 We're proud to host this event, and I thank all of you for joining us this evening. Bringing together faculty, students, staff, and members of the community to listen to and learn from the most powerful and influential economic voices in the world is our privilege through this lecture, and this evening we're so honored to have Amartya Sen deliver the lecture. I'd now like to welcome Michael as Professor and Chair of Economics to the stage. Michael. Thank you very much Chancellor Subhaswamy for your introduction and for your generous support of the Gamble Lecture. Welcome colleagues, students, and honored guests. This afternoon Amartya Sen will deliver the 2016 Phillip L. Gamble Lecture of the UMass Amherst Department of Economics. The annual Gamble Lecture features a prominent economist. Previous speakers in the series have included eight Nobel Prize winners, among them George Ackerloff and Eleanor Ostrom, and Professor Sen today will become our ninth. As well as others whose work and thought have illuminated our field, including Janet Yellen, Barbara Bergman, Tomah Piketty, Marianne Ferber, Lonnie Guinear, our own Robert Poland, and John Kenneth Galbraith. The Phillip L. Gamble Memorial Lecture Ship Endowment was established by Israel Rogosa, class of 1942, and his family and friends in honor of Phillip Gamble, a member of the UMass Economics faculty from 1935 to 1971, and chair from 1942 to 1965. He was beloved by students in our 2013 Sesquicentennial celebration a couple of years ago. I met a member of the class of 68 who recalled engaging class suppers at Gamble's house in downtown, which is what students call uptown, but, you know, downtown. We are grateful to Israel Rogosa's nephew Marty, a 1979 graduate of the Eisenberg School, who is the steward of the Phillip Gamble Memorial Lecture Ship Endowment. The Rogosa's are an all UMass family. Marty's wife Elizabeth is a 1988 Zoology graduate as well. The Gamble Lecture Ship is also supported by the Charles L. and Martha S. Gleason Fund. Charles and Martha were economics graduates in 1940 and 1942, both are now deceased. There are many people at UMass who made this event possible, and on behalf of the economics department, I thank them. I would like to mention in particular Sheila Gilroy, Departmental Administrator for Economics. Let me remind you now to turn off all ringing or buzzing devices, that includes me too. Our Gamble lecturer and distinguished guest is Amartya Sen, the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Amartya Sen is originally from West Bengal, India. After university in Kolkata, India, Professor Sen earned his PhD at Cambridge University in 1959. I mentioned Cambridge and Professor also philosophy because in tea just before the lecture, Professor Sen reminded us of this whole other side. He's a giant in economics, but he's also a giant in philosophy. The conversation was thoroughly daunting to be reminded of this entire other side. He has been appointed professor at many of the world's greatest universities in India and at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. Sen received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics. He has received many awards in addition to the Nobel, including the Bharat Ratna from India, a commander de la légende d'honneur from France, the Aztec Eagle of Mexico, and from the United States, the Eisenhower Medal and the George C. Marshall Award. Professor Sen's work stands out for eliciting both laughter and tears, perhaps unusual in economics, a field not always noted for well-developed emotional responses. With his rye wit, Professor Sen can highlight the fundamental irreconcilable tension between the million underpinnings of political liberalism and the peration roots of market fundamentalism through a short fable about two allegorical characters, lewd and prude, who try to log roll who gets to or has to or may or may not read D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, or an invitation to spend the afternoon at home doing nothing to join Professor Sen for tea or to go to a, to spend the afternoon in a drug den, can thoroughly disrupt the axiom of, the weak axiom of revealed preference. On more serious matters, Sen has reshaped views about the economic fundamentals. What are human goals and how do individuals and communities achieve them? Sen's concept of capabilities places the ultimate question of human freedom at the core of economics. No economist in more than a century has had a greater impact on how we define and measure human welfare with enormous impact on how development is imagined and achieved. In his manifesto, Development as Freedom, Sen observed no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy. Sen's work, especially his radical reconception of the political economy of famine, has had particular relevance for society's poorest members. Today, Professor Sen will address what's the use of human rights. It's my honor to welcome you as the 2016 Gamble Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Sen. Well, it's a great privilege for me to be here and to give this Philip Gamble lecture and to return to this campus, which I have visited regularly for a long time, become a lot less frequent now, but that's greatly my loss and it's wonderful that I'm back here again in a campus that I really do love. Among the things that happen, I'd better warn you about that with old age. I don't know if other words for that is an inability to walk once you have been standing on the same spot for 45 minutes. So at the end of it, you would see me struggling towards that. I'd better warn because usually somebody comes up and calls a doctor and you have to, this is just, if you give me 125 seconds, it will come back again. I will be able to walk and mention that right at the beginning. I would make a slight correction that actually my family is from Haka, not West Bengal, and so I see myself as Bangladeshi too, actually. I happen to have an honorary citizenship of Bangladesh as well, but my family came from there. I was very happy that Michael referred at least to Bengal, which is part of subcontinent. Of course, they have great connections with every part of the subcontinent, indeed. Well, what's the use of human rights, that's the title of the talk. In a book, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, published in 1790, Mary Wilson-Craft told Edmund Burke that he, Burke, was too preoccupied with seeking, quote, unquote, instantaneous applause to his eloquence to be able to see things clearly. Had that meant that Burke was mixed, I quote, I should believe you to be, Mary Wilson-Craft said, a good, though a vain man, unquote. She invited Burke to reflect further, and the differences were clear enough since they took, in many ways, exactly the opposite views in the two great revolutions of their time, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. At the risk of slight oversimplification, it can be said that Burke supported the American Revolution, but not the French, where Mary Wilson-Craft was still with the French rising, but remained very doubtful about the thinking behind the American Revolution. I would argue that answering the question I pose as the title of my talk, what's the use of human rights, can be helped a little by trying to understand how and why they differed so much on the subject. Burke's critique of the French Revolution had argued most strongly, which was argued most strongly in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, in that he made a powerfully conservative critique, it's a powerful critique, a very conservative though, of what was happening in France. In fact, Burke's reflection on the French Revolution soon became, as Stephen Greenblatt has put it, I quote, the most eloquent state of British conservatism, shavering monarchy, aristocracy, property, heritory succession, and the wisdom of the ages, unquote. Wilson-Craft, in contrast, wanted radical change and saw in the French Revolution great signs of hope. The difference between the two on the French Revolution is therefore not hard to understand. But what about the American Revolution? What could have upset Mary Wilson-Craft, the quintessentially revolutionary English woman, about the American Revolution? How did she justify her lack of sympathy for the fight, for independence of America, from colonial British rule? Here's what Wilson-Craft said in criticizing Burke's support for American independence, in a book, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. That is actually a really long letter, a very long letter to Burke. I quote from Wilson-Craft, on what principle Mr. Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive. For the whole tenor of his argument settled slavery on an everlasting foundation. Allowing his servile reference for antiquity and prudent attention to self-interest to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished. And because our ignorant forefathers not understanding the native dignity of men, sanctioned the traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to this inhuman custom. And to term an atrocious insult to humanity, the love of our country. And a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured, unquote. So Wilson-Craft's criticism of the American Revolution arose from her wanting more change in America rather than less. She insisted that we cannot demand human rights for white Americans, but not for others. And it's not acceptable to keep some people enslaved while clamoring for self-government for oneself. Whether Wilson-Craft foresaw that slavery would in fact be outlawed in the British Empire decades before it would happen in America. I'm not able to guess. But her argument was about the unacceptability, indeed gross unacceptability, of demanding freedom for some. Demanding freedom for some while denying it grossly to others. However, conservative as Burke was, he cannot be described, I have to submit, as reactionary. He spoke most eloquently, for example, about misruling early British Empire in India, and powerfully censored Warren Hastings' governance of the territory ruled by the East India Company. Among the grounds for impeaching Hastings in this speech delivered in parliament, Burke into that, I quote from Burke, I impeach him in the name of the people of India whose laws, rights, and liberties he had subverted. Whose properties he had destroyed, whose country he had laid waste and desolate, unquote. This sounds revolutionary enough, but it should be readily noticed that it's also a conservative position. Accusation against Hastings of subverting the laws, rights, and liberties well established in India. There is, in fact, no racism there, as you regularly notice. But it is a very strongly conservative argument. Burke's approval of the American Revolution was also a conservative support. No proposal for a radical change in established law than rights could be expected in that support from Edmund Burke, and it didn't come. And it included the acceptance of slavery. So what's the relevance of the Burke-Wilson craft different in answering the question, what's the use of human rights? There are, of course, great many uses of human rights that we can talk about. But the perspective of human rights, rights that everyone is supposed to have, by virtue of being a human being, is particularly relevant in battling against established inequality. It is there that the vindication to use Mary's language of the rights of women and of the rights of men, here are two books. The original one, Rights of Men, covering both. But then she thought, had to write a separate one for women. In addition, that use of the idea of vindication provides the intellectual agenda for a radical reorganization of society. Mary Wilsoncraft's own understanding of that connection would seem to have evolved over the years. When she wrote in her first book on rights, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, from which I quoted earlier, published in 1790, she took the term men to cover both men and women. But by the time, two years later, she published a second book on rights, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In 1792, she had become very aware of the special inequality from which women suffered, and related to that, the overwhelming need for fighting for women's rights as a category on its own. Mary's own experience as a young woman of moderate means possibly contributed to this understanding. Mary was born in London, but was strongly inspired by the French evolution. She worked in a variety of jobs, including being a governess and as a teacher in not very affluent establishments. She was an elegant woman, as I first read by John Opie in the National Photography, it brings out, you can see that still there, but she's fixed, pictured, quite unadorned. In fact, it would be fair to say I think carefully unadorned. Indeed, she expressed strong views on the way the demand of self adornment in women's life contributes to the incarceration of women in vulnerable and inferior positions. And what she called, I quote, the world of a vast prison. Women are taught from infancy, she argued, that beauty is women's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming around it, guilt cage only seeks to adorn its prison. It's a pretty severe critic, and we could discuss whether she was right or not, but it's clear what her views were. In 1792 in Paris, where she had gone to collect material for her book on French evolution to be published two years later, Mary Wilson-Coff met an American timber merchant called Captain Gilbert Imley and lived with him for a short while. The two had a daughter, but Captain Imley abandoned her fairly soon after her child was born. In 1797, Mary married William Godwin, the English radical thinker, Wotun, whose work she had been totally involved for a long time. She was an active in the circle of so-called English Jacobins. They had a daughter, also called Mary, who would later achieve much fame at Mary Shelley, the author of the famous Frankenstein and a number of other books. Mary Wilson-Coff died from septicinia a few days after the younger Mary's birth. Mary, the mother, was then 38. I believe I can argue that Mary Wilson-Coff was perhaps the most underestimated philosopher in the 18th century world of enlightenment. I've written on this subject elsewhere, particularly in my book, The Idea of Justice, but in this talk I will concentrate on two particular teams connected with the title chosen for the lecture. I refer in particular to the early recognition, in this case by Wilson-Coff, of the conceptual importance of the perspective of human rights in general. And second, her focus on the relevance of the rights perspective as a powerful intellectual background for resisting well-established inequalities. The intellectual world has changed over the centuries and some of the things that Mary had argued about is now standardly recognized. And yet the need for an integrated intellectual foundation for the perspective of human rights is still very strong, especially in battling gross inequality. We live in a world in which the idea of human rights is invoked in a great many different contexts. Democratic rights in protesting against authoritarian abuse, rights to personal liberty in defending elementary autonomies in private life, civil rights in demanding basic political freedom, economic rights against hunger and abject poverty, health rights for medical care, gay and lesbian rights to safeguard freedom to pursue minority lifestyles and so on. The rhetoric of human rights is only present in the contemporary world. However, despite the tremendous appeal of the idea of human rights, it's also seen by many as being intellectually frail, lacking in foundation, giving more room to emotion than reason, and perhaps it may be lacking in coherence and cogency. It's certainly true that the frequent use of the language of the rights of all human being, which can be seen in many practical arguments and pronouncements, has not been adequately matched by critical scrutiny of the basis and congruity of the underlying philosophical ideas. This is partly because the invoking of human rights tends to come mostly from those who are more concerned with changing the world, rather than with interpreting it, a distinction made famous by Karl Marx. There are stirring appeals on one side and these conceptual skepticism on the other. Underlying that skepticism is the question, what exactly are the human rights and why do we need them? What do they do? I've argued elsewhere that human rights are best seen as articulation of a commitment in social ethics comparable to, but very different from, substantively, accepting utilitarian reasoning. It's a rival to that. Like other ethical tenets, human rights can, of course, be distributed. But the claim is that they will survive open and informed scrutiny. This is, in fact, a point that Mary Wilson herself makes with considerable eloquence. Any universality that these claims have is dependent on the opportunity of unobstructed debate. She, in fact, in her second book, The Dealing with Women, which is addressed to a French leader of thought as well as the revolutionary influence, he gets a lot of quite striking examples of tute-ness, of behavior towards women, but then he said that ultimately, it's a matter for us to reason about this. And what I would suggest is that, let's reason on this and