Video: Amartya Sen on the capabilities approach to justice

From the conference on "Creating Capabilities: Sources and Consequences for Law and Social Policy" at University of Chicago, April 23, a video/audio with Amartya Sen's keynote lecture:

Amartya Sen's Keynote Lecture: Video / Audio
(78 minutes, including introduction and Q&As).

Introduction by Martha Nussbaum, Chicago Law School.

From the programme of the conference:
"This conference, organized by James Heckman, Martha Nussbaum and Robert Pollak, examines a variety of conceptions of human capability, including the Human Development and Capabilities Approach in relation to the recent literature on the economics, neuroscience, and psychology of human development in order to enrich both fields. The conference will foster a broader notion of capability formation than just formal education or cognition. It will adopt a life cycle perspective on capability expression and formation. Recent research documenting the contributions of families, schools, governments, and other institutions of society (including religious bodies, community groups, foster care, the juvenile justice system, and on-the-job training) to the formation of capabilities in children, adolescents, and young adults suggests that a broader framework for the Human Development Approach would be useful. The aim of the conference is to integrate recent advances in understanding how capabilities are produced into the Human Development Approach and to study the implications of the revised research program for law and public policy."

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998.

New book by Axel Honneth - "Das Ich im Wir"

Das Ich im Wir
Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie

by Axel Honneth

(Suhrkamp Verlag, Juli 2010)

308 S.



Kurzbeschreibung

In den Aufsätzen dieses Bandes verfolgt Axel Honneth seine Überlegungen zu einer Theorie der Anerkennung weiter, vertieft klassische Fragestellungen und erschließt neue Forschungsfelder. Im Vordergrund steht dabei die Absicht, die ursprünglich von Hegel entwickelten Ideen für eine zeitgenössische Konzeption der Gerechtigkeit fruchtbar zu machen. Es soll aber auch gezeigt werden, daß von einem normativen Begriff der Anerkennung aus eine Brücke zu sozialwissenschaftlichen Themen zu schlagen ist, wie sie in der soziologischen Gegenwartsdiagnose oder der Psychoanalyse verhandelt werden.

Inhalt

Vorbemerkung [pdf]

Hegelsche Wurzeln
1. Von der Begierde zur Anerkennung. Hegels Begründung von Selbst-bewußtsein
2. Das Reich der verwirklichten Freiheit. Hegels Idee einer »Rechts-philosophie«

Systematische Konsequenzen
3. Das Gewebe der Gerechtigkeit. Über die Grenzen des zeitgenössischen Prozeduralismus
4. Arbeit und Anerkennung. Versuch einer theoretischen Neubestimmung
5. Anerkennung als Ideologie. Zum Zusammenhang von Moral und Macht
6. Verflüssigungen des Sozialen. Zur Gesellschaftstheorie von Luc Boltanski und Laurent Thévenot
7. Philosophie als Sozialforschung. Zur Gerechtigkeitstheorie von David Miller

Sozialtheoretische Anwendungen
8. Anerkennung zwischen Staaten. Zum moralischen Untergrund zwischenstaatlicher Beziehungen
9. Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung. Paradoxien der Individualisierung
10. Paradoxien der kapitalistischen Modernisierung. Ein Untersuchungs-programm

Psychoanalytische Weiterungen
11. Das Werk der Negativität. Eine anerkennungstheoretische Revision der Psychoanalyse
12. Das Ich im Wir. Anerkennung als Triebkraft von Gruppen
13. Facetten des vorsozialen Selbst. Eine Erwiderung auf Joel Whitebook
14. Entmächtigungen der Realität. Säkulare Formen des Trostes

Axel Honneth ist Professor für Philosophie an der Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main und geschäftsführender Direktor des dortigen Instituts für Sozialforschung.

Habermas on human dignity and human rights

"Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik" (August, 2010) features an article by Jürgen Habermas on human dignity and human rights:

"Das utopische Gefälle. Das Konzept der Menschenwürde und die realistische Utopie der Menschenrechte". (Only available for free for a short period).

The article is based on Habermas' keynote lecture at an international conference in Frankfurt on June 17, 2010, on "Human Rights Today". See my previous posts here and here.

Update 1:
An English version is published in "Metaphilosophy" vol. 41, no. 4. (2010), pp. 464-480: "The Concept of Human Dignity and The Realistic Utopia of Human Rights". Here is the abstract:
"Human rights developed in response to specific violations of human dignity, and can therefore be conceived as specifications of human dignity, their moral source. This internal relationship explains the moral content and moreover the distinguishing feature of human rights: they are designed for an effective implementation of the core moral values of an egalitarian universalism in terms of coercive law. This essay is an attempt to explain this moral-legal Janus face of human rights through the mediating role of the concept of human dignity. This concept is due to a remarkable generalization of the particularistic meanings of those "dignities" that once were attached to specific honorific functions and memberships. In spite of its abstract meaning, "human dignity" still retains from its particularistic precursor concepts the connotation of depending on the social recognition of a status—in this case, the status of democratic citizenship. Only membership in a constitutional political community can protect, by granting equal rights, the equal human dignity of everybody."

Update 2:
A German version is also published in "Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie" vol. 58, no. 3 (July 2010), pp. 343-357, entitled "Das Konzept der Menschenwürde und die realistische Utopie der Menschenrechte".
Abstract:
"This paper argues that the normative source of modern basic rights consists in the idea of human dignity. It is this idea through which rights derive a universalistic content of morality. Due to their being rights, human rights can serve to protect human dignity, which in turn owes its connotations of self-respect and social recognition to the intramundane status of democratic citizenship. This is associated with a realistic utopia whose aim at realizing social justice is intrinsic to the very institutions of democratic constitutional states".

