ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, Amartya Sen has been preoccupied with questions of social justice. Inequalities between women and men have been especially important in his thinking, and the achievement of gender justice in society has been among the most central goals of his theoretical enterprise. Against the dominant emphasis on economic growth as an indicator of a nation’s quality of life, Sen (1980, 1982, 1985, 1992, 1999) has insisted on the importance of capabilities, what people are actually able to do and to be. Frequently his arguments in favor of this shift in thinking deal with issues of gender (see, for example, Sen 1990, 1995, 1999). Growth is a bad indicator of life quality because it fails to tell us how deprived people are doing; women figure in the argument as people who are often unable to enjoy the fruits of a nation’s general prosperity. If we ask what people are actually able to do and to be, we come much closer to understanding the barriers societies have erected against full justice for women. Similarly, Sen (1990, 1995) criticizes approaches that measure well-being in terms of utility by pointing to the fact that women frequently exhibit “adaptive preferences,” preferences that have adjusted to their second-class status. Thus, the utilitarian framework, which asks people what they currently
prefer and how satisfied they are, proves inadequate to confront the most pressing issues of gender justice. We can only have an adequate theory of gender justice, and of social justice more generally, if we are willing to make claims about fundamental entitlements that are to some extent independent of the preferences that people happen to have, preferences shaped, often, by unjust background conditions.
