gossen had given a good mathsy description of this by about 1854.  

I suppose one could say that 'utility' sounded like 'Truth' or 'Beauty' and maybe that was metaphysical but one could just call it 'Ophelimity' or profit and let money stand as its proxy.

The result was a significant narrowing of the conception of welfare to real income.

Indeed. The notion that you need to 'tithe' and go to Church once a week in order to be saved was dying out.  

This was the state of Utilitarianism at the time of the Great Depression when the absurdity of the criterion of the sum-of-utility became starkly obvious.

No. The absurdity of 'interpersonal comparisons' became apparent. The Nazi could say Jews get utility by being robbed and killed. They may think they don't want to be robbed and killed but that's because they are really really stupid- like that Einstein bloke everybody talks about. 

The illusion that the sum-of-wealth could form a valid criterion for welfare economics could not now be harboured even by the most hardened and cynical apologist of capitalism.

Sure it could- provided they got paid a little money. But the Cowles Commission had been set up to get mathsy guys to figure out a way to reflate the economy without scaring the straights. What was needed was something like Kennedy's notion of the Full Employment Budget Surplus. That sounded fiscally responsible and not 'Socialist' at all.  

John Maynard Keynes (1936) proved the fallacy of the theory of marginal utility as a macroeconomic theory and the inadequacy of utilitarianism, as it then was, as the basis for welfare economics.

No. He merely said that Hitler had the right idea. Reflate the economy. Increasing spending could cause tax revenue to rise so the deficit eliminates itself. Roosevelt was too cautious while the Brits, because of their vast Empire, were fixated on maintaining the value of the pound.  

Strange as it would seem, the reaction of utilitarianism in abandoning the interpersonal
sum-of-utility, was to take, not an egalitarian turn, but in effect the completely opposite direction.

Because utility is just a fancy word for money. You can tax those who have it and if you spend the money sensibly, those who have it will have more of it so you can get more tax revenue. The idea is simple. The Government can provide 'club goods' which make everybody better off. People pay more for better quality services. There is a virtuous circle.  

Rather than querying the sum-of-utility as a criterion of the good, the ‘third positivism’, Logical Positivism, denied the very legitimacy of interpersonal comparison of utility ‒ it was declared ‘unscientific’ to suggest that the well-being of one person could be greater or less than that of any other person.

No. It was merely that the thing was arbitrary.  

Economic science overcame the challenge of Logical Positivism by drawing on a mathematical apparatus named after Vilfredo Pareto. This new economic science eschewed reference to utility,

Pareto used the ophelimity 

basing itself exclusively on acts of exchange and choice. In logical positivist terms, ‘utility’ can only be defined in terms of each agent’s preference ranking as objectively manifested in the choices they make.

Revealed Preference referred to what could be inferred fromstatistical data, of the type big corporations used, to figure out their demand schedule. 

The crucial concept here is the ‘Pareto optimum’ ‒ that state of the market where there is no possible exchange, deemed by both parties to be beneficial, which remains to be executed. By this move, a new utilitarianism is established in which the good is a Pareto optimum rather than the sum of utilities. The Pareto optimum could be a universal famine, so long as no mutually beneficial exchange is left unmade. No-one has anything that anyone else wants. It is ‘the best of all possible worlds’ for a Logical Positivist Pangloss.

Nope. It is merely what would obtain if there was perfect information and zero transaction costs, no 'market power', etc, etc.  

If I could coin a term, I think Kenneth Arrow’s economics, together with his contributions to complexity theory and social-choice theory marks the beginning of a ‘fourth positivism’ based on the concepts of information and communication science. And the contemporary form of utilitarianism is what we call neo-liberalism or ‘economic rationalism’. It is self-evident that this ethic is as different from the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham as the economics of Kenneth Arrow is different from that of David Ricardo.

Arrow Debreu ignores Knightian Uncertainty. It is a Platonism whose general equilibrium solutions are in a time class exponential to our lifetime as a species. 

‘Critique of Utilitarianism’ therefore has to be seen in this sense: criticism which traces the outlines of the development of political economy is what could be called ‘internal criticism’, whilst only criticism which pits itself as much against political economy as against its ethical expression, could be called ‘external criticism’. In Sen, we find both kinds of criticism of utilitarianism mixed up together.

