The Family Capabilities Approach

Description

What is “the good life”? How can it best be achieved? The attention of the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Amartya Sen, to the human person and to the importance of realizing the good life has caused him to be described by one theologian as “the conscience of economics”. Known as the capabilities approach, his proposal, a now integral part of the United Nations Human Development Reports’ measurement of poverty, seems to ally itself with “the goal of rescuing peoples, first and foremost, from hunger, deprivation, endemic diseases and illiteracy” (Caritas in Veritate, 21), while not limiting itself to the topic of material underdevelopment but addressing the progress of society as a whole. However, a work engaging his thought with that of Catholic social doctrine has as yet been unwritten. This volume, therefore, seeks to fill that lacuna by first explaining and presenting Sen’s capabilities approach in a manner accessible to both amateur theologians and...