- It's almost
impossible to introduce someone who's really a heroic
figure in intellectual life-- in economics, in
philosophy, and just the pursuit of social
justice in the world. I think I'll start by talking
about Sen's upbringing in Santiniketan, where he
grew up with a father who was an expert in Hindu religion--
who wrote the Penguin Introduction to Hinduism-- to which Amartya has contributed
an introduction and an editing job. His mother was one
of Tagore's leading dancers in his
musical extravaganzas in his experimental school. And in fact, the
name Amartya was coined by Tagore, who thought
that "immortal one" is a good name for a
young boy to have. And so growing up in this very
rich, nurturing-- but also humanistic and arts-filled--
environment, I think, was a very important thing
to draw attention to. Because that kind of education
that that school provides this increasingly in
short supply in the world. He went from there to
Presidency College in Calcutta, and then on to
Cambridge University, where he had the famous Joan
Robinson as his thesis advisor. And his thesis was
monograph Choice of Techniques-- his first book. After that, he taught at both
Jadavpur University in Calcutta and the Dehli
School of Economics, but then went on various
visits to the US-- at both MIT and Stanford-- but then taught
for a long period as a Professor of Economics
at Oxford University, and then moved to Harvard
University, where he still the Lamont University Professor. However, in the
middle he was also a Master of Trinity
College Cambridge, between 1998 and 2004. And then, also in '98-- and the
program is wrong about this. I think the program
awarded you the Nobel Prize 10 years earlier
than you actually got it. Also in '98, he was awarded
the Nobel Prize in economics. And the following year-- an
equally important award-- the Bharat Ratna Award,
the highest civilian award awarded by the
Indian government. He's still passionate
citizen of India as well as living
in the US and being very involved in
British affairs as well. There are just three
features of Amartya's work that I want to mention,
which you have all seen in reading his work--
and which you'll see today. First, its technical brilliance. That's just beyond question. And I think is a large part
of what made it possible for him to address these
foundational issues of justice, and get the hearing of
the economics profession. But the second is
it's a determination to pursue foundational
questions, and to do that in a way that-- one might say-- is
interdisciplinary. Although, as he's
always stressed, the economics used to have that
as an internal part of itself, and that is to address the
foundational philosophical questions about justice that
are so crucial to thinking about economic problems. And then, finally, just
the passionate concern for how people live, and for
just in real human lives. You see this especially in
his new book on justice. But I think that's what
motivates and informs really everything else about his work. And it's what really motivates
the pursuit of the capabilities approach, which really does
say that the central question for development should be
what is each person actually able to do and to be. So he's going to
speak to us today on capabilities and justice. So please welcome
Professor Amartya Sen. [APPLAUSE] - Thank you. Well, I'm delighted
to be back here. And I'd like to thank the
organizers of the meeting, Jim and Martha, for their
kindness of inviting me, and Martha for the very kind-- over generous, but I won't
complain about that-- introduction. Actually, even though
I read that my name is meant to be immortal-- mean immortal-- I recognize
that the need for replacement has come. And I'm gradually trying
to replace, bit by bit. I've got metal
knees, and I've just replaced my lenses in the eye. So at the moment,
there's nothing here, because that's still recovering. But I don't think-- reading is not
always easy, but I think it may be slightly better
with the middle distance, for reasons that may
or may not be clear. I tried to argue in a recent
book, The Idea of Justice, that our understanding
of the idea of justice-- as it's conceptualized with
it's practical implications-- demands some clearly
radical departures from the mainstream
theories of justice that are dominant at the present time. The ongoing philosophy of
justice is too strongly dependent on the particular way
of thinking that was largely initiated by Thomas Hobbes
in the 17th century, and which concentrates on
identifying perfectly just social arrangement, and "taking
the characterization of just institutions," quote unquote,
"to be the principle-- and often the only identified-- task of the theory of justice." This way of seeing justice
is woven, in different ways, around the idea of a
hypothetical social contract-- an imagined contact that the
population of a sovereign state are supposed to be a party to. Major contributions were made in
this line of thinking by Hobbes in the 17th century--
as I mentioned-- and later by John Locke,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, among others. The contactarian approach has
become the dominant influence in contemporary
political philosophy, led by the most prominent--
and I believe the finest-- political philosopher
of our time, John Rawls, whose classic book-- A Theory of Justice,
published in 1971-- presents a definitive statement
on the social contract to pursue justice. But it also applies to other
theories of justice that are quite popularly
presented in these days-- in the modern
political philosophy-- Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick,
David Gautiere, and so on-- even though they
disagree with each other, they shared that feature. Some of these points I did
try to say in the morning, in the class. And I recognize this is a
larger group than at that-- I said the class, but I
didn't mean class, of course-- that was going on. So I will-- some people
might be slightly bored, since for the
first three minutes there is a lot of overlap
with what I said before, in the morning. In contrast, a number of other
Enlightenment theorists-- Adam Smith, the
Marquis de Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft--
in the 18th century-- Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill-- in the 19th, and
others, took a variety of approaches that deferred
in many ways from each other, but shared the common
interest in making comparisons between different ways in
which people's lives may go. Jointly influenced by the
working of institutions-- but not just institutions-- people's actual behavior,
their social interactions, and other factors that
significantly impact on what actually happens. The analytical and rather
mathematical discipline of social choice theory-- which had its origin
in the same period, in the works of the
French mathematicians in the 18th century, in
particular Condorcet, but also others
like both Borda-- offers, I argue in
the book, a richer-- and I think in some
ways more useful-- approach to thinking
about the idea of justice. In the book, I've discussed how
the approach of social choice theory can help the pursuit
of public reasoning aimed at the removal of
diagnosable injustice in the actual world
in which we live. And by social choice theory, I
don't mean only social choice theory. In the narrow sense, also
what they call public choice theory-- particularly the work
of James Buchanan-- is a major part, I
think, of that heritage. The task of the theory of
justice in this approach is not that of
speculating and dreaming about a perfectly just world-- or even about perfectly
just institutions-- but using public
scrutiny to arrive at an agreed diagnosis
of manifest injustices, on the elimination of which
a reasoned agreement could emerge. If our concentration has to be
on the actual lives of people, the question that
immediately arises is how to understand