Because he was a mixed up guy. I'd say Sen was an 'insider' who did a lot of the heavy lifting back in the Sixties and Seventies. What he didn't have was a political position. Was he for or against the Left Front in Bengal? We don't know. He was critical of Manmohan- but Manmohan was Punjabi. Does he like Mamta? Probably not but it might be safer to keep that under his hat.  

Utilitarianism and the Real Ethic of Bourgeois Society

There are of course more varieties of utilitarianism than there are species of song bird. However, I believe that the above sketch illustrates the essential development of utilitarianism, reflecting the development of bourgeois science.

Proletarian science was about chucking potatoes at the moon till one of them became a Sputnik.  

Utilitarianism expresses the real ethic of participants in political economic discourse. Preferences are accepted uncritically as ‘externals’. ‘Real’ means: within the
bounds of the ‘assumptions’ of political economy.

 No. Utilitarianism is either virtue signalling or some type of 'Effective Altruism' type fraud.  

There are however at least three distinct subject positions from which the ethics of the market can be viewed: (i) that of the economic agent (obeying the law, keeping promises, telling the truth, etc.), (ii) that of a government (regulating market outcomes and legislating), and (iii) that of a participant in a social movement, who could be critical of the very existence of political economy.

And of the Jews. I notice that anti-Semitism is reviving around the globe. Before you do crazy shit, you may as well get rid of smart people.  

Utilitarianism is an ethic of type (i). Historically, utilitarians have been very prominent in
advising governments, of course, but this is simply evidence of the capacity of political economy to manage government rather than the reverse.

Governments should be managing Professors by giving them regular enemas and making them attend mandatory Sexual Harassment training courses.  

Egalitarianism, as an ethical determination of the activity of the market regulator,

who will be disintermediated if not corrupted 

is an ethic of type (ii). A democratic government, which recognises the equal moral worth of all its citizens, must at least to some extent, be

a theocracy. It is only our souls which make us equal- right?  

egalitarian.

Egalitarianism has a history as well, perhaps most succinctly summed up in Marx’s 1844 three stage schema: primitive or crude communism, political communism ‒ ‘democratic or despotic’, and humanism as the transcendence of private property.

Because everybody will very cheerfully all cram themselves into the same set of underpants. 

The egalitarianism of our age is an democratic/electoral egalitarianism, and accordingly, Sen formulates the problem for egalitarianism in terms of social-choice theory.

No he doesn't. He says silly things like you can't have 'minimal liberalism' because everybody must have a preference about what brand of toothpaste you buy.  

At whatever historical juncture, the ethical dispute between egalitarianism and utilitarianism is a struggle between two different subject positions. Utilitarianism is at best indifferent to equality,

whereas Marxism is for brutal dictatorship and very much greater inequality 

but its significance comes from the fact that utilitarianism informs us about the ‘real’ ethic of the market.

No. People in the market don't know shit about utilitarianism. Only some stupid academics do.  

The interest that egalitarianism has in utilitarianism is that utilitarianism describes the conditions which egalitarianism aims to overcome.

By screaming loudly and shitting itself.  

It is from this point of view that egalitarianism is interested in the ‘internal’ criticism of utilitarianism.

Rawls was an internal critic. Sen wasn't. He had no theory. He just thought everybody should just do on doing public discussion and listening to impartial spectators from other galaxies.  

The same issue confronts those who address themselves to the ecological and social fall-out from the market.

Is Andy thinking of 'Carbon taxes'? That failed.  

With these clarifications, let us look at Sen’s explicit criticism of Utilitarianism.

Sen’s Criticism of Utilitarianism

Sen’s most crucial criticism of utilitarianism as a moral philosophy is its failure to recognise human agency.

It is Sen who doesn't recognize it.  

There are two aspects of a person, he says: their agency (the person as ‘actor’) and their wellbeing (the person as ‘patient’). Utilitarianism ‘simplifies’ this conception by assuming that a person’s agency always functions simply to maximise the patient’s well-being (or ‘utility’).

No it doesn't. Utilitarianism says a principal can delegate stuff to an agent. The person with agency may be contractually bound to make good choices for the principal or 'patient'.  

Consequently, agency and utility are reduced to the same thing, since the person is ‘obliged’ to do whatever is objectively necessary to maximise their utility

or that of the person of whom they are the agent. 

