Development economics, political theory, and ethics long carried on their own scholarly dialogues and investigations with almost no interaction among them. Only in the mid-1990s did this situation begin to change, primarily as a result of the pioneering work of an economist, Amartya Sen, and a philosopher who doubled as a classicist and legal scholar, Martha Nussbaum. Sen's Development as Freedom (1999) and Nussbaum's Women and Human Development (2000) together signaled the emergence of a powerful new paradigm that is commonly known as the "capabilities approach" to...

Development economics, political theory, and ethics long carried on their own scholarly dialogues and investigations with almost no interaction among them. Only in the mid-1990s did this situation begin to change, primarily as a result of the pioneering work of an economist, Amartya Sen, and a philosopher who doubled as a classicist and legal scholar, Martha Nussbaum. Sen's Development as Freedom (1999) and Nussbaum's Women and Human Development (2000) together signaled the emergence of a powerful new paradigm that is commonly known as the "capabilities approach" to...