MICHAEL McPHERSON
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results described in Sen's book,
Poverty and Famines,
where the em–
phasis on property rights led to people starving to death.
Any adequate moral theory will at least for now have to
acknowledge the wide ranges of significant moral questions that we
just don't know how to answer. Useful approaches will be partial and
overlapping rather than unitary and complete. This stance implies a
certain humility about our present understanding of moral truths.
As Thomas Nagel has recently observed, "The idea that the basic
principles of morality are known, and that the problems all come in
their interpretation and application, is one of the most fantastic con–
ceits to which our conceited species has been drawn." Some of the
leading moral philosophers of our time - Thomas Nagel, Derek Par–
fit, and Bernard Williams among them - share with Sen this ex–
ploratory attitude, but until recently Sen was almost unique among
leading economic theorists in supposing that these basic ethical ques–
tions are worth looking into. Instead most economists who have
worked on evaluative questions have supposed that the basic prin–
ciples are utilitarian, and have focused precisely on their interpreta–
tion and application, especially their mathematical elaboration.
But Sen has lately begun to make some converts to his view
that more complex views of the person can be incorporated in formal
analysis of social choice without any compromise in standards of
analytical rigor. Coming to grips systematically with those features
of our moral experience that utilitarianism neglects or overrides
seems a much more worthy challenge for the formidable skills of
welfare economists than any further elaboration on utilitarianism's
hoary themes of optimalities .
The essays by economists and philosophers in the recent collec–
tion in
Utilitarianism and Beyond
edited by Sen and Bernard Williams
aptly demonstrate the headway that Sen's approach has begun to
make. The analytical agenda suggested by these essays and by Sen's
own recent work is formidable. The issues range from reappraisal of
the ethical significance of traditional measures of economic welfare
and its distribution, to revised conceptions of human liberty and
equality . One comes away with a realization that both the formal ex–
ercises of neoclassical welfare economics and the rather tired philos–
ophers' debates between utilitarian and Kantian ethics have man–
aged to leave much of the most interesting moral territory quite
unexplored.
The brand of moral theorizing Sen and his colleagues engage in