Update 3:
See Michael Jäger's comments in "Der Freitag" (August 4, 2010): "Was der Mensch ist"

Update 4:
See a summary in English by Professor Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann.

Podcast of Amartya Sen's LSE lecture on "Global Justice"

A podcast of Amartya Sen's lecture at London School of Economics, July 8, is now available:

"Global Justice" (mp3; approx 80 minutes)

See my previous post on the event here.

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and an honorary fellow of LSE. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998.

Frank Michelman on "The Case of Liberty" (video)

Now available on video, two lectures by professor Frank Michelman, held at Frankfurt University on May 17 and 18, 2010, on "The Case of Liberty"

Lecture I: Liberty, Liberties, and "Total Freedom" (video, approx 1 hour)

Lecture II: Contract versus Common Ground? (video, approx 1 hour)

See the programme for the lectures here.

Also see Michelman's critical paper on Ronald Dworkin: "Foxy Freedom" (pdf) in "Boston University Law Review" vol. 90 no. 2 (April 2010).

Frank Michelman is Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School.

New book on the democratic legitimacy of international law

The Democratic Legitimacy of International Law

by Steven Wheatley

(Hart, June 2010)

424 pages

Description

The objective of this work is to restate the requirements of democratic legitimacy in terms of the deliberative ideal developed by Jürgen Habermas, and apply the understanding to the systems of global governance. The idea of democracy requires that the people decide, through democratic procedures, all policy issues that are politically decidable. But the state is not a voluntary association of free and equal citizens; it is a construct of international law, and subject to international law norms. Political self-determination takes places within a framework established by domestic and international public law. A compensatory form of democratic legitimacy for inter-state norms can be established through deliberative forms of diplomacy and a requirement of consent to international law norms, but the decline of the Westphalian political settlement means that the two-track model of democratic self-determination is no longer sufficient to explain the legitimacy and authority of law. The emergence of non-state sites for the production of global norms that regulate social, economic and political life within the state requires an evaluation of the concept of (international) law and the (legitimate) authority of non-state actors. Given that states retain a monopoly on the coercive enforcement of law and the primary responsibility for the guarantee of the public and private autonomy of citizens, the legitimacy and authority of the laws that regulate the conditions of social life should be evaluated by each democratic state. The construction of a multiverse of democratic visions of global governance by democratic states will have the practical consequence of democratising the international law order, providing democratic legitimacy for international law.

Contents [pdf]

1. The Democratic Deficit in Global Governance
2. Democracy Within and Beyond the State
3. The State as (Democratic) Self-Legislator
4. The Constitutionalisation of International Law Studies in International Law
5. Democracy in International Law
6. International Governance by Non-State Actors
7. A Concept of (International) Law
8. Deliberative Democracy Beyond the State
9. Democracy in Conditions of Global Legal Pluralism
Conclusion: Democracy and the Public International Lawyer

Steven Wheatley is Professor of International Law at the Law School, University of Leeds.

Critical essays on Sen/Nussbaum's capabilities approach

Capabilities, Power, and Institutions
Toward a More Critical Development Ethics

Ed. by Stephen L. Esquith & Fred Gifford

(Pennsylvania State University Press, June 2010)

216 pages


Development economics, political theory, and ethics long carried on their own scholarly dialogues and investigations with almost no interaction among them. Only in the mid-1990s did this situation begin to change, primarily as a result of the pioneering work of an economist, Amartya Sen, and a philosopher who doubled as a classicist and legal scholar, Martha Nussbaum. Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) [preview] and Nussbaum's Women and Human Development (2000) [preview] together signaled the emergence of a powerful new paradigm that is commonly known as the “capabilities approach” to development ethics. Key to this approach is the recognition that citizens must have basic capabilities provided most crucially through health care and education if they are to function effectively as agents of economic development. Capabilities can be measured in terms of skills and abilities, opportunities and control over resources, and even moral virtues like the virtue of care and concern for others. The essays in this collection extend, criticize, and reformulate the capabilities approach to better understand the importance of power, especially institutional power.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sabina Alkire, David Barkin, Nigel Dower, Shelley Feldman, Des Gasper, Daniel Little, Asunción Lera St. Clair, A. Allan Schmid, Paul B. Thompson, and Thanh-Dam Truong.

The capabilities approach was first fully articulated in Amartya Sen's "Commodities and Capabilities" (Oxford University Press, 1985) and was further developed in "The Quality of Life" (Clarendon Press, 1993) edited by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.

Bloomsday June 16, 2010 - Video from UCD

Video from Bloomsday June 16 at University College Dublin with Jürgen Habermas and the ten recipients of honorary degrees:

"Bloomsday 2010 at UCD"
(video, 15 minutes)

Jürgen Habermas received the UCD Ulysses Medal.

See Maeve Cooke's laudatio for Habermas here (pdf).

The honorary degrees were conferred on Broadcaster and historian, John Bowman; Internationally acclaimed author, Colm Tóibín; NGO anti-hunger campaigner, Tom Arnold; Journalist and agriculture expert, Matt Dempsey; Medical researcher and physician, Martin Carey; Chemist, Tadhg Begley; French novelist, playwright and feminist theorist, Hélène Cixous; French medical scientist, Laurent Perret; Pioneering scientist, Raymond Dwek; and Philosopher, Thomas McCarthy.

My previous posts on the event here and here.