1.The role of public discussion to debate conventional wisdom
on both practicalities and valuations can be central to the
acknowledgment of injustice.
2. Given the role that public debates and discussions must have in the
formation and utilization of our social values (dealing with competing
claims of different principles and criteria), basic civil rights and political
freedoms are indispensable for the emergence of social values. Indeed,
the freedom to participate in critical evaluation and in the process of
value formation is among the most crucial freedoms of social existence.
The choice of social values cannot be settled merely by the
pronouncements of those in authority who control the levers of
government. As was discussed earlier (in the introduction and chapter
1), we must see a frequently asked question in the development
literature to be fundamentally misdirected: Do democracy and basic
political and civil rights help to promote the process of development?
Rather, the emergence and consolidation of these rights can be seen as
being constitutive of the process of development.
3.This point is quite separate from the instrumental role of democracy
and basic political rights in providing security and protection to
vulnerable groups. The exercise of these rights can indeed help in
making states more responsive to the predicament of vulnerable people
and, thus, contribute to preventing economic disasters such as famines.
But going beyond that, the general enhancement of political and civil
freedoms is central to the process of development itself. 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 wellentertained vassals. The instrumental role of democracy and human
rights, important as it undoubtedly is, has to be distinguished from its
constitutive importance.
Fourth, an approach to justice and development that concentrates on
substantive freedoms inescapably focuses on the agency and judgment of
individuals; they cannot be seen merely as patients to whom benefits
will be dispensed by the process of development. Responsible adults
must be in charge of their own well-being; it is for them to decide how
to use their capabilities. But the capabilities that a person does actually
have (and not merely theoretically enjoys) depend on the nature of
social arrangements, which can be crucial for individual freedoms. And
there the state and the society cannot escape responsibility.
It is, for example, a shared responsibility of the society that the system
of labor bondage, where prevalent, should end, and that bonded laborers
should be free to accept employment elsewhere. It is also a social
responsibility that economic policies should be geared to providing
widespread employment opportunities on which the economic and social
viability of people may crucially depend. But it is, ultimately, an
individual responsibility to decide what use to make of the opportunities
of employment and what work options to choose. Similarly, the denial of
opportunities of basic education to a child, or of essential health care to
the ill, is a failure of social responsibility, but the exact utilization of the
educational attainments or of health achievements cannot but be a
matter for the person herself to determine.
Also, the empowerment of women, through employment
opportunities, educational arrangements, property rights and so on, can
give women more freedom to influence a variety of matters such as
intrafamily division of health care, food and other commodities, and
work arrangements as well as fertility rates, but the exercise of that
enhanced freedom is ultimately a matter for the person herself. The fact
that statistical predictions can often be plausibly made on the ways this
freedom is likely to be used (for example, in predicting that female
education and female employment opportunity would reduce fertility
rates and the frequency of childbearing) does not negate the fact that it
is the exercise of the women’s enhanced freedom that is being
anticipated.
Page no-304 to 309
DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM By Prof Amartya Sen
