O enfoque das capabilidades de Amartya Sen: entre a ética do desenvolvimento e o desenvolvimento ético

Abstract

This paper verses upon the relation between ethics and economics after such reflection on the development concept. Several transformations in which society has been through over the last decades highlight the discussions on the development concept and soar the necessity of a conceptual and theoretical review. Amartya Sen understands that the key for a suitable comprehension of development lays on an interpretation of freedom as the only end and main means of Development as Freedom. The capability approach of Amartya Sen shows a number of categories which aim to amplify our comprehension over the development since the exam of opportunities, realizations, rights and individual substantive freedoms considering the plurality of individuals and their existential possibilities. These are the general aims of this paper, identify the freedom and development sense in Amartya Sen, the relation between both and their effectiveness in the extant categories on the capability approach; analyze these categories: functioning, opportunities, capabilities and agency, (components of capability approach), highlighting their main contributions for the development ethics. In a special way, it was sought to understand the perspective fundaments of development as freedom: after an analysis of main assumptions and premises present in their discussions with the utilitarist moral economics, welfare economics and John Rawls' theory. Although some interpreters of A. Sen comprehend that the capability approach runs into fundaments for a new theory of justice, this paper follows a slighter interpretation, which accompanies other experts who see on the senian work a normative perspective for the development ethics which when overcomes such aim, it develops concepts and theoretical categories with potential for the elaboration of an ethics of development. It is defended that the capability approach of Amartya Sen is constituted in an ethic-economic perspective more plausible than the modern economic theories, which already endure referring to the evaluation of states in a society and their degree of development, freedom, well-being, in terms of enrichment of human life. It is treated a normative approach elaborated in a dialect relationship with the social reality, able to contemplate conceptual-theoretical discussions, supply with adequate tools to the research development and empirical studies about the development, aiming to orientate the formation of public politics through the manipulation and operation of present categories on the capability approach.