This paper examines Amartya Sen’s notion of ‘commitment’ in light of Geoffrey Brennan’s recent discussion thereof. Its aim is to elucidate one type of commitment which consists in following social norms. To this end, I discuss Sen’s ‘apples’ example from his ‘Rational fools’ essay (section 2). In section 3, I draw some implications of commitments in Sen’s work for the concept of ‘agent relativi...

L. K. Xue, T. Wang, J. Gao, A. J. Ding, X. H. Zhou, D. R. Blake, X. F. Wang, S. M. Saunders, S. J. Fan, H. C. Zuo, Q. Z. Zhang, and W. X. Wang Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China Environment Research Institute, Shandong University, Ji’nan, Shandong, China Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing, China Institut...

The aim of this special issue is to draw attention to “missing dimensions” of poverty data—dimensions that are of value to poor people, but for which we have scant or no data. Amartya Sen frames development as the process of expanding the freedoms that people value and have reason to value. Although the most widely known measure of human development includes income, longevity and education, man...

The number of divisors function den), is a classic function of number theory, having been defined centuries ago. In contrast, the Smarandache function Sen), was defined only a few decades ago. The purpose of this paper is to tind all solutions to a simple equation involving both functions. Theorem: The only solutions to the equation Sen) + den) = n, n > 0 are 1, 8 and 9. Proof: Since S( 1) = 0 ...

1 Department of Cardiology, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430060, PR China; 2 Cardiovascular Research Institute of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430060, PR China; 3 Department of Cardiology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China 4 Division of Cardiology, Heart and Stroke/Richard Lewar Centre of Excellence. University Health Network, University of Toronto...

The capability approach of Amartya Sen evaluates well-being in terms of an individual’s achievements and abilities to function. The traditional view of capabilities is that they are discernable as part of an individual’s own set of characteristics, or as part of a package of socially provided services. We argue that individuals also have access to a broad array of capabilities through their fam...

1 Department of Endocrinology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510080, China 2Department of Endocrinology, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University, Jinan 250012, China 3Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital, Shanghai 200233, China 4Department of Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine, Un...

Health-related Quality of Life measures have recently been attacked from two directions, both of which criticize the preference-based method of evaluating health states they typically incorporate. One attack, based on work by Daniel Kahneman and others, argues that 'experience' is a better basis for evaluation. The other, inspired by Amartya Sen, argues that 'capability' should be the guiding c...

Xin Luo,1,2 Biao Wang,1,* and Yue Zheng1,2 1State and Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, Institute of Optoelectronic and Functional Composite Materials and School of Physics and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, 510275 Guangzhou, China 2Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, SAR, China Received 19 March...

Debates about poverty relief and foreign aid often hinge on claims about how many poor people there are in the world and what constitutes poverty. Good measures of poverty are essential for addressing the world poverty problem. Measures of poverty require a basis for determining who is poor and a method of aggregation. Historically, the methods of aggregation were quite simple. The headcount in...