if you are persuaded by reason that, indeed, I'm right, then I hope you change defense declaration of the rights of men in a direction which takes note of the special problem that women have. So ultimately, there's a kind of great fate in reason, and that I'm not going to go into it here, but in the contemporary, the meta-ethical discussions in which a lot of people, among established philosophers from Tom Nagel, Derek Parfit, Tim Scandal, and others have been involved. The priority of reasoning is very similar to the one that May Wilson discussed before. This is a contrast between human rights in primarily legal terms, either as consequence of human legislation or as precursors of legal rights. Human rights may well be reflected in legislation and may also inspire legislation, but this is a further fact rather than a defining characteristic of human rights themselves. The legal interpretations have appealed to many for way on understandable reasons. The concept of legal rights is well established, and the language of rights, even human rights, is influenced undoubtedly by legal terminology. Also, a great many acts of legislation and legal convention, such as the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom, have clearly been inspired by belief in some pre-existing rights of all human beings. In a classic essay, called Are There Any Natural Rights, published in 1955, Herbert Hart, the great legal thinker in Oxford, had argued that people, I quote, seek of their moral rights, mainly when advocating their incorporation in a legal system. This is certainly one way in which human rights have been invoked, and Hart's qualified defense of the idea and usefulness of human rights in this context has been justly influential. But it is also important to see that the idea of human rights can be and actually are used in several other ways as well. In many contexts, legislation is not at all involved. And in some cases, legislation may well be a serious error. Indeed, many of the cases in which the idea of human rights is used often to great effect are not matters of legal rights at all. But what can be broadly called ethical rights? If a government is accused of violating some human right, that acquisition cannot really be answered simply by pointing out that there are no legally established rules in the country guaranteeing those rights. This is a fundamental distinction. There does, of course, exist a legal connection. Legislation can indeed often enough help to promote ethical claims reflected in human rights. And many concerned citizens and many NGOs have been intensely involved in promoting fresh legislation. Also sometimes, the ethical cause of human rights can be effectively advanced to better implementation of existing laws rather than demanding fresh legislation. But there is much more to human rights approach than that. Ethical claims can be advanced by many different means of seeking new or better implemented law is one but only one. Human rights cannot be entirely parasitic in one form or another on law. The relation between human rights and legal rights is in fact a subject with some considerable history. The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 took it to be quote unquote self-evident that everyone is, I quote, endowed by the creator, by the creator with certain inalienable rights. And 13 years later in 1789, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man without invoking God asserted that quote unquote men are born and remain free and equal in right. These are clearly pre-legal claims to be reflected in law, not originating in law. It did not, however, take Jeremy Bentham Long to write in his book Anarchical Fallacies, which was written also in the same period as the Mary Wilson book, 1791-92, specifically against the French quote unquote rights of man, to propose the total dismissal of all such claims. Precisely because they are not legally based. Bentham insisted that natural rights is simple nonsense, natural and in prescriptible rights, he added an American phrase, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense of all stilts, which I take to be some kind of an nonsense artificially elevated. He went on to explain, actually, when I raise my voice, my face, I seem to hear myself more loudly. Can you hear me when I'm reading? You can hear me all the time. That brilliant. Couldn't be better. So he went on to say, right, the substantive right is a child of law. From real laws come real rights, but from imaginary laws from the laws of nature can come only imaginary rights. It's easy to see that Bentham's rejection of the idea of natural rights of man depends entirely on the insistence on the privilege use of the term of rights. Seeing it in specifically legal terms, there isn't an argument that there's a definition. However, in so far as human rights are meant to be significant ethical claims pointing to what we owe to each other and what claims we must take seriously. The diagnosis that these claims do not necessarily have legal or institutional force, at least not yet, is as obvious as it is irrelevant. Now, as it happened, even when Bentham was penning those words, Mary Wilson Cough was writing a book on rights, and so was Tom Payne, called the rightful man. And Tom Payne was identifying what we would now call human rights. None of them used that expression at that time, but it's much the same, to guide our public efforts, including efforts to give legal force to them through new legislation. In fact, Tom Payne was one of the earliest voices demanding anti-poverty legislation, which, as Garrett Steadman Jones, a Cambridge historian, has argued in his book, then, the poverty was extremely influential in the political discussion over the centuries on the subject. On Tom Payne's understanding, these rights were not as fundamental as the Bentham children of law, but in fact parents of law, providing grounds for legislation, a point to view that would receive support, as I already quoted two centuries later from the great Oxford philosopher, Herbert Hart. Mary Wilson Cough did something which was perhaps even more radical. She discussed elaborately how women's legitimate entitlements could be promoted by a variety of processes of which legislation was only one and need not even be the principal one. The effectiveness of these moral claims, their practical, quote-unquote, vindication, in addition to their ethical acceptance, would depend on a variety of social features, such as actual educational arrangements, public campaign for behavioural modification, for example, modifying what we would call sexist behaviour, and so on. The subject, I dare say, is fairly widely understood right now in America, but more broadly, Wilson Cough would not have been the least surprised, and the least surprised, that many social movements, including the work of NGOs such as the Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medicines en Frontier, Oxford and others, have been so effective in helping to protect and advance human rights in economic, social, political, medical, and other areas through channels other than legislation. I might actually give an example here, assuming that I'm doing all right for time. For example, India and Pakistan both have Human Rights Commission, but in India it actually had a legal status. It was one of the early legal innovations included in Pakistan. The Human Rights Commission is only an NGO, and nevertheless it has had a major influence on a number of cases, perhaps a man by the case where a Christian boy was about to be executed on grounds of blasphemy, their legal intervention, their actually arguing for this case, played a part. Perhaps the most striking was some years ago now, about almost eight, nine years ago, when the Taliban had occupied the Swarth Valley in the Frontier. They were establishing certain Taliban rules, including the witting and caning of young girls who violated the dress code. This fact was known in Pakistan, was resented, but the barbarity of it was not, in fact, very clear. Now someone, not a person I know, but a very close friend of someone I know extremely well, actually took a risk of his life to video one of these canings, by pretending to make a phone call. You can see him in the pictures, in agency pictures, of making a long phone call. He was in fact taking a video, and then he, he was caught, he would have been killed of course, so he came out and then put this in the media, and the media covered it all, and it, the outrage was so strong that the military, which had earlier said they would not intervene, had to chain their mind. Now that didn't, there's no legislation involved at all. It's just activism. The argument here is that