Amartya Sen Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...maximization calculus may be quite irrational. Traditional welfare economics opposed the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor; each individual's economic choices were thought to produce the most efficient use of scarce resources. By contrast, when making interpersonal comparisons, Sen offered empirical evidence of relative deprivation. The illiterate poor may not choose education because of ignorance of its value. Observers placing themselves in the shoes of both the wealthy and the destitute are better able to assess the most just outcome. John...
Catholicism Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...based on a more optimistic moral epistemology. Rather than championing, as did Augustine, the individual person's worth as breaking beyond merely temporal bounds, Thomas presented the individual person as a constitutive element of a political order that is inherently both interpersonal and oriented to essential human fulfillment. For Thomas, law is a rule of reason that only has intelligible significance because it is rationally received by the individual person as subject. Thomas presented a right of self-preservation and rights of marriage and family as...
