Rationality and freedom are among the most profound and contentious concepts in philosophy and the social sciences. In two volumes on rationality, freedom, and justice, the distinguished economist and philosopher Amartya Sen brings clarity and insight to these difficult issues. This volume–the first of the two–is principally concerned with rationality and freedom.
Sen scrutinizes and departs from the standard criteria of rationality, and shows how it can be seen in terms of subjecting one’s values as well as choices to the demands of reason and critical scrutiny. This capacious approach is utilized to illuminate the demands of rationality in individual choice (including decisions under uncertainty) as well as social choice (including cost benefit analysis and environmental assessment).
Identifying a reciprocity in the relationship between rationality and freedom, Sen argues that freedom cannot be assessed independently of a person’s reasoned preferences and valuations, just as rationality, in turn, requires freedom of thought. Sen uses the discipline of social choice theory (a subject he has helped to develop) to illuminate the demands of reason and the assessment of freedom. The latter is the subject matter of Sen’s previously unpublished Arrow Lectures included here.
The essays in these volumes contribute to Sen’s ongoing transformation of economic theory and social philosophy, and to our understanding of the connections among rationality, freedom, and social justice.
Customer Reviews
Reducing assumptions about rational choice:
I found this book refreshing and insightful, it shares Sen’s thoughts on how to value freedom as an aspect of choice in and of itself: If I would choose x anyhow, how much does it matter that I also am offered y & z as options.
Additionally he discusses plausible scenarios in which a selection is dependent upon the menu of choices offered e.g., given options of {x,y} I choose x, given options of {x,y,a,b} I choose y.
That said this book is a compendium of papers with the attendant repetition and overlap. The introduction is the best part.
Real Philosophy or Social choice?!?!:
Yes it’s true. The book of Sen it`s too much focused on the “theory of social choice” and it never makes an analysis of freedom and rationality by a pure philosophical point of view, but always by the point of view of the “social choice”.
And it’s also true that this kind of analysis is often related to the impossibility theorem of Arrow, as all the social choice theory could be reducted to that theorem
I think the title of the book does not say the essence of it, People philosophically intrested in these two concepts should read something else…
Never have so many words been written about so little:
I read through the 700 pages of this book, including the mathematics, hoping at some point that the Nobel Prize-winning Sen would have something to say about Rationality and Freedom. Alas! I was disappointed. About 500 pages are devoted to an almost entirely vacuous “social choice theory” and in particular Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. I was thinking maybe that Sen was doing a “reductio ad absurdum” and at the end, he would offer an alternative approach. Unfortunately not. The salaries of the thousands of academics who are paid to do this stuff should be collected and distributed to poor people in developing countries. A far better use of the money.
