Supervisors: Jack Vromen and Ingrid Robeyns 

Brief project description:

Over the last 30 years the Indian philosopher-economist Amartya Sen has developed a distinctive normative approach to evaluating advantage in terms of individuals’ freedom to achieve the kind of lives they have reason to value, and development as the expansion of that freedom. This freedom is analysed in terms of an individual’s ‘capability’ to achieve combinations of such intrinsically valuable ‘beings and doings’ (‘functionings’) as being sufficiently nourished and being able to freely express their political views. My thesis is concerned with elaborating and extending the philosophical character of Sen's project.