Amartya Sen, 2002 International Humanist of the Year and 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, is Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until recently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. He was formerly Honorary President of OXFAM and is now its Honorary Advisor. Born in Santiniketan, India, Amartya Sen studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an Indian citizen. He was Lamont University Professor at Harvard also earlier, from 1988 – 1998, and previous to that he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University, and a Fellow of All Souls College (he is now a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls). Prior to that he was Professor of Economics at Delhi University and at the London School of Economics.

Here is a unique view of Professor Sen’s “Indian Humanism,” generously written and made available for the Humanist Chaplaincy website by Dr. Mark Lindley, former Assistant Humanist Chaplain of Harvard and now a noted musicologist and historian of modern India.

Everyone knows that “Amartya” means Amartya Sen, but not everyone means the same thing by “humanism.” Some characteristics of the humanism represented by both Amartya and the Harvard chaplaincy have been a non-militant atheism, a scientific outlook, and a high regard for humanitarian concerns. Some of us may think of the scientific temper and the resulting atheism as being due to Western traditions, so we may wonder what it was in Amartya’s heritage that made them important to him. The most immediate answer is his relation to Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the great Bengali writer on whose country estate, Shantiniketan, Amartya was born in 1933. Tagore chose the name “Amartya” (an un¬usual one, meaning literally “not earthly” and thus implying “heavenly”), and Amartya as a youngster attended the school that Tagore had founded at Shantiniketan in 1901. Let me explain a little more about Tagore.

Tagore’s grandfather had been, back in the second quarter of the 19th century, the first Western-type, ruthlessly efficient millionaire Indian businessman and banker. His son—the poet’s father—had been a renowned reformer of Hinduism—among other things, a monotheist—whose influence is evident in Tagore’s choice of topic for the set of lectures he was invited to give at Oxford in 1930: “the idea of the humanity of our God, or the divinity of Man the Eternal.” Amartya has reduced these grand concepts to down-to-earth points, on the one hand by declaring that:

“Space does not have to be artificially created in the human mind for the idea of justice or fairness…. That space already exists.” (Development as Freedom, 1999, p. 262)

—and on the other hand by discarding theism altogether. (In 1998 when someone told him, “You once said you were a Buddhist,” he laughed and explained: “I am not a card-carrying Buddhist! Years ago when I tried to register myself as an atheist in Shantiniketan, my headmaster insisted that I had to choose a religion. I chose Buddhism because it’s an agnostic religion. There were of course no Buddhists within 300 miles! I admire Buddha as the greatest Indian.”)

Tagore was a humanitarian as well as the greatest modern Indian poet and playwright. He devised and carried out various humanitarian projects, and when Oxford in 1940 awarded him an honorary doctorate and the encomium (in Latin) said that the university “has, in honoring you, done honor to itself,” his acceptance speech (in Sanskrit) evoked “a great tradition of humanity.” He said that “in an era of mounting anguish… with savagery let loose and brutal thirst for possession augmented by science, it may sound merely poetic to speak of any emerging principle of worldwide relationship. But Time’s violence, however immediately threatening, is circumscribed…. I accept this recognition… as a happy augury of an Age to come, and though I shall not live to see it established, let me welcome this friendly gesture as a promise of better days.”

Tagore’s basic attitude to science is evident in the concluding remarks of a university commencement address that he delivered in India in 1934:

“We are new converts to Western ideals—in other words, the ideals belonging to the scientific view of life and the world. It is greatly foolish to belittle its importance by describing it as materialism. For truth is spiritual in itself, and truly materialistic is the mind of the animal which is unscientific and therefore unable to cross the dark screen of appearance… and reach the deeper region of universal laws. Science means intellectual probity in our dealings with the material world. This conscientiousness of the mind is spiritual, for it never judges its results by the standards of external profits.”

