Entitlement relations and ‘unruly’ social practices: A comment on the work of Amartya Sen

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the conceptual basis and analytical deployment of Sen's entitlement analysis in ethics and economics, focusing on the rules of entitlement. Sen specifies the rules of entitlement in different ways in his work, ignores how legal rules work in practice and downplays the way in which socially enforced moral rules constrain and enable entitlement. The appropriateness of Sen's approach for the analysis of hunger and famine and for the philosophical arguments which Sen makes are assessed, and an alternative view of the rules of entitlement is suggested. This draws in particular on the literature on the moral economy of provisioning.