the richness and poverty of human life. The capability
approach, which is part of the theme
of this conference, focuses on the freedom
that people actually enjoy. It's useful to begin
by discussing-- why is this approach distinctive? The focus on freedoms
and capabilities differs sharply from many
other approaches to assessing the demands of justice-- for example, as with
institutional libertarianism, looking for the fulfillment
of certain formal rights that people should
have, whether or not these rights can be
actually exercised in a way that would have an impact on
the lives of these people. Many of these rights
can, of course, have an important
instrumental role in advancing more
free social life. That's not denied. But the pursuit of
justice cannot stop there. For example, to take
an extreme example, it is very nice and reassuring
to know that the state-- or any other person-- would
not prevent a destitute from going to Capris or
Acapulco to have a good holiday. But this society
may have to go a bit beyond securing the
individual's right to do what they can
do on their own, and consider what
society or the state can reasonably do to facilitate
the freedom of the people to achieve what they
have reason to value. It's important not
to be restricted by the reading of freedom within
institutional libertarianism. If that is important-- I go on to argue-- then the need to go beyond the
mental metrics of utilities, in the form of pleasure
and desired fulfillment, is surely another
important issue. The evaluative exercise of
taking note of people's actual freedoms cannot be avoided
by concentrating, instead, on some features of
mental reaction-- whether pleasure or
happiness, on the other side, desire fulfillment-- as the utilitarians of various
kinds from Jeremy Bentham onwards-- Henry Thidwick, Edward
deGaulle, to Ramsey-- have proposed. John Stuart Mill
was the exception to this utilitarian
tradition, in the sense that he describes
himself as utilitarian, but questioned it deeply-- mainly because he was much more,
in fact, than a utilitarian. I learned from Richard Reeves'
excellent biography of John Stuart Mill that Mill was
tempted by the narrowly utilitarian view--
ignoring everything else-- when he was 15. And 15 does seem like a good age
to be a dedicated utilitarian. Even if chronically
deprived persons-- for example, the hopelessly
poor or the long term unemployed or subjugated housewives--
learn to come to terms with and accept cheerfully
their deprived lifestyles-- underprivileged people
without hope of liberation often try to do
just that, to cope with the inescapability
of the deprivation involved-- that cultivated
cheerfulness will not eliminate the real
deprivation from which they will continue to suffer. In pursuing the perfect
rule of freedom, there are of course many
difficulties to be addressed and problems to be resolved. That is part of the exercise. Freedom has many
aspects and many faces, and it is necessary
both to distinguish between them and to
the focus of analysis depending on the nature
of the problem that is being addressed-- for example, in dealing with
the issue of torture and its unacceptability as
a means to other, allegedly more important, ends,
pursued in the contemporary world-- as it happens-- by many world powers,
including some leaders of the global establishment. What would be
particularly important is to see the relevance here
of the classical libertarian perspective on freedom-- like that pursued by John Stuart
Mill and, in this respect, Frederick Hayek-- arguing for the immunity
of every human being from forcible infliction
of pain and humiliation by others, including the state. This can be partly fitted into
the capability perspective, but it greatly predates
the modern development of the capability approach. And its concerns go go
well beyond checking who has which capability into
the causal influences that leads to capability deprivation
in each particular case, giving some special importance
to the tyranny of others. The need for-- and the
possibility of-- integrating liberties in this sense with
other social priorities have received a good deal
of analytical attention in contemporary social
choice theory as well-- pointing to feasibilities
as well as barriers which have to be overcome. And I think, well,
beyond I was trying to do something with a
capability approach in 1971. I published a short paper in
the Journal of Political Economy arguing why you
may have to go not only against aggregate
utilitarianism, but even against the
parental principle, if you really took
liberty seriously. This is in many ways a mistake. Even though it was
a four page paper, it immediately generated
about 250 papers. And I have to defend
myself, as well as-- with this extension--
as well as-- various things
happened, actually. And they observed
a lot of time-- I think probably
it was worth it. But what I'm emphasizing
here is that there's no conflict because of my
interest in the priority of liberty in some
issues in the context that would apply even to
the theory of justice. And the fact that the
capability cannot capture it all doesn't change the
story in any way. There's greater relevance
of other aspects of freedom when the focus instead on
issues of economic and social disadvantage an advantage-- and, in general, on the
inequality of the life that different people
are able or not able to lead in a society. These aspects of freedom
can be captured better by a fuller use of the general
capability approach, which concentrates on the
actual opportunities a person has to do
this or be that-- things that he or she
may value doing or being. Obviously, the
things we value most are particularly important
for us to be able to achieve. And somehow in evaluating
the capabilities in the form of the sets of alternative
combinations of functionings that we can have-- alternative
doings and beings that we can have-- in evaluating how we value them
has to remain quite critically important. But the idea of
freedom also respects our being free to determine-- to have to go
beyond this, and be free to determine what
we want, what to value, and ultimately what
we decide to choose. It should indicate that
the-- it's not a question-- that there is no question
asked about preferences and valuation-- the ability to
re-examine preferences-- the capability to do that-- to learn from
surroundings, to overcome what Marx called
false consciousness or objective illusion. That's another terms
Marx used, which could be quite relevant, too. It's easily checked. That means that is in-- and anyway, Marx thought it
mainly in the context of class, but I've tried to
argue elsewhere that it applies much more
in the case of gender, because people live
in the same family. And a kind of
harmonious life requires that you don't talk about
conflict, even though you are dealing with a situation
of cooperative conflict-- when cooperation generates
benefits, but in a differential way. And if the division
will deliver benefits, which is really
the central issue-- and people often get this quite
wrong, in the sense that-- and it's not just in
the context of feminism, but also in globalization--
saying that, well, you know, even the poorer
countries are benefiting. So what's the grumble about? Well, the grumble
isn't about that. As John Nash noted in
a revolutionary paper in Econometrica in 1950,
in fact [INAUDIBLE] economic, The
Bargaining Problem, that's true of
many circumstances where everyone benefits. The question is, which of
these would you choose? How would you benefit? How would you choose the
distribution of benefits? And that applies as much to
the issue of globalization as it does to the question of
men and women in the family. And indeed, the retort saying
that if you don't like-- if you think family-- I once published a
book jointly called The Tyranny of the Family. I guess in America I
might have been lynched for that, because the family