if it, if these are ethical claims, then you should use all the instrument you have, and legislation is only one of them. So hard to think it's not the definition of human rights, it's one of the examples of how human rights as ethical claims could be used, and there could be other examples I have just given you on. In a sense, Mary Wilson Cough was pointing to ways, and by the way, she makes that point very clearly, to ways that provide powerful basis for the work that many non-legislative organizations today do. They were coming into their own already, but now they're of course, we live in a world in which many NGO are very prominent, and play a very big part. It also tells us something about the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights made in 1948, very much led by Eleanor Roosevelt, which paved the way for many constructive global activities, both in the form of legislation, as well as in the form of encouraging activists intervention in the violation, in the prevention of violation. In the term human rights that are worth recognizing are not, it can be a good subject for legislation at all, a point that would not have surprised Mary Wilson Cough in the least, in fact, she says that. For example, recognizing and defending a moral right to be consulted in family decisions, even in a traditionally sexist society, may well be extremely important and can plausibly be seen as a human right. Yet the advocates of this right, this human right, who emphasize correctly as far-reaching ethical and political relevance, would quite possibly agree that it's not sensible to make this human right into a quote-unquote-to- quote-heart language coercive legal rule. Perhaps with the result that a husband would be taken in custody if he were failed to consult his wife. The necessary social changes would have to be brought about in other ways. It's easy to find many examples of such legitimate but not ideally legislated human rights in the field of development. However, the more general point is that whether or not these serious claims are ideally legislated, there are also other ways of promoting them and these ways are part and parcel of the use of what Mary Wilson calls vindication of the rights of men and of women and indeed she gave examples of that. I now take up a few critical questions that can be asked to arrive in using a non-legal approach to rights. The first question is quite foundational. What gives importance to human rights? I have argued elsewhere in my book idea of justice that the importance of human rights relates to the significance of the freedom which form the subject matter of these rights. So that's where the base is the human rights generate reasons for action for agents who are in a position to help in the safeguarding of promoting of the underlying freedoms. The induced obligation primarily involved the duty to give reasonable consideration to the reasons for action and their practical implication. Through drawing on a Kantian distinction, one can see that human rights can lead to both perfect obligations, as Kant called them, in the form of precisely specified duty of particular individuals or organizations and imperfect obligations in the more general and less strict form of a duty for anyone in a position to help to consider, not necessarily do because we can't do everything, to consider what he or she should do to provide help rather than saying it's none of my business. The answer to the question what duties are correlated with recognized rights, the question often asked, thus has to be answered at different levels of specification. To give an example, in the famous case of Katie Genovese, who was killed in Queens in New York in 1964, in the plain view of many people who could have helped but didn't, at least that's a story that's been some debate on that recently, you could say that the violators are the person who killed and maltreated the woman, that's of course a clear violation of perfect obligation, and of course the loss of freedom, the woman suffered, which is the origin of it all, but there's also a failure of imperfect obligation in the Kantian sense, when people could have helped and did not, whether that is exactly the story has been distributed, so I'm not commenting on the facts of the matter, but if the fact as told is understood then that's a good example of imperfect obligation. The physical position of leader rights is often contrasted with the inescapable ambiguities of the ethical claims of human rights, and sometimes today on grounds that this really is not, should not be called rights as such. This contrast, however, is not in itself a great embarrassment for ethical claims, including those of imperfect obligation, since the framework of normative reasoning can sensibly allow variation that cannot be easily accommodated in fully specified perfect, in terms of perfect obligation or legal requirements. As Aristotle remarked in the Necomatian ethics, I quote that we have to look, quote on quote, we have to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits. I turn now to the second question, can we include in the domain of human rights claims on the society, such as economic or social entitlement, that are not entirely feasible, not entirely achievable at this time, because many of these human rights claim are not achievable at this time. Does the impossibility of complete fulfillment in the present situation nullify or damage or embarrass acclaimed human right? There have been many attempts in the rights literature to keep the idea of human rights confined to the so-called first-generation rights, like liberty or freedom from violence without including economic and social claims. This skepticism sometimes takes the form of arguing that unless there are institutions that are adequate to guarantee the complete fulfillment of a right, then there is no such right. I believe this argument, common as it is, is wholly mistaken, and unrealized right is a distinct category from a known right. It's an acknowledged right that is not yet fulfilled, and it's perhaps not completely fulfillable without some social changes. Indeed, precisely because we see claims of this kind as rights, we have particular reason to try to do what we can to make them realizable, and then we actually realize when necessary through new institutions. This is one of the issues that emerge from world-time craft frequent appeals to institutional change. Not because these are not rights yet, but these are unfulfilled rights. They are not yet vindicated, but the vindication demands certain things. The usefulness of the acceptance of some rights legitimate may lie at least partly in inspiring and helping to promote these institutional changes. The answer to the question why human rights, to the question why human rights lies to a great extent on the social role of human rights in translating an ethical value into practical action aimed at promoting that ethics. Today I should add the further point that if a complete guarantee of fulfillment were indeed accepted as a condition for any claim to be seen as a right, then not only the second generation rights connected with economic and social entitlement, but also first generation rights connected with liberty and non-interference would be entirely compromised. The elementary fact that it is not easy to guarantee or not possible to guarantee complete non-interference in each other's life and even to ensure the absence of violent interference was always clear enough, but that realization must be blatantly obvious today after such events as 9-11 or terrorist murders in London or Paris or Montréal and elsewhere and the regular statistics of murder that comes out every year in all the publications of cities. The first and second generation rights are not as distinct in terms of social ability as some critics of development rights have tended to make them. In fact, the supportive activities of social organizations are often aimed precisely at institutional change, when these activities can be seen as part of imperfect obligation that individuals and groups have in a society where basic human rights are violated. Ethical significance of these rights provide good grounds for seeking realization through institutional expansion and reform. Not surprisingly, in India today, the Dalit movement at DALIT, Dalit movement demanding rights for groups previously called untouchable and treated as such, makes extensive use of the idea of universal rights, a connection to which attention was drawn by the Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution. This use can be helped to a variety of approaches including demanding and agitating for appropriate legislation and the