Overview
- Highlights the essential role of freedom’s agency value in political and moral philosophy
- Contains a new and surprising argument for a value-based approach to overall freedom based on problems usually raised against
- It brings together the depth of philosophical insights on overall freedom with the rigour of axiomatic analysis reveals hidden assumptions in the literature on freedom rankings
- Rational choice theory shows important implications of agency for the evaluation of human development with the capability approach
Part of the book series: Theory and Decision Library A: (TDLA, volume 53)
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Table of contents(7 chapters)
About this book
In this book, Binder shows that at the heart of the most prominent arguments in favour of value-neutral approaches to overall freedom lies the value freedom has for human agency and development. Far from leading to the adoption of a value-neutral approach, however, ascribing importance to freedom’s agency value requires one to adopt a refined value-based approach. Binder employs an axiomatic framework in order to develop such an approach. She shows that a focus on freedom’s agency value has far reaching consequences for existing results in the freedom ranking literature: it requires one to move beyond a person’s given all-things-considered preferences to the values underlying a person’s preference formation. Furthermore, it requires, as Binder argues, one to account (only) for those differences between choice options which really matter to people. Binder illustrates the implications of her analysis for the evaluation of public policy and human development with the capabilityapproach: only if sufficient importance is ascribed to freedom’s agency value can the capability approach keep its promises. ​
Authors and Affiliations
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Erasmus Institute of Philosophy and Economics, Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Constanze Binder
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Agency, Freedom and Choice
Authors: Constanze Binder
Series Title: Theory and Decision Library A:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1615-2
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-024-1613-8Published: 10 April 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-94-024-1615-2Published: 29 March 2019
Series ISSN: 0921-3384
Series E-ISSN: 2352-2119
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 159
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Topics: Political Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods, Operations Research/Decision Theory