values are so extraordinarily important here. But the retort-- that if women
don't like living in families, why don't they live outside? That's not the issue
that's being discussed. The question is,
living in the family, there are many
alternative divisions. And here it really
turns of the freedom of being able to
understand what's going on, and where the issue
of false consciousness comes in-- to be able
to see that there may be some illusion that the
requirement of family living has generated, which one
has to go beyond in order to pursue justice
in this context. Is easily checked that means
such as incomes and other resources-- while valuable in
the pursuit of capabilities-- and not themselves indicators-- I'm moving to a
different subject now-- indicators of the
capabilities and freedoms that people actually have. The ability of the person
to convert resources into capabilities
depends on a variety of contingent circumstances. For example, the
person's biological, physical, and mental
characteristics, his or her proneness to illness-- the physical, social, and
epidemiological environment in which the person
lives, and so on. The real opportunities that
different persons enjoy are very substantially influenced
by variations to individual circumstances, for
example-- age, disability, proneness to illness, special
talents or the absence thereof, gender, maternity, and so on-- and also by disparities in the
natural and social environment in which people live-- epidemiological conditions, the
extent of pollution around one, the prevalence of local crime. Under these circumstances,
an exclusive concentration on inequalities of income
distribution cannot be adequate for an understanding
of economic inequality. Valuing human
freedom differs thus from focusing on
income or wealth, which Aristotle had already noted
more than 2,000 years ago. Referring to
"wealth is evidently not the good we
are seeking, for it is merely useful and for
the sake of something else", unquote. If you focus on freedom, we
would of course be interested-- deeply interested-- in income
and wealth as well, inter alia, that persons respectively
have, and in other such means captured within the broad
category of what John Rawls called primary goods. But ultimately, we
have to go beyond that and examine the freedom that
people actually do enjoy. Consider an example. Being disabled has a double
effect in reducing the person's ability to earn an income-- what can be called
their earning handicap-- and in making the
conversion of income into good living
that much harder, thanks to the cost
of prosthetics and the arranging
assistance, and, of course, the impossibility
of fully correcting certain types of disadvantages
caused by disability. And this can be called
a conversion handicap. For example, of a person
who happens to be, say, crippled by an
accident or by illness may need assistance, or
a prosthesis, or both. And even then, the person
would, in all probability, not become as able to move
around freely as someone without that disability. The conversion handicap
refers to the disadvantage that the disabled person
had in converting income into good living-- or the freedom of life. A system of poverty removal
that concentrates only on the lowness of income-- in particular, whether
a person's family income is below the poverty line
specified for that society-- will catch the earning handicap
fine, but not the conversion handicap at all. And this could make the poverty
relief program fundamentally inadequate and ineffective. Let me illustrate the influence
of conversion handicap with some results from the
poverty study in the United Kingdom-- discussing also
for the inadequacy of the poverty
redressing arrangements in British society. The results obtained by
a brilliant young student at Cambridge,
called Wibke Kuklys a German student who,
alas, died tragically shortly after completing her PhD
from a virulent type of cancer which gave her no
chances at all. In that illuminating
PhD thesis-- which was published later by
the Social Choice and Welfare Society's normal publisher,
Springer, as a separate book. But when I tried to
write an introduction, since she was no longer there. Well, see, I think she
saw the final proof just before she went. Taking a poverty cutoff line
of 60% of the British National median income, she was
working on the picture in 1996 to '99 in Britain, Kuklys
found that 17.9% to 18% of individuals lived in
families with below-poverty-line income-- if you take all
the families in Britain. Yet now, attention is shifted
to individuals and families with a disabled member-- look at only those families--
by the way, it's quite high. People don't even recognize--
one in 10 persons in the world has significant disability. It's about 600 million people
in a world of 6 billion. This is the World
Bank's statistics. If attention is shifted to
that, the percentage of such individuals from disability
affected families living in below-poverty-line
income is 23.1%-- so let's say 23%. So it goes up from 18% to 23%,
a jump of 5 percentage points, reflecting largely the
earning handicap associated with disability of their
affected members of the family, and the earning
disadvantage of others in the family who have to
take care of the disabled. It's now conversion handicap is
introduced, and note is taken-- and she couldn't, of
course, deal directly with the capability space. She did what
economists often do-- looked at the income needed-- the indirect utility space
it is sometimes called-- what is needed in order
to compensate for it. So she looked at the
dual, as it were. If that is introduced,
note is taken of the need for more income to
ameliorate the disadvantages of disability-- to the extent it
can be ameliorated-- through prosthesis,
through assistance, and other counteracting
arrangements. The proportion of individuals in
families with disabled members who have thus corrected-- who have family income that
is below that corrected income level, taking into
account the extra-- that goes up from 23% to 47.4%-- more than 24 percentage points
higher than the poverty ratio when note is taken only
of earning handicap, but not of conversion handicap. Indeed, the bulk
of the poverty-- even in terms of
inadequate income, without taking any note of
the irremediable aspects of capability disadvantage
of the disabled-- turns out to be due to the
conversion handicap going well beyond their earning handicap
by four or five times, well beyond the earning
handicap on which the poverty statistics concentrate. This can make the standard
poverty relief programs very inadequate, one-sided,
and unfair-- unless we look not just
at low incomes earned-- which is the way it all goes-- but also at the insufficiency
of income to overcome the capability
disadvantage related to the conversion handicap. That is, to bring
in the dual state for the extra income needed. And then again, that
is an understatement, because it doesn't capture
the irremediable feature of the disability
that people have. If you were to move beyond
identification and relief of poverty to the assessment
of social inequality, the enlightenment provided by
the perspective of capabilities can take us well beyond
the limited domain of income inequality. We have to take an interest
in the overall capabilities that any person enjoys
to lead the kind of life she has reason to want to lead. And this requires that attention
be paid to her personal as well as environmental
characteristics, going beyond the
income statistics. Indeed, I would
argue that the nature of every theory of
economic and social problem is significantly influenced--
or should be influenced-- by taking the importance
of freedom and capability seriously, moving away from
the primary goods space. Let me turn, now, to the
relation between the capability perspective and the importance
of education, on which there was a certain amount of
focus in the conference-- and there are a number of
