Sen transformed welfare economics and political philosophy by judging development and justice through the real freedoms people possess, not only income, utility, or formal rights.
Intellectual setting
Sen's experience of the Bengal famine and his work across economics, philosophy, and development studies shaped a critique of welfare measures that ignore deprivation, agency, and democratic accountability.
Key ideas
Capabilities
What matters for evaluating a life is a person's substantive opportunity to achieve valuable ways of being and doing, not resources alone.
Public reasoning
Justice need not wait for a perfectly just social blueprint; comparative reasoning can identify and reduce remediable injustice.
Legacy
The capability approach reshaped the study of poverty, development, disability, gender, and human rights, and underlies influential alternatives to income-only measures of social progress.