Amartya K. Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher and the current Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He has also taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Jadavpur University Calcutta, the Delhi School of Economics, and the London School of Economics. Sen’s scholarship has contributed to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and measures of well-being of countries. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including On Economic Inequality (1973), Choice, Welfare, and Management (1983), Resources, Values, and Development (1997), and Peace and Democratic Society (2011). His books have been translated into over 30 languages. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and India’s Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian honour, in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. He is also the recipient of the Adam Smith Prize, the British Order of Companion of Honour, the Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service, and the Bodley Medal.
In his lecture, Sen described the numerous paradoxes of liberty, beginning with the most obvious: that no one is free to be unfree. He outlined three alternate ways of conceiving liberty. First, as the ability to have power over the conduct of one’s personal life. Second, as the ability to control certain personal decisions. And third, as the ability to constrain others from disturbing your control. Sen focused on discussing the differences between the first two. Sen proposed that the paradoxes created by these views of liberty be resolved by making rights exclusive to your own desires, rather than outward looking – in other words, a conditional liberty. To see liberty exclusively in terms of who is exercising control could not be complete, as it missed entirely the concept of indirect liberty (what someone would have chosen), which may be a very important part of freedom in an interdependent world. Sen therefore rejected entirely the attempt to parcel out liberties into bits and pieces of individual control.
Listen to Sen’s lecture below.