by Amartya Sen
Even the originators of quantitative national income estimation, 225
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e which receives such attention and adherence, did try to explain that their ultimate interest lay in the richness of human lives, even though it is their measures, rather than their motivational justifications, that have received wide attention. For example, William Petty, the seventeenth-century pioneer of national income estimation (he proposed ways and means of assessing national income through the use of both
‘the income method’ and ‘the expenditure method’, as they are now called), spoke about his interest in examining whether ‘the King’s subjects’ were in ‘so bad a condition, as discontented Men would make them’. He went on to explain the various determinants of the condition of people, including ‘the Common Safety’ and ‘each Man’s particular Happiness’.2 That motivating connection has often been ignored in economic analysis that concentrates on the means of living as the end-point of investigation. There are excellent reasons for not confusing means with ends, and for not seeing incomes and opulence as important in themselves, rather than valuing them conditionally for what they help people to achieve, including good and worthwhile lives.*
It is important to note that economic opulence and substantive freedom, while not unconnected, can frequently diverge. Even in terms of being free to live reasonably long lives (free of preventable ailments and other causes of premature mortality), it is remarkable that the extent of deprivation of particular socially disadvantaged groups, even in very rich countries, can be comparable to that in the developing economies. For example, in the United States, inner-city African-Americans as a group frequently have no higher – indeed, often a substantially lower – chance of reaching an advanced age than do people born in the many poorer regions, such as Costa Rica, Jamaica, Sri Lanka or large parts of China and India.3 Freedom from premature mortality is, of course, by and large helped by having a higher income (that is not in dispute), but it also depends on many other features,
* The motivation behind the ‘human development approach’, pioneered by Mahbub ul Haq, a visionary economist from Pakistan who died in 1998 (whom I had the privilege to have as a close friend from our students days), is to move from the means-based perspective of the gross national product (GNP) to concentrating, to the extent that the available international data would allow, on aspects of human lives themselves. The United Nations has regularly published Human Development Reports from 1990 onwards.
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l i v e s , f r e e d o m s a n d c a p a b i l i t i e s particularly of social organization, including public healthcare, the assurance of medical care, the nature of schooling and education, the extent of social cohesion and harmony, and so on.* It does make a difference whether we look merely at the means of living rather than directly at the lives that people manage to have.4
In assessing our lives, we have reason to be interested not only in the kind of lives we manage to lead, but also in the freedom that we actually have to choose between different styles and ways of living.
Indeed, the freedom to determine the nature of our lives is one of the valued aspects of living that we have reason to treasure. The recognition that freedom is important can also broaden the concerns and commitments we have. We could choose to use our freedom to enhance many objectives that are not part of our own lives in a narrow sense (for example, the preservation of animal species that are threatened with extinction). This is an important issue in addressing such questions as the demands of environmental responsibility and of ‘sustainable development’. I shall return to that important question later, after a general examination of the perspective of freedom in assessing human lives.
va l u i n g f r e e d o m
The valuing of freedom has been a battleground for centuries, indeed millennia and there have been supporters and enthusiasts as well as critics and severe detractors. The divisions are not, however, primarily geographical, as is sometimes suggested. It is not as if ‘Asian values’, to invoke a term frequently used in contemporary debates, have all been authoritarian – and sceptical of the importance of freedom
– while traditional ‘European values’ are all pro-freedom and
* Going beyond well-discussed applications of the capability approach, the reach of capability-based reasoning may extend to less traversed territory as well, for example the importance of taking note in urban design and architecture of the freedom associated with the capability to function. This is well illustrated by the pioneering work of great importance by Romi Khosla and his colleagues; see Romi Khosla and Jane Samuels, Removing Unfreedoms: Citizens as Agents of Change in Urban Development (London: ITDG Publishing, 2004).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e anti-authoritarian. It is true that many contemporary ‘categorizers’
see belief in individual liberty as a significant classificatory device separating the ‘West’ from the ‘East’. Indeed, the advocacy of that line of classification has come from both the jealous guardians of the uniqueness of ‘Western culture’ and from resonant Eastern champions of what are called ‘Asian values’, allegedly giving priority to discipline over liberty. There is, however, very little empirical basis for dividing the history of ideas in this way.5
Freedom has had its supporters as well as detractors in classical Western writings (contrast, for example, Aristotle with Augustine), and it has received similarly mixed support in non-Western writings as well (contrast Ashoka with Kautilya, discussed in Chapter 3). We can, of course, try to make statistical comparisons of the relative frequency with which the idea of freedom is invoked in different regions in the world in diverse periods of history, and there might indeed emerge some interesting numerical findings, but there is little hope of capturing the ideological distinction between being ‘for’ or
‘against’ freedom in some large geographical dichotomy.
f r e e d o m : o p p o r t u n i t i e s
a n d
p r o c e s s e s
Freedom is valuable for at least two different reasons. First, more freedom gives us more opportunity to pursue our objectives – those things that we value. It helps, for example, in our ability to decide to live as we would like and to promote the ends that we may want to advance.