supplementation of legal demand by political recognition and social monitoring and indeed more generally social activism. To deny the ethical status of these claims would be to ignore the careful reasoning that fires these constructive activities. I move now to the third question. If human rights are not vindicated by legislation, rather legislation may draw on them, what criteria can we use for the ethical vindication of these claims? I would argue that like other ethical claims that are subjected to public reasoning, the robustness of human rights relate to the idea of survivability and unobstructed discussion. I've already said something on that and I'm going to skip a little bit to leave time for discussion, but really come back to that. I turn finally to the fourth question. Should the public reasoning that vindicate human rights be confined to one society only or should it have some universal standing? It often argued that in a world with much cultural variation and widely diverse practice there can be no rights that are universally accepted. Edmund Burke was one of the first to argue along this line in criticizing the French declaration of the rights of man. If he, because it came to be a universal, universal exception. If we wanted to base human rights on the intersection of what is already accepted in all the countries of the world no matter how secure that they are from the rest and no matter how authoritarian and tyrannical the regime is then this would indeed be a big problem for the human rights approach. The strategy of the human rights movement is in fact quite different. Partisanship is avoided not so much by either taking a conglomeration or an intersection of the views respectively held by the dominant voices in different societies across the world including very repressive ones. But through an interactive process in particular by examining what would survive in public discussion given a reasonably free flow of information and uncurved opportunity to discuss different point of view. Adam Smith's insistence that ethical scrutiny requires examining moral beliefs in the earlier quote on quote from a certain distance had a direct bearing on the connection of human rights to the global public reasoning. This argument Adam Smith outlines in some detail in this area of moral sentiment. And I quote from Smith we can never survey our own sentiments and motives. We can never form any judgment concerning them unless we remove ourselves as it were from our own natural station and endeavor to view them at a certain distance from us. We can do this in no other way than by endeavoring to view them with the eyes of other people or other people are likely to view them, unquote. The Smith's outline of reasoning has three very powerful implications for the theory of human rights. First the force of a claim for a human right would be seriously undermined if it were possible to show that they are unlikely to survive open public scrutiny. But contrary to a commonly often reason for skepticism and rejection the case for human right cannot be discarded simply by pointing to the fact that in politically and socially repressive regimes we do not allow open public discussion. Many of these human rights are not taken seriously at all. Uncurved critical scrutiny is essential for this vessel. Indeed as it is also for defense. Second we have to recognize that what are taken to be foreign criticism often correspond to internal criticism from non mainstream groups within the society itself. If say Iranian dissident imprisoned by an authoritarian regime precisely because of their heterodoxy any suggestion that they should be seen as quote unquote ambassador of the western values rather than as Iranian dissident will only add serious insult to manifest injury. Third as Adam Swift pointed out the values that are dominant are often influenced by prevailing practice. He illustrated this as he always did by taking societies that are much admired with the support that the support that infant infanticide received from Athenian intellectuals including Plato and Aristotle. What is needed is critical examination with explicit account being taken of how things look from a certain distance. At Smith put it I say I quote the mother of newborn infant for the practice allowed for off in almost all the states of Greece even among the polite and civilized Athenian. And whenever the circumstances of the parent rented it inconvenient to bring up the child to abandon it to hunger or to wild beast was regarded without blame or censor. Uninterrupted custom had by this time so thoroughly authorized the practice that not only the loose maxims of the world tolerated this barbarous prerogative but even the doctrine of philosopher which ought to have been more just and accurate was led away by the established custom. Aristotle talks of it as of what magistrate ought upon many occasions to encourage. Plato is of the same opinion and with all their love of mankind we seem to animate all their writings nowhere do they mark this practice with disapprovation unquote. What are taken to be perfectly normal sensible in an insulated society may not be able to survive a broad based and less limited examination once the parochial gut reactions are replaced by critical scrutiny including an awareness of various practices and norms across the world indeed. Even in that time a number of places these activities were regarded not only as immoral but illegal. Scruzilli from a certain distance may have something to offer in the assessment of practices as different from each other as the stoning of adulterous women entirely around Afghanistan and the abandoned use of capital punishment in parts of China, Iran or even the United States. This is the kind of issue that made Smith insist that the eyes of the rest of mankind must be invoked to understand whether a punishment appears equitable unquote. Ultimately the decision discipline of critical moral scrutiny requires among other things I quote endeavoring to view our sentiment with the eyes of other people. The need for interaction across the borders can be I fear as important in this society as there in four hours. So the answer to the question what's the use of human rights lies in the relevance in the reach of public reasoning for social ethics which tends to yield claims that can be conveniently called human rights. The domain of that reasoning can indeed be global rather than local. This calls for some idea as to what global public reasoning would yield and this is to some extent of course a guesswork but that is increasingly an area of active engagement in the interactive world in which we live. The point to note here is not so much whether we are permitted to make cross border scrutiny but the discipline of critical assessment of moral sentiments as Adam said argued with such clarity no matter how locally established they are requires that we must view them in a non parochial perspective. A human rights approach to social ethics has to take note of the importance of such critical engagement sounds frontier. This is an important issue on which Mary Wilson crowd and Edmund Burke differ radically. That difference remains critical today. Thank you. Professor Sen will take questions. There's a microphone up front it would be very helpful if you would come to the front to ask your questions. It would also be very nice if we could have fairness in asking the questions. I will intervene if I feel it's necessary but I encourage you to ask yourself what fairness in asking the questions might look like. So this microphone is open I do encourage you to come up. Hi Professor Sen I'm wondering about the institution of economics which doesn't really do ethics anymore. Can we change it change economics and become ethical ethicists as well? You're asking me to accept your diagnosis and then asking me to provide a remedy. There's involved two challenges. I don't know enough about institutional economics to be able to determine whether I accept your proposal I'm sure there are good arguments you must have for them but sometimes I would like to see what these arguments are and then I can proceed to the second question. But you know as an incurable optimist let me say if there was such a defect it could be rectified because it seems to me that there's no intellectual discipline is immune to rectification. That doesn't say anything about institutional economics by the way as it's particular something but then. So thanks for asking that question. Great thanks. So you talked about how we should encourage a non parochial global public reasoning. So I'm wondering how would you envision a global public discourse that doesn't just lend itself to the dominant