interesting and momentous papers in this conference. Our ability to do things
depends on our education. Sorry-- that our ability to do
things depend on our education is a point that's
not hard to grasp. They are highly
important issues that go beyond that fairly
straightforward recognition into the complexity of the
development of human capability formation-- on which, of course,
there is very interesting work going on here under the
leadership of Jim Heckman. One issue concerns the question,
how much of a difference can education make when
the child is handicapped in one way or another? Another question relates
to the difference that early education-- for example,
preschool education-- can make to what
happens later on-- what I think Jim calls
it the dynamic aspect. Still another question
concerns the exact role of education among
other influences, including nutrition, which
often influences physical health and cognitive development. A further question-- and by the
way, in countries like India, this is a very important issue. Nutritional Deprivation
is a huge reason for cognitive underdevelopment. A further question--
and by the way, there too, preschool
intervention could make a very big
difference-- and not just school meals and so on. A further question
great significance relates to the
contribution of education to emotional development,
and to the growth of social understanding. This is the general area
of huge significance, in with the use of capability
approach can be potentially extremely important. A big dichotomy in attitudes
and belief that can be observed relates to the respective
roles of nature and nurture in the development
of human capabilities. The division between
nature and nurture is, of course, ultimately
an empirical question-- at least, empirically informed. But it would be wrong to see it
only as an empirical question. Given the complexity-- and
often the undecidability-- of determining the exact impact
of different factors that influence human capabilities,
and since they are very little independent measurements
of inborn qualities, you have to guess it
as a kind of residual-- there will tend to
remain, at least in the foreseeable future, the
need for general arguments-- and indeed well-informed
general assumptions-- that sort out policy
issues, even when the empirical questions
are not fully resolved. And here we do observe quite
a variety of approaches. I shall take the liberty of
commenting here on an approach that Adam Smith followed, and
which the form of assuming that there are no difference
in natural talents unless they is specific
and definitive evidence in the contrary direction. Indeed, armed with
this inclination, Smith actually adjusted his
attitude to human potentials in what would look like-- today-- as in an extremely
radical direction. Smith argued, in short, for
an almost complete priority of the impact of
nurture over nature. And I'll quote from Smith-- since Smith has such an
image, especially in Chicago, as a conservative thinker,
it is quite important to recognize how radical he is. I cut out some of his remarks
on race and ethnicity, and the pretensions
of the white man-- over Africans, in particular-- where he argues
that there isn't a-- he's given to exaggeration. He uses the word
Negro, of course. And he says there
is not a singular Negro anywhere in Africa
whose capacity to understand the demands of justice is
something so complicated that his sordid
master is completely incapable of grasping
what is being presented. He absolutely loved
these sentences. From Smith-- "The difference
of the natural talent in different men is,
in reality, much less than we are aware of." This is Smith. "And the very
different genus which appears to distinguish men
of different professions when grown up to maturity
is not, upon many occasions, so much the cause as the effect
of the division of labor. The difference within the
most dissimilar characters-- between the philosopher
and a common street porter, for example-- seems to arise not so much from
nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world,
and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they
were perhaps very much alike. And neither their
parents nor playfellows could perceive any
remarkable difference. About that age--", that is six
to eight, or soon thereafter, "--they come to be employed
in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes
then to be taken notice of, and widened by degree,
till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing
to acknowledge scarcely any resemblance with
the street porter." Unquote. It's easy to see that there
can be some real tension here between Smith's firmly
articulated view and the existence of genetic
differences between one person and another within
the same race, or nationality, or in class
that modern biology has tended to identify. One doesn't have to
got with Charles Meyer to point out that there
could be differences here, on which there has been
lots of scientific work. This could be stochastic,
but it could happen. The important point
to note here is not only that this
epistemic generalization that I quoted from
Smith reflects what Smith, on one side,
very much wanted to believe-- since he was deeply radical-- but also what he
thought would be the right practical
assumption to make when dealing with
groups of people without any pre-identified
genetic differentiation among people when they are born. It's an argument that will be
revisited later in the debate. You can put it in a
different context-- in the context utilitarianism
between Abba Lerner and Milton Friedman, and I joined
the debate also-- that sometimes,
when you don't know which way is, that the
right assumption would be that of insufficient
reason for assuming it stays much the same. I will not pursue this
mythological issue further here. But it is important to
understand both Smith's emotional inclination,
but more importantly his well-reflected research
strategy in the way his argument tended to proceed. Last year was quite
an interesting year, because it was the
250th anniversary of the theory of
moral sentiment, which was published in 1759. And I had the privilege to
write a long introduction to the new anniversary
edition that Penguin put out of The Theory of
Moral Sentiment, where I discussed also the
misunderstanding of Smith that we see all around, and the
importance of the recognizing how radical a figure
he actually was. By the way, this is-- I think it came out in
December-- but by the skin of its teeth, like
the 31st of December, I managed to capture
the year which was the 250th anniversary. Largely it was my fault,
of course, as always. I may have been a little
late in delivering. But it did just about make it. What is important for Smith's
research agenda is not whether the quoted
statement about uniformity of talent to all human
beings is literally correct-- he often puts in words
like perhaps, probably, we can assume, and so on-- but whether group
differentiation that we see in actual society-- the vast differences that
we see between members of the working class
on the one hand, and the more privileged,
educated, cultivated people on the other-- with good taste in reading,
with music, and several other things-- reflect
different of natural talent, as many people are
inclined to believe, rather than difference of
education and opportunities, to which Smith points, and which
informed his whole analysis in both The Theory
of Moral Sentiment and in The Wealth of Nations. And the quotation
I gave, I think, is in fact from The
Wealth of Nations. But it also applies to his
posthumously published theory Lectures on Jurisprudence,
which were put together from his students' notes. It's not only that quote
unquote "common people" have much less opportunity of
education and less opportunity, even further, of good
education than people of rank and fortune. But Smith points