. By the converse argument of the third positivism, utility is by definition whatever it is that a person is maximising by their choices. Utilitarianism thus fails to distinguish between the ‘well-being aspect’ and the ‘agency aspect’ of a person,

just as everybody fails to distinguish between the 'about to fart' and 'has just farted' aspect of someone far away. This is because the thing is irrelevant. On the other hand, if you are close to a person 'exercising agency' in a reckless manner, you may do something to make them stop just as you might tell a person who is coming towards you with the intention of farting in your face to keep the fuck away. 

employing an impoverished conception of the person, lacking in subjectivity and any capacity for moral conflict

 By not recognizing the farting aspect of the person, philosophers have gravely impoverished their conception of personhood. 

‒ I would say, an unethical person. If for example, a person chooses to act in accordance with a moral imperative, they may do so at cost to their own comfort and happiness, but for utilitarianism, this is a contradiction in terms: doing the right thing is just something that this agent chooses.  

A perfectly reasonable view if you think doing the right thing involves doing the sensible thing rather than stupid shit. True, some people take great pleasure in doing stupid shit. That is up to them.  

Part of Sen’s program therefore is to introduce agency, or ‘freedom’, into utilitarianism. This can be done for example, by taking freedom as a distinct component of well-being over and above utility.

Only if farting can be taken as a distinct component of freedom. Yet, why should it be. We understand that some people may resign from prestigious positions in the Diplomatic Corps in order to devote themselves to farting noisily. This gives them pleasure. They exercise 'agency' or 'freedom' to live in the manner they consider best for themselves.  

Thus, the expansion of functioning to capability allows the agency of a person to be taken into account.

like farts, agency was already taken for granted. 

Whether this works is another question. however. Could economic science rely on the principle of agents acting to maximise their own capability?

Absent Knightian Uncertainty, sure. Why not? Capability is just their budget set.  

As an improvement of egalitarianism it makes sense, and it certainly makes sense as a critique from the standpoint of a social movement, but it is doubtful that it can be realised as an improvement of political economy.

Political economy is useless. There is Macro and there is the mathematical theory of Finance but nobody knows or cares about Marxist shit. 

To suppose otherwise is like the ‘triple bottom line’ movement,

i.e. corporate social responsibility 

which seems to believe that the subjective intentions of individual economic agents determine the course of the economy, and that measuring what a company does will determine what that company and its competitors will do.

Whereas it is actually some philosopher in some shitty campus whose 'Political Economy' will cause all the rich peeps to fuck off and die so that everybody can fit into the same pair of underpants. 

Drawing on Sen’s introduction to Utilitarianism and Beyond (1999), we can summarise his
criticism of utilitarianism as follows.

Utilitarianism as a moral principle can be seen to be a combination of three more elementary requirements: (1) Welfarism, requiring that the goodness of a state of affairs be a function only of the utility information regarding that state; (2) Sum-ranking, requiring that utility information regarding any state be assessed by looking only at the sum-total of all the utilities in that state; (3) Consequentialism, requiring that every choice, whether of actions, institutions, motivations, rules, etc., be ultimately determined by the goodness of the consequent state of affairs. (Sen, 1998 p 39)

But such information is not available. Thus there is no moral principle corresponding to Utilitarianism. Similarly, 'Magicism' requires identifying those who can transform the Earth into Paradise and then motivating them to do so by emitting magical farts. Sadly, this can't be an 'action-guiding' principle because we don't know who has the relevant magical powers. Indeed, the very notion may not be 'compossible' with reality. In the case of relevant utility functions, we know they are not 'accessible' or computable or suffer 'concurrency problems' such that they have no unique or non-arbitrary representation.  

As explained above, I do not accept (2) as essential to utilitarianism, since sum-ranking applies exclusively to the utilitarianism of the first and second positivisms.

This is like saying you don't accept 'Magicism' since you don't accept that magical farts are the best motivators.  

The Pareto theoretic, in my view, retained the essential features of utilitarianism whilst disposing of the sum-total, and Sen at times supports this view as well:

Because of the Szpilrajn theorem 

If interpersonal comparisons of utility are dropped, but nevertheless utility is regarded as the only thing of intrinsic value, then Pareto optimality would be the natural surviving criterion, since it carries the utilitarian logic as far forward as possible without actually making any interpersonal comparisons of utility. (Sen, 1998 p. 38)

But to get to the Pareto front you need arbitrageurs who are good at making interpersonal comparisons. They are thus able to buy cheaply from one guy and turn a profit by selling dearly to another guy who got higher utility from the thing.  