Amartya as an economist has undermined several “neo-classical” precepts associated more or less directly with the doctrine that economics in order to be scientific must be ethically neutral. In one particularly famous instance, the annual Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was awarded in 1972 to an American who had ostensibly proved that a democratic welfare state is theoretically impossible and therefore any welfare state has to be, to some extent at least, a dictatorship; but Amartya had already pointed out that the proof, running to many pages of erudite equations in symbolic logic, depended on assuming that not only does each citizen rank certain political objectives as more desirable than others, but also she knows exactly how much more desirable they are to her, and he showed that if this theoretical assumption is replaced by the more realistic one that people want some things more than others without knowing exactly how much more —that is, if the ranking is ordinal but without assigning exact weights—then the proof collapses and it becomes theoretically possible for a welfare state to be democratic (Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 1971). The Nobel Memorial Prize committee cited this achievement when it decided in 1998 that Amartya too should get the award—and here again a Western institution honored itself by honoring an Indian: the committee chose Amartya in order to restore the prestige of the prize after the 1997 choice had proven so disastrous (no need to tell the whole story here) that the most extremely ideological member of the committee was removed.

Another of Amartya’s achievements that impressed the reformed committee was to show, in Poverty and Famines (1981), that the decisive cause of six of the greatest modern famines was not local crop-failure but only a very large degree of inequality in different people’s legal entitlements to food. His writing, which is normally worthy of the most suave diplomat, rose to a remarkable pitch of emotional directness near the end of that book; he said (in Section 10.5):

“Famines can arise in overall boom conditions… if the boom takes the form of uneven [economic] expansion…. In the fight for market command over food, one group can suffer precisely from another group’s prosperity, with the Devil taking the hindmost…. The law stands between food-availability and food-entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.”

A few more citations will fill out succinctly the picture of Amartya as an economist whom Humanists can proudly claim as one of their own. Here is how he applies, in the context of a certain kind of modern economic thinking, the Kantian “categorical imperative” that human beings be given due regard in their own right and not treated as mere tools:

“It would… be a mistake to see the development of education, health care and other basic achievements only or primarily as expansions of ‘human resources’—the accumulation of ‘human capital’—as if people were just the means of production and not its end…. [However,] basic education [and] good health… are not only directly valuable as constituent elements of our basic capabilities, these capabilities can also help in generating economic success of a more standard kind, which in turn can contribute to enhancing the quality of life even more… [although] the political economy of actual use can be very different from the potential possibilities generated.” (“Radical Needs and Moderate Reforms”, in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, ed., Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, 1998, p. 6)

Here is how he warns against what I would describe as a tendency of certain prestigious and affluent people to idealize other people’s deprivations:

“Our mental reactions to what we actually get and what we can sensibly expect to get may frequently involve compromises with a harsh reality. The destitute thrown into beggary, the vulnerable landless laborer precariously surviving at the edge of subsistence, the overworked domestic servant working round the clock, the subdued and subjugated housewife reconciled to her role and her fate, all tend to come to terms with their respective predicaments…. Consider the person (call him 1) who has learned not to have over-ambitious desires and who is easily pleased. Take a case in which he is much more deprived in terms of food, clothing, shelter, medical attention etc. than person 2 (raised in more bouyant circumstances), and is nevertheless happier than 2 and has more [of his conscious] desires fulfilled. It is not at all obvious that 1 must be seen as having a higher level of well-being than 2.” (Commodities and Capabilities, 1987, p. 15)

Here is how he engages the interest of those readers from affluent countries who don’t happen to care about the people in poor countries:

“Reluctance to go into medical matters has been shared by most of the economic traditions, despite their diversity in other respects…. In welfare economics… ‘quality of life’ has typically been judged by such factors as longevity, which is perhaps best seen as reflecting the ‘quantity’ (rather than the ‘quality’) of life. In the richer countries, the functionings involving longevity, nourishment, basic health, avoiding epidemics, being literate, etc., may have less variation from person to person [than in poor countries], but there are other functionings that do vary a great deal. The ability to entertain friends, be close to the people one would like to see, take part in the life of the community, etc., may vary a good deal even within a rich country such as the USA or the UK…. [And] there are other functionings (for example, those involving literary, cultural and intellectual pursuits on the one hand, and vacationing and traveling on the other) which involve a good deal of variation amongst the people of even the richer countries, and which raise questions of assessment and valuation [in regard to quality of life].” (Op. cit., pp. 30-31)