also to the fact-- and it's a very important fact-- that the working
life of people itself is a source of
cultivation and education. And that differentiates further. As he said in that
statement I quoted, what began as a little different
becomes wider and wider. Since our lives are
themselves forces of education and
capability formation, Smith points here to an
enormously important line of research that has not been
adequately pursued even now, after a quarter of a millennium. Smith's reasoning focused
on the following issue. And I quote from Smith again-- "The employment of people
of some rank and fortune besides--" he talks about
education differences first, and we are beside that-- "are seldom such as harass
them from morning to night. They generally have a
good deal of leisure, during which they may perfect
themselves in every want-- either of useful
mental knowledge, of which they may have
laid the foundation--" a foundation in school-- "or for which they may
have acquired some taste in the earlier part
of their life--" including their working lives. "It is otherwise with
the common people. They have little time
to spare for education. Their parents can scarce
afford to maintain them, even in infancy. As soon as they're
able to walk, they must apply to some
trade by which they can earn their subsistence. That trade, too, is generally
so simple and uniform as to give little exercise to
their understanding, while at the same time their
labor is both so constant and so severe that it leaves
them little time leisure, and less inclination to apply
to-- and even to think or-- anything else." Reasoning in this
line, Smith notes that the system of division of
labor, which as it happens he definitively analyzed--
and this is the big thing. I mean, his big
contribution was that. And indeed, the Nobel that
Paul Krugman got two years ago in many ways is a development
of this Smithian line of reasoning-- discussing how competitive
market equilibrium with [INAUDIBLE]
returns to scale may not be the best way
of understanding it, and why the mathematical
problems-- which are quite considerable-- can
be dealt with, which Paul did. But it is very much
on the Smithian line. So he is a great champion
of division of labor, because it's hugely beneficial
in raising productivity and our income, in
advancing trade, and enhancing living
standards of people. But it goes on to note
that on the other hand, the effect of
division of labor is to diminish the reach of
human talent and freedom for the majority of people-- the working classes. And he's concerned
very much about that. And he thinks, of course-- again, that is not
often recognized-- that what you have
to cultivate market, the state had a
huge role to play to negate these inequalities
that generate from what is otherwise a productive system. He analyzed this
nasty implication of division of labor
in considerable detail, eloquently drawing attention
to how much a narrowing of the human mind it yields. I'll quote from Smith again-- "I have seen several boys
under 20 years of age who have never exercised
any other trade but that of making nails." Unquote. A humane public policy
has to take note both of the positive and
negative features of division of labor, and of
course do what it can to expand the
reach of education. This argument fits into
Smith general advocacy of public education to reverse
the neglect of native talent that seemed, to him,
to be a uniform feature of all societies-- and with what they
urgently in need of remedy. While it's important
to understand Smith's inclination--
indeed longing-- to believe in the equal
potentials of all human beings, what is crucial to his policy
prescription is his pointer to the uniformity of the
neglect of human talent-- to the lack of education
and the unimaginative nature of the work that many
people are forced to do. Class divisions reflect this
inequality of opportunity, Smith argued, rather than
being a result of differences of inborn talents and abilities,
as many of his contemporaries tended-- explicit
theory of [INAUDIBLE]-- to believe. I must stop here, since I have
run out of the half an hour that was allocated to me. I seem to have done more,
but I think we began late. No, no. I think we can come back to it. But I look forward
to the Q&A. I hope we have been able
to point to some of the huge issues of social
understanding and policy making that can be embraced
by reasoned and reasonable use of the capability perspective. This is because an
adequate understanding of the relevant truth,
role, and reach our freedom and capability is central
to the assessment of justice and injustice in this society. This is an area
of human knowledge on which, I've argued,
there is much to do still. Thank you. - Do you want to call
on people yourself, or shall I call on them? - Well, I don't know. I think that given my
eyesight at the moment, you may be better able. - OK. I'll call on people. - I don't want to-- - We have-- - --catch people. I know bright people--
--would say about 15-20 minutes for discussion. - I don't want to catch people
who are scratching their ear, and force them to
ask a question. No one seems to be scratching
their ears at this moment. I couldn't have been
that convincing. - Yes? - During your talk this
morning, or during a comment, you said that the
operationalization of the capabilities
motions chills your bones. - No. - Was the quote right? No. - I said the concentration
on that problem-- - Concentration-- - --chills my bones. --on operationalization. OK. - Because, you know,
they are paying. - I just want you
expand on what-- - Now, but, you
ask your question. Why don't you ask your question? Assume that's what I said. But then, what would
you have then said? - Well, [LAUGHTER] maybe you
could expand why there's too much concentration on the
operationalization of the-- - Oh. Why there is, I don't know. That's a causal thing. But why do I think
that there is? - Yes, right. - Yeah. Well, because of two
different reasons. One is that quite a lot of the
importance of the capability thing is to recognize
problems-- like Smith's thing-- that much of the inequality
in the world that we observe is not connected with
inborn talent at all. But it's connected with
how people are educated and, indeed, their working
life, which is also a source of education. Now, to many
people, this was not an operationalized argument. To quote [INAUDIBLE] what
percentage can you tell us? What's the impact, et cetera? I think the most important
thing is to recognize that that is, indeed, the case. And I think that's
making a huge stink. As I tried to say in
the morning-- or maybe I'm imagining. I've just given five
lectures in Chicago so far, so I'm not sure which
one was given where. But you know, it's
like saying, if we're reading a book like
Mill only with the-- it's like saying, look,
come off it, Mill. I mean, you know-- tell us how you're
going to measure liberty an operationalize it. But that's not what
the book is about. It is for pointing out a very
important neglect, which has to be remedied, no matter how. Now, the second issue is
that operationalization is inescapably an
art of the possible, and the art of what is
contextually needed. And that will mean you will not
get one operationalized thing. Now, whether there is
sufficient uniformity in the world to have
a list of capabilities that may be relevant for-- not to discuss it, not
inequality in general-- but poverty particularly--
deprivation, I think-- it is a different question. We could debate on
that empirically. But I think the issue
would vary a lot, depending on what
stage of development you're in, what are the
priorities at that moment, and so forth. And it also depends on concerns
about what is available and what is not. Quite often, I think
the kind of work, let's say Wibke's Kuklys
did, which I was quoting, didn't take sufficient note
of the conversion handicap, since it dealt with the indirect