discourse that comes from Western intellectual thought? Like how do we maintain a diversity of thought in global discourse? Anytime to understand the question. How I could encourage global discussion with that not come from what? How do we encourage diversity of thought in this global discourse given that Western intellectual thought has had such a dominant force on thinking throughout the world? I mean I think there's two things that are just a good question but there are two things here. One is that if global discourse is important then you have to recognize that you should try to do it and you accept that you may not be entirely successful to start with. And I think I've come back to that point but the second point is that I think the immovable nature of the discourse because of the power of the Western heritage is I think over emphasized. I think that's that's the kind of argument that people have always given against change on grounds that you can't really you know they're so powerful accepted and if people accepted that then I don't think they they would have changed the world in the way it happened from time to time and quite often indeed. So I would say that I'm not as pessimistic and if it were the case that you're not allowed to publish things that you can't write you're offered in the New York Times or the or the Guardian then that would be one thing but that's not the world in which we live necessarily. And it's certainly true that often you don't get encouragement in that and you may meet resistance but there are a lot of ways in which there is much greater awareness of the different points of view in the world. Sometimes I think sometimes too much ground is given particularly in the context say in the feminist literature there have been this debate about certain customs which may thought to be maybe thought to be anti-women for the very good reason that they are anti-women in a number of cultures and there's been attempt to give it a protection on grounds that it's somebody else's point of view but I think the right thing to do is to bring it into open discussion is effective of which society it is. That doesn't mean that ultimately what you decide to do would not have some contingency of social condition but the idea that it's their values and not ours and therefore and they're you know they're right in their own domain and you are right in yours. I think that's that's a cop out really and so I'm sure that that's not what you are after I think what you are considering is how to grow and how to try to have one of it. I think they can't say it's more like practice, practice and practice. Thank you. Hi Dr. Sen I wanted to ask what your thought was on the way in which some rights facilitate other rights so particularly economic rights. So your thought on how we need a global public discourse you know isn't it necessary do you think it's necessary for us to ensure some basic quality of life in order for global public discourse to even be possible or other economic rights? Yeah I think global type public discourse is important and it helps but I don't think you will hold anything up on grounds that there hadn't been a global public discourse on that subject and for example if I look at the say the Dalit movement the untouchable former untouchable movement for for I mean the constitution gives them life but they are that often they're violated your need activism but what is holding it up is not public discourse or global public discourse what's holding it up is the nature of the class system in India which makes it very difficult for these people to rise the imposition of influence so I think while we should always demand global public discourse I don't think we should hold anything hostage to not having enough of it to to that but but your ultimate question namely or what took to be the basic question is that how do we encourage it? I think there's many ways of encouraging and then you see I'm one of those NGOs I think get a big bad wrap in the world today I think many of them are doing just that I was a very privileged and very proud of the fact that for three years I was president of Oxfam and that among the though we began as a family anti-family institution among the thing that Oxfam achieved was to bring a lot of discussion about issues that were happening in the in the public across the world so I think there are many different ways of pursuing them and I think you can make a contribution I can make a contribution and I think this is what Kant would call an imperfect obligation that we all have to to to help advance public so you're asking the right question thank you oh I see okay so my question is how do we relate sustainability since it's such sustainability with with welfare economics in terms of the future because we have to go into a sustainable future to maintain economics I couldn't hear you know I have a hearing talk okay so my question I actually got a hearing A that one state in in that I went to lunch in Trinity and I felt so ashamed of myself and ignoring my immediate interlocutor and listening eavesdropping on everyone's conversation that I decided to put it in my pocket but I should have got it out today if I knew yeah yeah yeah absolutely so my question come closer to it yeah so my can you hear me now better okay so my question to you is how do we how can we relate sustainability with social economics yeah I don't know the answer social economics you have to explain to me what that is so I mean with social economics I mean like welfare economics which you've specialized in that's economic it is economic yeah I think I think I was they didn't institute they're the institution they're the association called social economics I think and I was I found that when I went to the meeting I thought I was put down as one of the what was the description one of the fathers of the socially social economics and I had to say that this was more like a paternity suit than anything else because to me it's not a different subject that's what economics is about I think the last thing and I'm not answering the question but I am saying something which is important I tell my student to give the ground saying okay what you do is economic no matter how little you think it relates to what economics is ultimately about I do something called social economics give me a ground I think it's just a mistake I think we have to claim ground that what we are doing is economic is not social economics if you want to classify of course it will classify social economics or societal economics or anything like that but there was another concept of complexity in your thing relating social economics to what sustainability and sustainable development I don't want to say sustainable development is a very central economic question I would relate to that one called social economics I just don't know I know how it relates to economics namely if you value something and if you would like it to be sustained then you have to find ways and means of making that possible that's what sustainable policies are sustainable economics is and so on I think these are big issues of economics as such okay and really I'm quite serious in saying don't present it off somewhere else on grounds that they're doing economics and you are doing something for social economics okay resist it hello professor san thanks for coming regarding regarding human rights and accessibility to natural resources such as water and other resources that are critical to human life such as commodities like corn, wheat and soybeans where would you see the balance shifting in the future between corporations harnessing the rights to use these commodities and nations and the balance between corporations and countries and it'd be commodities being a human right for everybody to use at that you know the corporations have a certain role they have certain disadvantages and they also generate some problem I think at that general level I don't think and this is serious I don't think you're going to be able to answer the question at that level of general you know I think there are some economic problems with demand specific statement of the conditions under which you are asking the question and then you could give an answer to that but it's like how do I promote virtue without losing pleasure in leading a life very big question but you won't get a general answer to that question all right thank you I encourage you to think about that but contingently specify the circumstances then ask the question yes is the show on hand is there is there currently a good way in economics to measure the value of human rights value of human rights of human rights is there currently a good way in economics to measure the