Lesson · 4 min Stretch
Equality of What?
In one line Amartya Sen asked what equality should measure: money, happiness, or what people are actually able to do and be.
Almost everyone favors equality of something. The hard question, as the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen put it in a 1979 lecture, is equality of what? Equal income seems natural, but people need different amounts to live equally well. A wheelchair user may need more money to get around the same city.
Equal happiness fails too. People in hard circumstances often adapt, wanting less, and a measure of satisfaction would then hide real deprivation. Sen proposed focusing on capabilities: the real freedoms people have to do and be what they value, such as being healthy, educated, safe and able to take part in public life.
Martha Nussbaum drew up a list of central capabilities that every just society should secure for each person, above a threshold.
Go deeper
The capability approach shaped the United Nations Human Development Index, which ranks countries by health and education as well as income. Luck egalitarianism, which grew from the work of Ronald Dworkin and G. A. Cohen, offers another answer: inequalities from bad luck should be corrected, while those from free choices need not be. Critics ask who decides which capabilities count, and whether a fixed list is paternalistic.
The same grant
Two students receive the same monthly grant. One lives near campus. The other has a disability and must pay for accessible transport across town.
On paper they are equal. In what each can actually do, they are not: attending lectures, joining clubs and getting to the library all cost one student more. A capability view asks the university to look at what the grant makes possible for each student, not only at the number.
Try this today Pick two people with the same income. List what each can actually do with it, and where the gaps come from.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Equality of What?.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/equality-of-what. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Egalitarianism” — Covers the question of what should be equal, including luck egalitarianism.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Capability Approach” — Explains Sen’s and Nussbaum’s views and their critics.
- Amartya Sen, “Equality of What?” (Tanner Lecture, Stanford, 22 May 1979) — The lecture that asks the question and first proposes capabilities.