capability space, as it were-- namely, the income space-- to what extent that is needed. But then again, even with
all the prosthetics and all the help, you're
still not the same, if you're crippled, as an
uncrippled person who can walk around freely without that. So that's to say,
look, this didn't work. Now, and some day, one
hopes that one will get a better way of getting at it. But I think the reason
why [INAUDIBLE] is still a hugely important contribution
to understanding of capability and poverty in general, and
to a particular critique of the British
anti-poverty program. On the other hand, I
think they recognize that. It doesn't indicate that
this is the last word. It is operationalized,
somebody could say, I could do a better way
of operationalizing. Whether or not it
can be done becomes a relevant question there, too. So I think if we
recognize the contingency and context-dependence
of operationalization, and the fact that what is
captured by operationalization is only part of the thing. I think the basic issue is
understanding what's going on. And operationalization-- the
demands of operationalization can divert people from asking
questions that cannot be-- at an operational level-- answered at that moment. Mill could not have given
you a good index of liberty at that time, by which you
could say that the government society had more liberty or less
liberty than France, and so on. But he was pointing to
a very important issue. I don't want to stifle them. So it is the over concentration
on operationalization, and the pursuit of
context-independent operationalization, about
which I was likely grumbling. - In your newest book,
can we see your focus on saying we should look
less at what makes a justice the perfect, ideal,
just institution, and more at deciding what are
clearly areas that are unjust, and trying to fix them? Isn't that focusing more
on operationalization? So that's one part
of the question. But the other one is-- please correct me if I'm wrong--
but I recall that in the book, you actually point to one
example of clear injustice today-- the access to medicines issue. - Well, I do many. But that's one of them. - OK. OK. - About 10 or 11, yeah. - OK. Well, I wanted to know, one-- the broader question about--
are you really actually thinking about operationalization
in the book-- but, two-- thinking about
access to medicines, and here in the
context of education-- a very practical question
in some sense is-- do you see access to educational
textbooks as just as important? And what is your
position on that? - Well, I think the issue
I'm trying make it about-- that the point I was trying
to make, that social choice-- about socials
contracts, of course-- I think you can talk in
terms of operationalization. But that's a very narrow
framework to bring in. And I think in terms
of practical reason-- and after all, this is not pure
reason, and practical reason-- and the question that arises
is that there a decisional conflict-- which, of course,
Kant makes quite clear. And this applies to
the human rights thing. All the debates
about human rights-- can you actually be sure? Will there be enough
of an agreement on what are human rights? And therefore, the whole
subject is rubbish. We've ended up in
a situation where it is very counterproductive. You have to emphasize
many things. Border disputes takes up
a huge amount of time. It's exactly like an
analogy saying, look, you keep talking
about China and India. But that is not a
well-defined concept, that they haven't yet settled
the dispute around the border in McMahon line. We don't know where China
begins and India ends. Can you give me a criteria
by which you know exactly whether you are in
China or in India in an operationalizable way? And if I said, look, I can't-- and I think this will
remain an ambiguity. But nevertheless, talking
about China and India is not a waste of time. There's a lot of things
you can understand with that talk, which
you can't otherwise. So I think it's a question of
the priority of the concept and understanding. And then, yes,
operationalize it. And that's why I go
to the examples, too, in the context of today. And I also discuss
how it's moot-- the Condorcet and Smith,
and Wollstonecraft. They concentrated
on slavery, but not the freedom of unionization
and collectivity and so on. But then, of course, once
slavery is abolished-- at least in parts of the world-- then it becomes relevant
to ask further questions. And then the focus of
operationalization changes. And I was partly also pointing
to the context dependence of the operationalization
exercise that would be relevant. But it wouldn't be, if
you put operationalization first, rather than the
understanding of the problem first. And then the operationalization
follows from it, contingently and in terms of the
art of the possible. What can be done, and
what cannot be done? So I think that's
the way I would tend to think of that issue. And then there
will be boundaries on which we will not able-- for example, I don't-- I mean, one reason why I
believe that we will not all agree on liberty and
the relative importance of liberty on one side,
and economic inequality on the other. Now I think, again, an
operational framework with all of these will want them
to be all perfectly weighted out. I don't think we
have to do that. And generally, it's not even an
absence of operationalization to say that you can deal
with a partial ordering, whereby some questions you can
resolve, and others you can't. I mean, I attach
importance to both. And I do think that Rob Nozick-- my very close
friend, and with whom I taught 10 years in a class-- I did think that he put more
focus on liberty and none on economic inequality in a
way that wasn't justifiable. I thought, in some ways,
that was also Herbert Hart's criticism of Rawls. Why should liberty have
a complete priority? Now, I think-- as I
argued in the morning-- Rawls was not only right,
but absolutely visionary to separate out liberty
as a part of a requirement of a theory of justice. And he was right to
begin there, too. And yet, I think he ends up by
giving lexicographic priority, giving more room to that than I
would argue it should be given. But then there are economic
egalitarians who actually would not see anything in that. And I was also mentioning that
even my friend Ronald Dworkin-- with whom I also taught class
with for 10 years in Oxford, as it happened. I mean, I don't begin to see
how equality of resources by a counter-factual
insurance market-- and of course Ronny, like
many other non-economists, takes the market
very seriously-- as if the equilibria always
exist, and they are unique, and they are easily
convertible into-- and this insurance market. It's going [INAUDIBLE] of
asymmetric information. But there's a certain amount
of naivete in assuming that this could do all that. But quite aside from that,
what happened to liberty? And I think that's become-- you know, we will continue
to disagree on that. But that doesn't matter. It's quite important. I mean, it would be nice
if we all agreed exactly on derivative [INAUDIBLE]. But it's very important to
recognize that each of these have importance. We may disagree on
the extent to it. One of my first papers
in Econometrica-- it wasn't really my
first paper, there were a couple of papers were
in majority decision and domain condition. But then and in 1970, I
think, I published a paper on exactly that-- how you could generate
partial ordering when the weights are not specified. And you get-- there's some
mathematical complexity involved. But you get certain
regularity properties which have been part of the
standard maths of earlier periods. It I mean one of the big things
that was happening then-- and it's very important
for us to bear in mind operationalization
contexts-- because like a lot
of economics, which has been guided by physics and
Newtonian mechanics and that, it assumes a level