And here is how he converts “freedom” from a code word for freedom of the rich to oppress the poor to a morally valid concept:

“The basic approach [in my book Development as Freedom] is that individual advantage is to be judged by the substantive freedom that the individual enjoys, and that development is the process of expansion of individual freedom. As Marx put it, it has to do with ‘replacing the domination of circumstances and chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances.’ I discuss, in particular, five different kinds of freedom. The first is internal freedom, or the freedom to be creative, the freedom to reason and to think in a lucid, articulate, rational way. For that the important policy issues are such matters as literacy, education, communication with others and the openness of society. The second is participatory freedom. Here the principal issues are democracy and political liberty, but particularly a society that is based on public debate and discussion. There is some connection here with the ideas that have been emphasized on the one side by Habermas and on the other side, in the public-choice literature, by James Buchanan. I think it is interesting that both of them have seen democracy in terms of what Buchanan calls government by discussion. There is then the question of transactional freedom. This is where markets enter and where parts of Adam Smith’s writings are very important. The freedom to participate and exchange and to deal with each other is a very important part of enhancing individual opportunity as well as increasing the efficiency of economic and social arrangements. The fourth is procedural freedom, which includes absence of discrimination and inequality of treatment, as well as issues of legitimacy and matters such as financial regularity and the absence of corruption. These are what we may expect when we are dealing with each other in the society in which we live. Finally, there is protective freedom. Even though we may want chance and circumstance to be dominated by human will, there will be situations in which things go wrong and when they do, there must be social safety nets to prevent people from falling down under. In very poor economies this fall can take the form of famine; in other cases, economic crisis may not manifest itself as a famine but could take the form of severe deprivation. I argue that these are important issues in the formation of economic and social policy. Let me illustrate the failure of each of these freedoms in terms of particular cases. Examples of the violation of ‘internal freedom’ are illiteracy and lack of education. Another example is the lack of female opportunity and keeping the minds of women clouded by some false perceptions of the ‘naturalness’ of gender inequality. The most extreme example here is that of Afghanistan, but we do not have to look that far—I think India is a very good example of the violation of such freedom. There are districts in India where female literacy is below ten per cent. Coming to ‘participatory freedom’ I would say that despite all its successes, China’s failure lies in the inadequacy of participatory opportunity. I take the democracy movement quite seriously in this respect. Regarding ‘transactional freedom’, the pre-reform Indian situation can be taken to be an example of its failure. This applies to many other parts of the world as well. The issue of ‘procedural freedom’ and legitimacy comes up particularly in the context of the rampant corruption that we see in many countries, for example, in South Asia, East Asia and South-East Asia. Indeed, the current financial crisis that we are witnessing has something to do with that. Finally, the lack of ‘protective freedom’ can be illustrated by social arrangements that allow people to go into a famine and when there is nothing to stop people from falling into dire poverty, hunger and death…. The issue of protective freedom is … reflected in a dramatic rise of mortality rates in Russia…. What we need to do is pay attention to each of these different dimensions of freedom. That is what I have tried to do in my work on development and freedom.” (Frontline (an Indian newsweekly), 6 November 1998, pp. 10-11)

If this man supports the Humanist chaplaincy, then its version of humanism is almost certain to be worthwhile.

Years ago, he took some care to established a reputation for first-rate competence in the mathematical aspects of economic discourse that the most influential mid-20th-century professors regarded as making economics a science like physics. He served, for instance, as president of the Econometric Society before serving as president of the American Economic Association, the International Economic Association or the Development Studies Association. But his writing since he won the Nobel Prize no longer reflects that preoccupation. In India he weighs in nowadays on public-health issues and on cultural issues occasioned by the political successes of fundamentalist Hindus. In The Argumentative Indian (2004) he has made good use of his knowledge of Sanskrit (going back to his days at Shantiniketan) to show, with citations from ancient scripture, that the fundamentalists’ hide-bound doctrines are unlike the kinds of discourse that typified Hinduism in its most radiant days.

Mark Lindley