Though Sen also refers to this move as ‘post-utilitarian’:

This particular tradition has been carried into the post-utilitarian phase of welfare

economics, concentrating on Pareto optimality and efficiency. (Sen, 1998 p. 49)

Sen actually proposes a “return to a more full-blooded utilitarian conception” of “interpersonal comparisons of utility” because, rightly in my view, he does not accept that interpersonal comparisons of well-being or advantage are in-principle ruled out.

They can be done arbitrarily by some bunch of virtue signallers sitting on a committee.  

I think Sen’s work on functioning provides an objective measure of well-being and his argument that partial ordering presents no barrier to objectivity are entirely convincing.

Not if you come from India. Nutters like him were on the Planning Commission and fucked us up but good.  

Taken together, I think these considerations dispense with the logical positivist ban on interpersonal comparison of well-being.

Brown monkey from a shithole country says you should fuck up your own affluent country. This other brown monkey says 'please don't. Us darkies will get it in the neck first if Western economies implode.'  

Sen points to three key problems in transcending utilitarianism:

[1] First, we have to distinguish between the ‘well-being aspect’ and the ‘agency aspect’ of a person.

No we don't save in the case of people lacking mental competency- e.g. Professors of shit subjects 

[2] Second, the utilitarian conception provides a defective (and systematically biased) view of well-being ...

It does not provide any view of it. Utility means well-being just as much as it means ophelimity. The thing is a Tarskian primitive.  

a very inadequate reflection of value ‒ indeed even of what the person himself or herself actually values, not to mention what he or she would value on serious and courageous reflection, freed from the limitations imposed by unfavourable circumstances.

What these guys students decided they valued after 'serious and courageous reflection' was that they had wasted their time taking these lectures.  

 

[3] Third, a person’s freedom can be seen as being valuable in addition to his
or her achievements.

More especially if they are in jail.  

A person’s options and opportunities can be seen as counting in a
normative evaluation, in addition to what the person ends up achieving or securing.

This is an arbitrary type of double-counting.  

[2] above refers in part to the fact that people may ‘accustom’ themselves to poverty, ill-health, discrimination and unfreedom, and indeed may know of nothing else, but a person’s well-being can and must be judged by what the person would value if they had the capability to enjoy a given freedom.

Equally the affluent may 'accustom' themselves to think they have to care about the poor when actually, on sober and courageous reflection, they should laugh heartily at them.  

In relation to the other two points, insofar as the ‘agency aspect’ is dealt with in terms of the value a person attaches to freedom as in [3], for example, acquiring an education for the purpose of enhancing life choices, then such a criticism can function as an ‘internal’ criticism of utilitarianism.

It can be an 'internal' criticism of anything you like.  

Consequentialism

One of the great strengths of Sen’s subject position, is that he takes the consequences of an ethical principle seriously.

No he doesn't. To do so you have to give

1) an account of a consistent doxastic logic

2) a Structural Causal Model linking 'action-guiding' principles to good consequences in the real world.  

Utilitarianism is characterised by the fact that it is almost exclusively consequentialist and Sen essentially embraces this consequentialism. But he does not accept that ‘the ends justify the means’, seeing that a certain compromise with deontological ethics is necessary.

It is arbitrary not 'necessary' in the philosophical sense.  

Sen deals with this in characteristic fashion by combining “process” with “culmination outcome” as “comprehensive outcome.” So for example, a politician may wish to be elected, but she wants to be elected fairly, not by fraudulent means. The outcome of “fairly elected” is a ‘comprehensive outcome’ incorporating a deontological element within the consequentialist framework.

Nope. 'Fairly elected' has an empirical extension. In India, there is a statutory body- the Election Commission which checks on this. If it is proved your goons rigged the elections, not only are you disqualified, you may lose all credibility.  

The need for some kind of ‘third point’ between utilitarian consequentialism and libertarian deontology seems inescapable, but the manner in which process is to be valued and rolled into the value of the outcome remains somewhat unclear.

The Law can provide buckstopped, protocol bound, 'extensions' to all relevant terms. The Bench provides the clarity philosophers can but grope for in the dark.  