of precision which is not very appropriate
for social variables, and not particularly
needed either. You have [INAUDIBLE] when
Bourbaki's famous book on math and general topology and set
theory-- those two books come-- the basic ordering is what
we calls pre-ordering, which is an incomplete ordering. That's a basic relation. Then completeness is a special
assumption that comes in. I think that's a really
much more useful thing-- but similarly, other that
mathematicians were also doing, and some economists
involved in it too, namely-- fuzzy sets, fuzzy preferences--
social choice theory had quite a bit on that-- Ken Arrow and
Suzumura and I wrote, in our Handbook of Social
Trust, a whole chapter on these fuzzy relations
and the importance of them in the social context. But these are part of the old
math of a very different kind. In fact, all the
things I've found since I came in clinically
with as great mathematician's college, the distinction is
between pure and applied math. And applied math is
all mainly physics. And it turned out
that the thing that is most aptly capable, usually,
is the kind of math which is not that of physics, but
which was put on the film-- film math like
topology and so forth. And that of course
with the big change that was happening
in economics, also, beginning with the work of
Ken Arrow, Gerard Deveaux, and so on. So it's that, and
operationalization, as it stands, is really pretty
captured by the predominance of the physics-related math. I might say, by the
way, [INAUDIBLE] seems that it's pure
math, applied math, and applicable math. That's a huge compromise,
but we've always believed on that compromise--
that kind of thing. - I wish you would-- I wanted you to
clarify something. - [INAUDIBLE] - It came up a bit this morning. - Yeah - And I it's a question
that many people have about the capabilities. It's a very basic question. I understand your
desire to go away from a pure
utilitarian criteria. So you don't want to
rely on preferences. And your example of somebody who
gets used to a bad way of life is a very good example. But I worry that
the capability set itself is generated by an
implicit set of preferences, and that out there
we're sort of trading one set of preferences for
another that's less explicit. So I'm sure that you've
encountered this question. I'm repeating [INAUDIBLE]
but in some sense, defining what's
a good and what's a bad-- what should be
considered a capability or not-- involves some
kind of implicit valuation. Maybe not for the agent
himself or herself, but from some third party. So the question is,
where does that-- so there's not a
uniqueness question. It's not a unique agreement
on what a capability set would be-- especially when we
trade off components, like liberty versus
economic freedom and various kinds
of other things. So I wonder how you would
respond to that comment? - I think there's three
things to say on that. It's a very
interesting question. One is that part of
the problem arises from the use of
the word preference to mean very many
different things. And when I did a paper
called Rational Fools, which was published
a long time ago-- difficult to think now. It's like 35 years ago
or something like that. The complaint was that
the preference is used in so many different things. They're not the same. And if you use the same word-- by definition, by construction--
you make them the same. But that's an
empirical assumption. There's your concept of your
own well being, your concept of your interest, your
concept of your goals, your concept of your values-- which may go beyond goals. You might give room to others
in the pursuit of their goals, even though it requires you
to go beyond your own goals, because you accept some need for
restraint in living a society. Now all of these could be called
preferences, if you'd like. But they're not the same. And the Italians tended
to use one in particular-- they used the word preference. Whenever you raised
the question, they'd say, oh, you can
put it into the preference. That's no problem. But the only thing
is, by the time you've done that, you don't
have the pre-chosen meaning of preference, in terms
of the Pareto optimality. That is about the
individual well-being. And that meaning has gone, if
the priority is not about that. And it is a very
relevant question. I mean, in the-- - But do you change the
[INAUDIBLE] they're independent preferences of a
very general nature? - No, it's not that. But they-- - [INAUDIBLE] - That's not the only issue. By the way, this is only
my first of three points. And I'll come to the others. But the preference, you can
put anything you like in it. But it will be-- then it's changing its meaning. And our values are very
important, ultimately. And our goals are different. But goals need not be the
same the self-interest. Now, this is a big subject
of debate, of course, within law and economics. And, of course, as it happens,
one of the oddities that-- I teach a class man with a
brilliant legal theorist who was originally trained as an
economist, Christine Jones, who is a professor
at Yale Law School-- jointly offered in
Yale and Harvard-- on rationality and choice. And of course, it's quite clear
that rational choice theory is having quite a tough
time now, in terms of experimental economics,
and behavioral economics. That's that people don't
seem to behave like that. And yet, the
interpretational issue is not sufficiently engaged, I
think, in behavioral economics, yet. And that remains a big
thing-- the disinclination to going to the
interpretational question, which seems to me as central,
is extremely important. There are things we agree to
do, which is our preference-- --any interest in news, and
they would end up believing that Obama wants to send everyone's
grandmother to oblivion-- that he will do otherwise,
like he should be the New York Times. And he suggests looking at--
you're saying, you know, I can't play the game very well. Because you know, that
light is distracting. You don't mind putting
the window shade down. Now, your thought is
that you should rather give him the New York Times. But you think, A,
he wouldn't like it, and B, you ask
yourself-- you happen to have control over
the window shade, because you have that fate. On the other hand,
you shouldn't do it in a way that goes against
what this guy is trying to do. That doesn't mean it's
not even part of your goal to make him play the game. It's not the goal at all. It is that you're following
a self-imposed constraint-- that you don't impose your
own goals on your behavior. Now, of course, in
a mathematical form, every constraint can lead
to a Lagrangian multiplier [INAUDIBLE] as an
as if preference. But that's not the same
thing as a real preference. It's just the representational
of the [INAUDIBLE]. So I think there are
all kinds of ways that there are things we do-- which with preference
have to be concerned-- which may not reflect-- not only are not for your
self-interest, but not even your old goals,
because you accept that in good rules of behavior
in dealing with-- living with-- others in a society. So the first issue
is the interpretation of preference in utilitarianism
is a very narrow one. But then they use this
to include everything under preference, and buy what
is, after all, a gigantic fund. Cover every factor,
because they've already had a term, preference, which
is so versatile that it can include everything, and
at the same time then you can end up interpreting
it as your interest and well-being. And to some extent,
that happens, I think. I don't know whether
Gary is coming tomorrow, but that's one of
our-- he's not, OK-- one of my ongoing
arguments with Gary Becker. But the second issue, is this-- that the preference--
somehow all of these problems went away. Preference is not going to give
you interpersonal comparisons, except in an exercise
of imagination-- as imagined by [? Hasani ?]