This aspect of freedom is concerned with our ability to achieve what we value, no matter what the process is through which that achievement comes about. Second, we may attach importance to the process of choice itself. We may, for example, want to make sure that we are not being forced into some state because of constraints imposed by others.
The distinction between the ‘opportunity aspect’ and the ‘process aspect’ of freedom can be both significant and quite far-reaching.*
* It is very important to appreciate that freedom as an idea has these two quite distinct aspects, and that some approaches to evaluation may capture one aspect better than 228
l i v e s , f r e e d o m s a n d c a p a b i l i t i e s Let me first consider a simple illustration of the distinction between the opportunity aspect and the process aspect of freedom. Kim decides one Sunday that he would prefer to stay at home rather than go out and do anything active. If he manages to do exactly what he wants, we can call it ‘scenario A’. Alternatively, some strong-armed thugs arrive to interrupt Kim’s life and drag him out and dump him in a large gutter. This terrible, indeed repulsive, situation may be called
‘scenario B’. In a third instance, ‘scenario C’, the thugs restrain Kim by commanding that he must not go out of his house, with the threat of severe punishment if he violates this restriction.
It is easy to see that in scenario B the freedom of Kim is badly affected: he cannot do what he would like to do (to stay at home), and his freedom to decide for himself is also gone. So there are violations of both the opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom (his opportunities are severely curtailed) and the process aspect (he cannot decide for himself what to do).
What about scenar
io C? Clearly the process aspect of Kim’s freedom is affected (even if he does under duress what he would have done anyway, the choice is no longer his): he could not have done anything else without being badly punished for it. The interesting question concerns the opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom. Since he does the same thing in both cases, with or without duress, could it be said that therefore his opportunity aspect is the same in both cases?
If the opportunity that people enjoy is to be judged only by whether they end up doing what they would respectively choose to do if unrestrained, then it must be said that there is no difference between scenarios A and C. The opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom is unaltered in this narrow view of opportunity, since he can stay at home in either case, exactly as he planned.
But does this give adequate recognition to what we understand by opportunity? Can we judge opportunities we have only by whether or not we end up in the state that we would choose to be in, irrespective of whether or not there are other significant alternatives that we could the other. The nature and implications of the distinction were investigated in my Kenneth Arrow Lectures, ‘Freedom and Social Choice’, included in my book, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Chapters 20–22.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e have chosen if we wanted? What about choosing to go for a nice walk – not Kim’s preferred alternative that Sunday but perhaps an interesting enough possibility – certainly preferable to being dumped in the gutter? Or, what about the opportunity to change one’s mind and, perhaps more immediately, what about the opportunity to choose freely to stay at home rather than the opportunity just to stay at home (and nothing else)? There are distinctions here between scenario C
and scenario A even in terms of opportunities. If these concerns are serious, then it seems plausible to argue that in scenario C the opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom is also affected, though obviously not as radically as in scenario B.
The distinction between ‘culmination outcome’ and ‘comprehensive outcome’, discussed earlier, is relevant here. The opportunity aspect of freedom can be seen in different ways in light of that distinction. It can be defined only in terms of the opportunity for ‘culmination outcomes’ (what a person ends up with), if we see opportunity in that particularly narrow way and regard the existence of options and the freedom of choice to be somehow unimportant.6 Alternatively, we can define opportunity more broadly – and I believe with greater plausibility
– in terms of the achievement of ‘comprehensive outcomes’, taking note also of the way the person reaches the culmination situation (for example, whether through his own choice or through the dictates of others). In the broader view, the opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom is clearly undermined in scenario C, by his being ordered to stay at home (he cannot choose anything else). In scenario A, in contrast, Kim does have the opportunity to consider the various alternatives that are feasible and then choose to stay at home if he is that way inclined, whereas in scenario C he definitely does not have that freedom.
The distinction between the narrow and broad views of opportunity will turn out to be quite central when we move from the basic idea of freedom to more specific concepts, such as the capabilities that a person has. We must examine in that context whether a person’s capability to lead the kind of life she values should be assessed only by the culmination alternative that she would actually end up with, or by using a broader approach that takes note of the process of choice involved, in particular the other alternatives that she could also choose, within her actual ability to do so.