Can the value of the fairness of an election be added in with the value of success in an election to give a total value for a fair election, compared with the value of a fraudulent election or a fair but unsuccessful election?

Yes. Indira Gandhi found that out the hard way. So did Zulfi Bhutto.  

What Sen seems to be striving for here is a way to incorporate into a paradigm of distributive justice, concerns which are not really compatible with conceptions of distributive justice.

Because Sen didn't give a shit about the subject. It is one thing for an elite white dude to clamour for the middle class in affluent countries to slit its own throat. It is another for an immigrant brown monkey to do so more particularly if his ancestral shithole just had a big famine because it embraced Socialism.  

Sen’s Critique of Social Choice Theory

For more than 50 years, long before the notion of ‘critical voice’ found its way to the centre of his work, Sen has been wrestling with this paradox in terms of Arrow’s social choice theory. Sen tells the story of the origin of Kenneth Arrow’s famous Impossibility Theorem as follows:
In 1948, Olaf Helmer, a logician at the RAND Corporation, wondered about the legitimacy of applying game theory to international relations (‘the ‘players’ were countries, not
individuals’), and asked young Arrow, a PhD student, ‘In what sense could collectivities be
said to have utility functions?’

It was the wrong question. All you need to do is compute the pay-off matrix for different 'mixes' of cooperation or conflict.  

Arrow replied that ‘economists had thought about that question and that it had been answered by Abram Bergson’s notion of the social welfare function’.

Which is fine if there's a guy or a bunch of guys everybody would agree could hit upon a good enough approximation. Still, the thing is unnecessary and costly to compute. Nobody bothers to compute their own utility function.  

As Arrow settled down to writing an exposition for Helmer, he was soon
convinced that no satisfactory method for aggregating a set of orderings into one ordering
existed.

It was obvious since Plato that the task should be delegated to a public spirited expert everybody liked and respected. 

The impossibility theorem and related results and their proofs came within ‘about
three weeks.’ Arrow changed his dissertation topic to reflect the new finding, and sent off a
brief exposition of the result to the Journal of Political Economy at the request of the editor.

Arrow defined a guy who wasn't a dictator as a dictator. This is ex falso quodlibet. If Arrow's theorem is true it must also be the case that cats are dogs.  

A diplomat (for example) needs to have some way of knowing the preferences of the group they represent,

 His Foreign Minister briefs him on this before he departs on his mission

but it is a big step from this legitimate, if specialised, need to the idea of establishing the principles of justice for a whole society.

Nope. That is as easy as pie albeit an arbitrary procedure. The good thing about principles is that they are short and can be placed in a hierarchy.  

It is already to make some substantive political assumptions to suppose that there is or
should be one sovereign decision centre to determine what is right, even within a limited
time span, for society as a whole. (Sen, 1999, p. 2)

Nope. Pick up the phone. Ring a lawyer. Ask 'is there a sovereign decision centre in this territory? Oh. Where is it? Oh. How do I get in touch with it? I see. I can go see my Member of Parliament. Thank you. Goodbye.'  

Social choice theory concerns a group representative whose task is to determine a group
preference from the ordered lists of choices submitted by each group member. These ‘ordered lists’ are supposedly lists held by each individual member of the population in which they have placed every possible state of the world in order of preference. These preference lists are then handed to the returning officer’ to compute the group’s preference list.

This will take longer than the lifetime of the Universe.  

Unsurprisingly, only the most abstract imaginable problems find any solution in this theory.

None do. Otherwise, Mathematicians would use it to solve difficult mathematical questions.  

Sen continues to look for a process by means of which a returning officer could determine a
group preference without troubling the voters to sort things out amongst themselves, but he argues that more has to be taken into account than simply the list of preferences. In arguing against the use of real income as the measure of well-being and for the use of functioning instead,

so that a place subsistent on borrowing, remittances or charity could appear prosperous even if it had embarked on suicidal economic policies.

Sen also argued that the former was lacking in information content.

Whereas we have zero information about 'functioning' or 'capabilities'.  

In the 1999 Development as Freedom, Sen sums up his criticism of social choice theory along similar lines:

The informational base for this class of rules, of which the majority decision procedure is a
prominent example, is thus extremely limited, and it is clearly quite inadequate for making
informed judgments about welfare economic problems.