or [? Vickory. ?] You're not considering being somebody else. So your preference
is telling you what you would like yourself. It doesn't tell you how the
deprivation of a person-- I mean, there is no
question that if I am a subjugated housewife,
I'm better off-- and I might prefer, if I see no
hope at all of changing that-- to take some pleasure
in this, rather than mourning all the time. So as a living
strategy, it makes a good deal of sense for
me to create some happiness in my life, if I think the
situation is hopeless-- which is true of many
inequalities in the world. But that-- the
relevance of it isn't that that is a bad reflection
of your preferences, even though what should
count in your capability-- it's in your capability. What it is bad at is
comparing your deprivation with that of the other. The preference information gets
you nothing at all on that, in terms of actual
choices that are observed. That's a completely
different territory. Preference has nothing
to say on this subject. And I think that is a point
which is not often recognized. Because, unlike classical
utilitarianism-- which was concerned with
comparison of happiness, and I don't have a
problem with that-- or in a Randian form,
comparison of fulfillment of desires comparing by the
strength of their desires-- it's a little
[INAUDIBLE] but at least I understand what that is. Simple preference, as
revealed in market, is not telling you
anything at all about interpersonal comparisons. That's a huge thing. Given the amount
of time I'm taking, I'll stop at these two
points, rather than go on through the third. - OK. I think then we'll just have
time for only one-- well, I was going to call on-- Doctor, do you still
have your question? No. - Why don't we take two? Yeah. Let's take two. - OK. Well, [? Dasha ?] and
[? Atavan. ?] OK, first, Dasha. - Sorry. I said, no, I no longer
have my question. - Oh, so that you
no longer have it. So you don't want to. OK. Atavan. - I want to return to your
beautiful observation this morning about the obligations
that might arise from having lots of capabilities-- from
having a very large capability set. You suggested-- you had
the metaphor of the mother with the child. And the mother has an
obligation for the child, because of her capacity
to care for the child. We have focused largely,
today, on a kind of education within a domestic context-- within a familial context,
within the nation state system. But we haven't looked
at the possibility of transnational
approaches to eduction. Is there a role for
countries or people who have great capacity
of capabilities to assist in education
without being paternalistic in doing so? They'd assist in education
elsewhere in places that are greater deprivation. O I think the family is
a rather big subject. I don't want to enter into it. And you know, Christine and I
spent that one day, I think, for-- we do it Yale and
Harvard together-- Yale Law School and
Harvard together. And Yale students are
bussed in to Harvard. Instead of making them come
every week for two hours, we do every
fortnight four hours. So it's an all-day
exercise for them. So one of the days we spent
on things like Katzenstein's [? Nadiem ?] and other things-- about how to be paternalistic
without violating liberalism, and so on. I think there's a
big lot of problems. And we can discuss that. But I don't enter into that
territory, because that's not acting what you're really
basically thinking, because your paternalism
comes in only very passing. But I'm saying I'm
not saying anything on the paternalism issue. It requires much
greater engagement. But on the subject what it
is owed beyond your border-- one of the differences, you
see, between the approach I'm trying to present and that
the social contract theory is that it can easily be global. If you take a statement
like Martin Luther King's, saying that "injustice
anywhere in the world is a threat to justice
everywhere in the world." That makes no sense. In fact, Tom Nagel-- you can't think of a smarter
and more humane philosopher than Tom-- and one of my closest
friends, we published work. I learned a lot. In an incredible paper, he
argues against this, actually. I think, Josh has a
paper, too, arguing why the idea of global
justice is a canard. Why? Because there's no global state. What you're talking about? Now, that, of course, is the
way that social contract theory, in that form, does. And it's a question which-- I don't want to go into here-- as to some halfway-hearted
like contractualism of Tim Scanlon-- how much can
it cover or not cover on that. I'm quite skeptical
of that, too, though Tim and I have a
lot of points in common, and I've learned a great
deal, again, from his work. But the real issue is that
a lot of the ethical debates in the world are
exactly of the kind that people were raising
in the 18th century. Indeed, they were raising
that when Mary Wollstonecraft said, surprisingly-- since it's known that she
wrote her second book attacking Edmund Burke's attitude
to the French Revolution, for not supporting--
that the first book, Vindication of
the Rights of Men, which people don't read much-- there's quite a lot
in it about slavery. And there, she
attacks Edmund Burke for supporting the American
Declaration of Independence. And it even had this
mysterious statement which, when I first
encountered, I found very puzzling-- on what
ground Mr. Burke could support the American Declaration
of Independence is beyond me to fathom. What is this revolutionary
English woman talking about? What she is talking
about is slavery-- namely that you cannot make a
statement about freedom of some people, not to others. And the time to engage in it
was right then and right there. Now, these are all
international issues that are being considered. Tom Paine's discussion
had a lot of that, too, even though his
concentration is national. And [? Garrett ?]
[? Steadman's ?] beautiful analogy shows that this very
abstract discussion of Tom Paine played a hugely
important part in the emergence of poverty-relief programs
institutionally in the United States many, many decades--
indeed a century-- later. So I think that plasticity
of going beyond borders is present in the
alternative approach-- which I'm calling the social
choice approach-- to this, broadly, these people fitted in. And the human rights literature
is part of that exercise. It's not that human
rights are legal rights-- which [? Bentham ?] thought
is the only kind of right-- but that's just a conclusion. Nor is it that human rights
can be discussed only when they're realizable, as
some people like Cranston did. And to some extent, in a
brilliant argument otherwise, Onora O'Niell does. Because part of the
object of recognizing something as human rights is to
agitate-- to make them feasible rights. The fact that
they're not feasible already doesn't stop the
engagement of human rights. Because part of the
invitation of human rights is for first legislation,
as well as best practices. And Mary Wollstonecraft
discusses that. And, indeed, in a
very visionary way-- one of the reasons why I
think she's unfortunately the most neglected author
of the old 18th century philosophers is
where she said that, but you're not going to
be able to remedy this by legislation alone. Attitude to women is a matter
for public discussion, debate, media criticism,
literature-- everything. So it's that generic
view which is there. Now, the connection with
certainly [? Potter, ?] and [? Wurthe-- ?] and
when I quote the fact that [? Wurthe ?] gives an analogy--
this is not so much about many capabilities, except that
it's just that there, [? Wurthe ?] is arguing that
you don't have to argue from a mutual advantage
in cooperation. Which, in a sense, is very
deep in the social contract approach. You don't have to argue for it. If you are able to do something
which to recognize is good, you have an obligation to do it. There's some kind
of a schizophrenia if you recognize it would
be better if it's done, and at the same time, you don't
have to do anything about it. What do you mean,
then, it's better? So that's the question
that comes up. And you could debate,
obviously, on that too. And the human rights are not-- it's a statement of that kind. These ethical statements,
which might have a-- the Declaration of Human Rights
by the United Nations in 1944, which Eleanor
Roosevelt pioneered, it was very much
her hope that that will serve as a model for
legislation elsewhere. And, indeed, the European
Declaration of Human Rights and the Court of
Human Rights would not have come, but for that. So there are all
kinds of ways in which to make not-yet-feasible
rights feasible, the human rights may
be a very important way of thinking about it. And that's not a contract area--
not a mutual advantage thing-- not that we do this for the
Sudanese women terrorized by men, but we do this
because that is important. And we can do
something about it. And it's not the
question that we expect Sudanese
women to do something for American women
are agitating on that, as a part of the global
feminist movement. I think it's that
kind of question for which the [? Wurthe ?]
statement, I think, is very relevant. - Thank you very, very much. [INAUDIBLE] [APPLAUSE]
