58 pages • 1 hour read
Amartya SenDevelopment As Freedom
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Thomas Malthus posited in the late 1700s that exponential population growth would soon outstrip food supplies; he assumed that food supplies would grow linearly or hit a maximum land capacity. Two centuries later, people continue to offer similar pessimistic warnings concerning the global food supply, despite little evidence for such a crisis. Statistics from the United Nations actually show food per capita growing substantially, even in densely populated regions. Only Africa remains stagnant, and as Chapter 7 noted, the problems there come from larger economic challenges. This increase occurs despite falling food prices, which diminish the economic incentive to produce more food. Staple foods like rice and wheat cost less than half what they did in the 1950s, thanks in large part to techniques that allow a vastly improved yield per hectare. Many regions could improve production even more by adopting existing technology. Given these facts, the persistence of hunger and malnourishment is shocking.
Although food supply itself does not provide a good argument for reducing world population, Sen asserts that continued population growth would self-evidently pose some kind of problem in the future, such as urban overcrowding or environmental strain. Although fertility rates are declining, there is considerable debate about how fast they are declining and whether they will naturally continue to do so or whether public authorities need a coercive approach to force women to have fewer children. China famously imposed its One Child Policy in 1979 to try to improve its economy by forcing most parents to have only a single child, with punitive measures and forced abortion or sterilization to enforce it. In contrast, some people assert the right of families to determine how many children they want. Others limit this right to women only, usually in the context of debates about abortion and contraception. This is one area where there are practical consequences to the debate between utilitarians, who deny that “rights” have any weight against desirable results, and libertarians, who uphold such rights at all costs. As Sen previously discussed in Chapter 3, he argues for an approach that weighs rights and outcomes equally. Given the lack of evidence that coercion works better than other policies, the rights of families and women should be respected.
This debate goes back to the 1700s. Before Malthus, the Marquis de Condorcet suggested unrestrained population growth would reduce happiness but predicted the triumph of reason would lead families to voluntarily choose fewer children. Malthus believed such a reduction would have to be forced on families by hunger and impoverishment. Modern explanations for why fertility is in fact declining as society becomes more prosperous usually theorize that families choose to have fewer children either due to economic pressure or due to changing social norms. The economic approach, championed by Gary Becker, argues that the cost of raising children to compete in contemporary society has increased, particularly the need to invest household resources in education; so, families have fewer children and invest more in each. Sen leans to crediting a shift in social norms due to empowering women to make family decisions and the increased availability of contraceptives.
China famously adopted an extremely coercive approach in its One Child Policy and its fertility rate has dramatically dropped. While some outside observers praise it, this policy has come at the cost of violating rights while inflicting pain and impoverishment on those who resist. Furthermore, it is unclear how much of China’s reduced fertility came from this draconian program and how much came from other social programs that China enacted simultaneously. Given the Chinese gender bias, this has also led to the death of unwanted female babies. The state of Kerala in India, for example, achieved a similar fertility rate just as quickly through female education.
Chapter 10 Summary
Despite how widespread the rhetoric of human rights is, critics make serious attacks on its practical applicability. Some critics argue, first, that rights only exist in a meaningful way if they are guaranteed by law; therefore, claims of inalienable rights existing from birth is meaningless. The state alone can give rights—this is called the “legitimacy critique.” Second, critics argue that rights don’t matter unless we can specifically assign the duty to uphold or fulfill them to someone. Stating that a government or another actor has a duty to provide food has a real application; simply stating that a person has a right to food accomplishes nothing—this is the “coherence critique.” Finally, critics challenge the idea of universal values. They theorize that all ethics are embedded in the cultures that created them and that therefore it makes no sense to impose any ethical norm or supposed rights on other cultures. This is the “cultural critique.
Sen rejects the legitimacy critique by defining rights as making a rational ethical claim about what ought to be; whether such a claim can be legally enforced makes no difference to whether people should morally behave in a certain way. He rejects the coherence critique by arguing that the language of rights allows us to make a claim about the quality of life people should have in cases where multiple actors could help them achieve it.
