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LIT-289: Equality of What?

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Properties6
StatusActive — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-258); worth reading as the founding statement of the capability idea and the cleanest short case against welfarist and primary-goods metrics; read it knowing that the positive proposal is a two-page sketch with no account of which capabilities count or how to index them, and that "functionings", "capability sets" and "freedom" do not yet appear.
Version2
Tagsethics, society-and-governance, social-science
Extended byLIT-287 — Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined, LIT-288 — Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-258 — Equality of What?
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-025 — Neither utility information nor resource holdings, alone or together, can register claims that arise from how differently people convert resources into what they can do and be: equal resources leave unequal capabilities, and utility adapts to deprivation, THEORY-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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Sen (1979), The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, delivered at Stanford University, 22 May 1979; published in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. I (1980), pp. 195–220 (official copy: https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/s/sen80.pdf, not reachable from here) — https://ophi.org.uk/sites/default/files/Sen-1979_Equality-of-What.pdf

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-258 is the close reading of 2026-09-28, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the founding statement of the capability idea and the cleanest short case against welfarist and primary-goods metrics; read it knowing that the positive proposal is a two-page sketch with no account of which capabilities count or how to index them, and that “functionings”, “capability sets” and “freedom” do not yet appear.

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