So what? Decisions have to be made all the time on the basis of inadequate or imperfect information. Some 'welfare economists' aren't useless. They could devise a way to get information cheaply using new tech for example by incentivizing 'quadratic voting' on the issue. 

This is not primarily because it leads to inconsistency (as generalised in the Arrow theorem), but because we cannot really make social judgments with so little information.

Getting and processing information has never been cheaper or quicker. Plenty of Indian startups can organize the thing for you. 

Acceptable social rules would tend to take notice of a variety of other relevant facts in judging the division of the cake: who is poorer than whom, who gains how much in terms of welfare or of the basic ingredients of living, how is the cake being ‘earned’ or ‘looted’ and so on. The insistence that no other information is needed (and that other information, if available, could not influence the decisions to be taken) makes these rules not very interesting for economic decision making. Given this recognition, the fact that there is also a problem of inconsistency ‒ in dividing a cake through votes ‒ may well be seen not so much as a problem, but as a welcome relief from the unswerving consistency of brutal and informationally obtuse procedures. (my italics, Sen,2002, p 252)

Nobody was dividing any cake through votes. India and China, at about this time, had two different models for fdi. To be frank, the Chinese were taking a bigger slice. Still, they did infrastructure better and so they won even before the virtue signallers fucked up Manmohan's regime. 

and in perhaps the most damning criticism of all, going to the issue of agency:
... in arriving at social choice solutions of diverse views on systemic process concern,
preferences cannot do all the work.

In India, 'agency' meant virtue signalling nutters preventing development even if was done by reputable agencies. That's why the Ambanis and the Adanis and so forth had to be financed by the public sector banks to make a big profit on essential infrastructure projects.  

In particular, rules of aggregation are processes too,

as are the 'rent-a-mob' tactics of the virtue signalling nutjobs 

and they are needed to do the social choice exercise of combining diverse views (even about systemic processes). Rules that fix the constituent features of the overall arrangement for aggregation are sometimes called ‘the constitution’ ‒ in terms of which individual preferences are put together to arrive at a social choice.

But this gets distorted by the preference falsification of the virtue signalling activists. This is cool for the big corporates who can spend a little money buying them off but it is bad for everybody else.  

For example, in the Arrovian system, rules such as the independence of irrelevant alternatives and the Pareto principle are not themselves put to a vote.

They are arbitrary stipulations. Arrow was saying that these 'reasonable' requirements could not be met

In fact, if these rules themselves were to be determined by a ‘prior’ voting mechanism or some other social choice process, there would, then, be a need to have other rules governing the choice of these ‘prior’ social choice mechanisms.

This is irrelevant. I suppose one could say 'assume voters have 'Muth rational expectations'' then Arrow can't prove his impossibility theorem because we don't know what the 'Muth rational' solution would be. It is an intensional object. The problem of impredicativity arises. 

At some stage or other, some rules would have to come from outside the immediate domain of individual preferences. (Sen, 2002a, p. 626)

We don't know that. All we know is that they would be arbitrary and non-unique 

With these two paragraphs, Sen effectively damns Arrow’s social choice theory. This belies the fact the Sen has spent 50 years with this theory, including setting up whole academic departments to study and research it, describing Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem as “momentous,” seizing every opportunity to virtually canonise Arrow himself, and even the book from which the last quote is taken (written three years after Development as Freedom) spends about 500 of its 700 pages eulogising the ‘Arrovian’ social choice theory.

To be fair, mathematicians find it interesting- because they don't understand how actual politics works.  Still, they may be interested in how people get elected to some professional association or something of that sort. 

This is strange indeed, but the contradiction is inherent in Sen’s own subject position, a
contradiction inherent in a society in which the major decisions affecting everyone’s lives are taken not by the person themself, but by governments posing as representatives.

Just as students delegate decisions to their School or College and patients delegate decisions to Hospitals and so forth. But the Government may not pose as 'representative'. It could be a despotism or a commercial enterprise. 

Conclusion

Beginning from an immersion in economics, through a painstaking critique of existing notions of utilitarianism and egalitarianism, Sen arrived at the conclusion that the essence of well-being and advantage is not

anything anyone wants 

wealth, or functioning, or capability or even voice. The essence of well-being is critical voice.

which nobody gains by listening to- save for shits and giggles

Egalitarianism must therefore address itself to the distribution of voice and critical voice in
particular,

why not stinky farts? They can be even more annoying than critical voice. 

rather than just real incomes, functioning or even capability. But this does not and cannot produce any kind of magic formula for a just distribution.

