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LIT-284: Sen's Capability Approach

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-257); worth reading as the most Sen-specific short account in the batch, especially §3b's partial-agreement mechanism and §5's criticisms with Sen's replies. It dates from 2012 and was never revised, and it omits agency freedom entirely, so for concepts it needs the SEP entry beside it.
Version2
Tagsethics, society-and-governance, social-science
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-257 — Sen's Capability Approach
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-411 — In Sen's capability approach the weighting of functionings is left to public reasoning, and evaluation can still guide action without agreement on weights: where every weighting in an agreed range, or every view by its own argument, ranks one option above another, that ranking holds, so the approach is deliberately incomplete and yields a partial ordering

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Wells (2012), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ISSN 2161-0002); originally published 24 Apr 2012, last updated 25 Apr 2012 (per the IEP page as archived 1 May 2012); text unchanged since — https://iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-09-28 at the owner’s request, as one of nine texts assembled to represent Amartya Sen’s capability approach without a full reading of The Idea of Justice. published: is the first appearance (ADR-002).

It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-257 is the close reading of 2026-09-28, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the most Sen-specific short account in the batch, especially §3b’s partial-agreement mechanism and §5’s criticisms with Sen’s replies. It dates from 2012 and was never revised, and it omits agency freedom entirely, so for concepts it needs the SEP entry beside it.

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