Asian authoritarian leaders especially have adopted the cultural critique and claim that their Confucian-influenced cultures value discipline and loyalty over individualistic Western rights. In doing so, however, they ignore the vast diversity of Asia (or even just the East Asian region) as well as the complexity of the Western tradition. Aristotle, for example, upheld the value of personal freedom while also denying the equality of freedom in his thoughts on the subjugation of women and enslaved people. Confucius advocated critiquing leaders and the state in a way that current authoritarian leaders abhor. Additionally, Buddhist teachings emphasize free action. The Indian emperor Ashoka made tolerance a keystone of his policies after converting to Buddhism. The earlier Indian thinker Kautilya championed the freedoms of the upper class, as well as noting the duties of the king to care for the destitute. Later Indian Islamic rulers frequently showed more tolerance for religious variety within Islam and among non-Muslim subjects than contemporary European rulers. Asian traditions are diverse and include variations of the ideas of freedom and tolerance that modern Asian autocrats attempt to dismiss as Western.
Sen says that this is not to deny the pervasive influence of Western culture and education. As societies modernize and adapt, some older traditions will be lost unless society makes a conscious effort to preserve them. People can preserve these traditions. However, cross-cultural borrowing is not new and not necessarily bad—he points to the improvements to British cuisine from the influence of India and elsewhere. More importantly, this complex and diverse process has to take into consideration all the people in local society, not just the political or religious leaders. Protestors demanding democracy in Asian societies demonstrate that those leaders who claim rights have no meaning for people in Asian cultures are wrong.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
The title of this book, Development as Freedom, points to the fact that Sen will take human rights as the bedrock value for development. However, these two chapters complicate that conclusion. While Sen values human rights, he is willing to sacrifice them for pragmatic concerns if necessary. However, he does not think that such a sacrifice is often necessary, since he argues that respecting liberties in the political or social sphere normally leads to greater economic freedom, including freedom from hunger. His is a “goal-rights system” that gives equal weight to rights and results (212). In Chapter 9, he offers the specific case study of population control, while Chapter 10 turns to the philosophical underpinning for Sen’s limited championing of rights.
While discussing population control as necessary, Sen stresses Freedom as the Means and End of Development. First, he demolishes the standard argument for population control as a way of preventing hunger and famine, and he then goes on to say that population reduction is nevertheless important. He establishes that China’s brutal imposition of its One Child Policy violates the human rights of women who were forcibly sterilized or subjected to abortions and that it has led to the mass termination of baby girls. Without democratic discussion, there is no way of knowing if the targets of China’s policy would have consented for the sake of a perceived economic good. He then goes on to argue that China’s success in reducing fertility rates could have been achieved without coercion, as happened in certain states in India, most notably Kerala. He concludes that no evidence supports the greater effectiveness of coercion and that coercion has bad side effects such as sex-selective abortion. Therefore, he concludes, “there is nothing here that gives definite ground for transgressing the basic importance of reproductive rights for the sake of achieving other good consequences” (225).
In Chapter 10, he elucidates the theoretical underpinnings for assertions of human rights, but he does not answer questions about whether people intrinsically possess rights or whether rights are merely legal guarantees granted them by a government. Sen sidesteps the problem by adopting a third option that sees rights as a linguistic shorthand for people to assert a vision of their ideal world. He defines rights as a “set of ethical claims” (229). Sen sees rights as ethical claims or as a way that a person can express that he or she feels wronged. He argues that this definition is useful because letting people make these claims provokes debate, and he is confident that rational discussion will lead to equitable answers. His main focus in this section is using the historical and contemporary diversity of Asian culture to challenge authoritarian leaders who claim the sole right to judge what kind of rights matter in their culture.
Sen’s insistence that overpopulation is a real problem stems in part from his commitment to The Importance of Empowering Marginalized People—especially women, including giving them the choice to use contraception and abortion. He values that separately from other concerns about overpopulation, like environmental strain. In the latter part of the 20th century, there was global attention on reducing population. However, that consensus has eroded with time as it turns out that below-replacement fertility rates tend to create long-term economic problems in many countries, in part due to a smaller working population attempting to care for a larger population of the elderly. China tacitly admitted the error of its population control efforts when it reversed course in 2015 and decided to allow couples to have two children; in 2021, it removed that limit (“It’s time to abolish China’s three-child policy.” Human Rights Watch). Like many countries with falling fertility rates, it has started offering subsidies to encourage women to have more children. So far, China appears to be failing to reverse its decline. This seems to prove Sen right—social and economic development, along with cultural change, primarily caused fertility to decline, as he theorizes here, rather than coercion.