value of human rights I don't know what valuing of human rights as an activity would consist in we value human rights obviously I won't be giving dyslexia if I didn't value human rights I'm asking whether I can attach some number like 23.5 to that I think there are certain types of scale in which I might try to do that but you know let's get there I think there's measurement issue or there's a huge confusion in economics the basic pretty much anything we are interested in is measurable in what sense the basis of measureability is ranking think about the mathematical sequence you begin with what you call the partial ranking you can rank A against B but you can't rank B, B against C so you got a partial ranking then you get a complete ranking then with some more conditions you get a complete ranking which can be numerically represented not all of them are then with some more axioms you can numerically measure them in scale such that not only can you say it's higher or lower but you can compare the differences then at another level you can compare differences of differences and further down and get what sometimes called cardinal scale and then with some further assumptions you can even compare ratio like saying 16 kilogram is twice 8 kilogram now in each level you are getting some measurement at a different degree of exactness but it began with a partial order and at each level you are getting saying something now as I quoted Aristotle you're not it would be a mistake for you to look for a measureability in some subject which does not admit of a measureability of that kind of axiomatic structure now this is when somebody says culture is extremely valuable however it cannot be measured what do you mean then you could say it's a pity it cannot be measured so I could say why is it a pity and he said well because it cannot be measured and people who stick to measureability don't use it I said is as a result the world is worse off for not taking that into account and the answer could be yes well you have got a partial ordering right there namely the world without these cultural features taken into account is worse than a world in which it's taken into account so there's there's no way of escaping measureability measureability is like speaking foes which we're always doing but just as earlier Christian mentioned that the contingency of actual circumstances are important the nature of the variable in question will tell you to what extent it could be measured and how now I think many of these human rights are valuable in the sense of ranking you could say that I will not accept this I will not accept that say take the Dalai's movement that some people don't have the right to go to good school not because is denied legally but there are no good schools in these areas and you could say that this is a shame and somebody said well how would you compare with something else like the badness of raising taxes to get the money all the badness of cutting down some other program but then you are comparing them that's the way the valuation will come in and the human rights discourses and debates are about that kind of value mostly they are partial ordering some of them are are more more fuller ordering and some of them admit a great deal of memorability when you are particularly involved now I give a course in medical school on on on such issues about changing healthcare and then there are issues like life expectancy mortality rates and they are quite clearly measurable so it really depends on the circumstances in question I'm sorry I gave you a longer answer than you probably wanted but it's something that worries me since I've I've spent a fair amount of my life doing what is called mathematical economics in fact my first book on that collective choice and social welfare and this is a press talk ad talk now I'm publishing the second edition after 50 years in large so I'm twice and I have some mathematical chapters I'm not a mathematical chapter but there's also a discussion of what is measurability in that and that will be published by Harvard next year and by Penguin in England but so you don't have to buy it you can borrow it from the library how do you think we can relate the world of corporate finance to development economics or welfare economics and do you think the financial world is contributing more to inequality or to development I don't know the answer to that question I don't know actually much financial economics and corporate finance I've never learned anything about corporate finance and I think in my deathbed I would be able to make that statement again no it's not my subject and do I think it to be unimportant no I don't I think it was important and I think those who I'm going to take a concrete example I think that the fact that that was around Rajan who was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India the fact that he has an enormous influential study of why financial institutions are important he persuaded me not that I became a financial economy I persuaded me and I thought he did a lot of good when he was there then he fell out of favor with the government and he's left or he doesn't say that's why he left but generally that's what the press say so I do regard them to be important but not everything that's so I regard it as important I'm going to do ballet dancing it's not going to be one of my things thank you Hello Dr. Sen can you hear me you have to hold it can you hear me now yeah so my question is what do you think which reform should come first social political or economical you have to do all of them together it's like saying what should you have breakfast lunch or dinner I think you should have all of them okay but and why why you know I think this is this is also like a I'm sorry you're I'm getting tempted to give these long answers which I'm told by my children is a terrible thing to do but the fact is when they one you could do one but not the other you have to choose then the question is which is more important is right when my boss asked me would I like coffee or tea I said tea because I wouldn't be drinking tea and coffee both I would have one or the other but social political and economic reform is not like that if you do political reform that doesn't prevent you from doing economic reform or social reform and indeed there is a good case and try to make in a in a kind of a primer book a very elementary book called Development of Sweden that they actually supplement each other and so try to do them all together that's not impossible when I land in Bombay somebody asked me if you had to do three things in India today what would you do and I have to say well why three why not 137 I mean there's no particular reason why is it confined I mean the world has complication and the bound that's in many ways but on top of that you don't want to bond yourself up by putting arbitrary limitations we don't exist just one minute it's you mentioned about Dr. Ambedkar right but in his book he mentioned that social reform should precede political and economic reform he didn't say that no what he said was that he said and I do discuss that that remark which is much misunderstood he was the constitution of the Indian the architect of the Indian constitution Indian constitution in 1949 was the first one in the world to have affirmative action it gets special place for that and it doesn't get enough credit for it but it did and it did have a considerable effect on the country he was saying that many things can be achieved by legislation but not everything can be achieved by legislation and you also need economic reform economic change he talked about economic inequality he talked also about the social attitude and he talked about education and so on so he didn't say that social reform should precede others he said that these well he may have said that in some context in the debate yeah you could say listen I really think before what you are doing we ought to do social reform that doesn't mean I really believe that I should do only social reform and not that either so you know I think what he was arguing and Ambedkar's vision and he is a for those who are interested here should read something of Ambedkar he was himself a great untouchable leader quote unquote and I think he yeah he generates a kind of taxismo reaction from the from the present government because they would not like supportive view for reasons that are not entirely unconnected with their with their cultural and religious disposition and at the same time wouldn't like to say so since he is so revered and of course they don't like him particularly since at the end of his life he decided to become a Buddhist and so that's what you guys looked at as a kind of