Because Sen has always been a useless tosser. At least he didn't become a Marxist when that was fashionable.  

Foundational ideas of justice can separate out some basic issues as being inescapably
relevant,

only one is relevant. Is the issue justiciable? If not, it has nothing to do with the idea of justice. I may say it is unjust that my farts are getting less stinky. To which forum of adjudication can I take this complaint? None on earth. Earthly justice can have nothing to say about the issue.  

but they cannot plausibly end up, I have argued, with an exclusive choice of some
highly delineated formula of relative weights as being the unique blueprint for ‘the just
society’. (Sen, 1999, p 286)

Uniqueness is impossible. A good enough arbitrary solution is all we ask for.  

The whole point is that to the extent that people have a critical voice in the social arrangements determining their own life, they can determine those arrangements in collaboration with others affected by those same social arrangements.

Critical voice can cause Putin to pull his troops back. Who knew?  

Through his critique of distributive justice, by introducing into the heart of a fundamentally distributive conception, a concept of recognition (critical voice), Sen seems to have transcended the opposition between distributive and recognition paradigms of justice.

There is no distributive paradigm of justice. It isn't true that it is just or fair to arbitrarily redistribute anything. Where there is justiciability, a party may be recognized as having locus standi. But the Court may not be able to enforce its decision. Justice is merely a service industry. 

The conception of critical voice at which Sen has arrived has only a sketchy, sociological
elaboration in Sen’s own work, but there does exist a vast literature of social theory and moral philosophy on critical voice.

Jut like the vast literature on alien visitors to our planet carrying out anal probes.  

The result is by no means unproblematic. Equitable distribution of critical voice is a kind of
utopian conception akin to the ‘withering away of the state’. Indeed, the very idea of ‘distribution’, as if there were a fixed total of something to be distributed, is called into question by this critique.

There is no limit to crazy. Your 'critical voice' can always be drowned out by shite crazier yet.  

Nevertheless, the concept can still function as a regulative ideal.

Not if it is associated with senile shitheads. 

The social measures which tend to give people critical voice are well-known ‒ education and literacy, a free press, public broadcasting and communication media, property rights, access to the labour market, freedom of belief and association, freedom to travel, disability support of all kinds, as well as security, public health, food, land and shelter. Each of these factors can be assessed from the point of view: how does this measure contribute to the distribution of critical voice?

The reverse is the case. If crazy people run amok, some money may be spent on policing or placating them while fiscal support for the poor and vulnerable withers on the vine. After all, if healthy and affluent people are marching through the streets, why not let poor and sick people, who genuinely have something to complain about, join them out in the cold?  

Perhaps Sen’s work points to a new conception of the relation between the politics of
distributive justice, the politics of recognition and the new anti-corporate movements?

Crazy leftie nutters run amok. Then crazy right-wing nutters run amok. Then the corporates offshore all their IP and sit back and laugh heartily as the country goes off a fiscal cliff.  

Sen’s conception is not just of ‘folk paradigms’ or social movements which are antagonistic to one another, but rather that the ‘new’ social movements arose by way of a critique of redistribution as a paradigm of justice, and that the notion of ‘critical voice’ is emerging, again, by way of a critique of recognition notions of justice.

That craziness never went away. We will always have it with us. But, it is increasingly likely to be right wing craziness which prevails. 

The relation between these competing paradigms of justice is therefore one of sublation or
transcendance, i.e., negation in the Hegelian sense, rather than negation in the simple sense of being alternatives.

No. What we have here is a shift from paranoid ranting against the Rich to a complete schizophrenic breakdown involving eating your own faeces.

William Lawvere showed Hegel's dialectic could have a Category theoretical representation more particularly if 'optimality' or 'naturality' feature. Alternatively, one could speak of 'epistemic' or intensional objects whose 'extensions' become well defined, for certain purposes, at certain points.  This can be a little like (in work done on P=NP) 'learning' at some point turning into 'knowledge'. One might mention Vygotsky's 'zone of proximal development' in this connection. But not in connection with Sen. He learnt nothing and forgot nothing and just kept repeating himself in a more an more vacuous manner.