denial of the heritage of India overlooking that India was a Buddhist country for a thousand years and it's as much a as much a tradition as the Hindu tradition so people like quoting these things and I think Ambedkar has been more wrongly quoted and wrongly interpreted than anyone else so since you are interested don't join that do the opposite try to read what he said why he said it and why is that very important today it was important in 1949 when he finished the the editing of the constitution he said we are achieving many things to this this is the same strong as my talk legal is very important but not the only thing but there are many things that will have to happen in a non-legal way you can attribute to Ambedkar and easily and you can attribute to my emotional ground actually I come from Ambedkar Bank so I'm curious about the ongoing discussion in the development world especially the high level development institutions like the World Bank about the nexus between development economics and the humanitarian work especially in light of recent refugee crises and along with that I'm curious about your thoughts on the economic rights implications for protracted refugee crises especially I'm hearing some of them but not everything are you going to interpret that right okay thank you I can rephrase not too much yeah yeah actually rephrasing is one thing but getting close to the mic may be even better oh okay yeah all right I have there was a in one of my youthful days when I was in the nightclub the singer told me the right way of being listened to and being make sure that others listen is to try to kiss the microphone without actually kissing it I am curious about your I'm curious about your thoughts on the ongoing discussion in the development world the World Bank for example in regards to the nexus between development economics and humanitarian work especially with respect to ongoing refugee crises and the economic rights implications for protracted refugee crises like refugee camps yeah well I think that that's a very strong connection um you see I think the the interesting thing is that they're not they're a little dissimilar categories to compare development economics is the subject humanitarian works is an activity you could ask the question for development economics take into account humanitarian activities and their influence I think very much so and indeed to the extent I've written on development from time to time like the development of freedom I discussed that and indeed I think to say NGOs I was praising NGOs even from that podium that of course is humanitarian work not every NGO does humanitarian work some of them may do anti-humanitarian work but mostly the good ones do and if you look at you know take an example say Bangladesh crack has done a major thing if you try to understand what's going on in Bangladesh why for example Bangladesh which has half the per capita income as India used to have three years less life expectancy 20 years ago and now have three years more life expectancy why infant mortality and child mortality in lower in Bangladesh why there are more girls educated as a proportion in Bangladesh than in India you won't be able to escape many things of which a very important one is the role of NGOs and the humanitarian activity that they're perceived so even in terms of epistemology as the development economist who is doing his or her job no matter what his or her politics that political inclinations are you have to take into account because these are big influences and this has happened again and again actually and if you look at even the history of medical expansion the removal of epidemics and so on these have often come from people working for humanitarian activities and sometimes they are combined with scientific activities to give an example when I was 18 I had cancer I had cancer in the mouth I had radiation of adults which people don't any longer get because these were early days of cancer research six years after Hiroshima I was being treated in Calcutta only about 12-15 years ago Mary Curie in Paris had worked on that subject on the radiation and its impact and they were doing some of the early things I was the third case of radiation treatment of cancer in that cancer hospital in Calcutta which actually happened to be opened by another Madame Curie namely the daughter of the famous one but she was very famous too and these if you look at their activities many of them were scientific curiosity many of them were the humanitarian commitment so of course ultimately took a risk and gave a life on that so I think the way people's life changed as a result of humanitarian activities often done far away in my case 6,000 miles away not in Calcutta but in Paris made a major difference and you see our epistemological sources are various sometimes very easy to get hold of sometimes extremely difficult to see how things are changing and attitude in a change is one of the most important things that have been studied I mean I was looking for example an NGO called Tostan which was strictly concerned with such issues as genital mutilation now some of the basic research was based on the history of Chinese foot binding and they discovered an important game theoretic connection namely that it was very difficult to get people to agree that they wouldn't allow their children to be daughters to be footbound but it was very difficult to get five percent ten percent but once it get to 40 percent then there was a kind of it rolled on to about 100 percent and so that's what Tostan was trying to do with genital mutilation so these are based on epistemology understanding how these things spread there's an enormous amount to be done and these are not market economics not that market economics are not important it's very important and even financial economics though I don't know anything about it I'm told it's very important so but so are these things so the human life depends on a variety it's like the question about social economic political they all come into our life and these humanitarian activities have an enormous presence in our life and if you think about institutions like national health service they're a kind of mixture you know there may be government things and people talk about accountability but accountability is one way of catching a thief and making people more responsible but many of these are not accountability driven at all people do it because professionally they have the obligation to perform that because they're a doctor they have to do something and this has come up again and again going back to Hippocratic time and that issue you can call it humanitarian yes you could call it professional and obligation is it market related it's not unrelated to market but is it market driven I don't think so it's driven by other things I mean when I was on my way coming back from India to here I called my doctor where you know I spent the summer in India in England and then my national health service doctor said she was going you know I wanted I was suffering from some ailment which I'm out of now but I asked her can you see whether I had that in the record and she told me well I'm finishing at six I was hoping to go home soon but I will look for it and then she wrote to me and I noticed at eight thirty saying that she began by saying I'm much better in medical advice than on historical research but I've now found out that you didn't have any symptoms that we can look at now she did not have to do it they would not accountability she had done her work why was she staying up there she was staying up there because she felt she was a doctor she could help me I think assume that economics is such a blind subject that it cannot recognize it to do is to do a dishonor to a subject which I think it doesn't dissolve it's the subject of Adam Smith and the theory of moral sentiment though oddly enough people have ended up saying that he thought that everything is driven by profit motive which is exactly what he denied and if you want to read the theory of moral sentiment the first sentence denies it saying that there's something in human life which make us do certain things not out of any gain that we're going to have so I know that people don't read books but not to read the first sentence it's quite an achievement but thank you for asking that question so please thank our speaker in the tradition of the department to give the speaker a framed photograph of her or his gamble lecture and we will not break with that tradition so we will send this to you by mail but well we'll send it to you for a year as long as you don't describe him that might pay with man and please let us thank our speaker thank you very much thank you