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l i v e s , f r e e d o m s a n d c a p a b i l i t i e s t h e c a p a b i l i t y a p p r o a c h
Any substantive theory of ethics and political philosophy, particularly any theory of justice, has to choose an informational focus, that is, it has to decide which features of the world we should concentrate on in judging a society and in assessing justice and injustice.7 It is particularly important, in this context, to have a view as to how an individual’s overall advantage is to be assessed; for example, utilitarianism, pioneered by Jeremy Bentham, concentrates on individual happiness or pleasure (or some other interpretation of individual
‘utility’) as the best way of assessing how advantaged a person is and how that compares with the advantages of others. Another approach, which can be found in many practical exercises in economics, assesses a person’s advantage in terms of his or her income, wealth or resources. These alternatives illustrate the contrast between utility-based and resource-based approaches in contrast with the freedom-based capability approach.*
In contrast with the utility-based or resource-based lines of thinking, individual advantage is judged in the capability approach by a person’s capability to do things he or she has reason to value. A person’s advantage in terms of opportunities is judged to be lower than that of another if she has less capability – less real opportunity – to achieve those things that she has reason to value. The focus here is on the freedom that a person actually has to do this or be that – things that
* My work on the capability approach was initiated by my search for a better perspective on individual advantages than can be found in the Rawlsian focus on primary goods: see ‘Equality of What?’ in S. McMurrin (ed.), Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1980). But it was soon clear that the approach can have a much wider relevance: see Commodities and Capabilities (1985); ‘Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984’, Journal of Philosophy, 82 (1985); The Standard of Living (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Oxford University Press, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). The connection of this approach with Aristotelian ideas was pointed out to me by Martha Nussbaum, who has gone on to make pioneering contributions to this growing field of investigation and has strongly influenced the way the approach has developed. See also our jointly edited book, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e he or she may value doing or being. Obviously, the things we value most are particularly important for us to be able to achieve. But the idea of freedom also respects our being free to determine what we want, what we value and ultimately what we decide to choose. The concept of capability is thus linked closely with the opportunity aspect of freedom, seen in terms of ‘comprehensive’ opportunities, and not just focusing on what happens at ‘culmination’.
It is important to emphasize certain specific features of this approach that should be clarified at the outset, since they have sometimes been misunderstood or misinterpreted. First, the capability approach points to an informational focus in judging and comparing overall individual advantages, and does not, on its own, propose any specific formula about how that information may be used. Indeed, different uses may emerge depending on the nature of the questions that are being addressed (for example, policies dealing respectively with poverty, or disability, or cultural freedom) and, more practically, on the availability of data and of informative material that can be used. The capability approach is a general approach, focusing on information on individual advantages, judged in terms of opportunity rather than a specific ‘design’ for how a society should be organized.
A number of very distinguished contributions have been made by Martha Nussbaum and others in recent years on matters of social assessment and policy through powerful use of the capability approach. The fullness and the definitive achievements of these contributions have to be distinguished from the informational perspective on which they are based.8
The capability perspective does point to the central relevance of the inequality of capabilities in the assessment of social disparities, but it does not, on its own, propose any specific formula for policy decisions.
For example, contrary to an often-articulated interpretation, the use of the
capability approach for evaluation does not demand that we sign up to social policies aimed entirely at equating everyone’s capabilities, no matter what the other consequences of such policies might be. Similarly, in judging the aggregate progress of a society, the capability approach would certainly draw attention to the huge significance of the expansion of human capabilities of all members of the society, but it does not lay down any blueprint for how to deal with conflicts 232
l i v e s , f r e e d o m s a n d c a p a b i l i t i e s between, say, aggregative and distributive considerations (even though each is judged in terms of capabilities). And yet the choice of an informational focus – a concentration on capabilities – can be quite momentous in drawing attention to the decisions that would have to be made and the policy analysis that must take account of the right kind of information. The assessment of societies and social institutions can be deeply influenced by the information on which the approach focuses, and that is exactly where the capability approach makes its main contribution.9
A second issue to emphasize is that the capability perspective is inescapably concerned with a plurality of different features of our lives and concerns. The various attainments in human functioning that we may value are very diverse, varying from being well nourished or avoiding premature mortality to taking part in the life of the community and developing the skill to pursue one’s work-related plans and ambitions.
The capability that we are concerned with is our ability to achieve various combinations of functionings that we can compare and judge against each other in terms of what we have reason to value.*
The capability approach focuses on human life, and not just on some detached objects of convenience, such as incomes or commodities that a person may possess, which are often taken, especially in economic analysis, to be the main criteria of human success. Indeed, it proposes a serious departure from concentrating on the means of living to the actual opportunities of living. This also helps to bring about a change from means-oriented evaluative approaches, most notably focusing on what John Rawls calls ‘primary goods’, which are all-purpose means such as income and wealth, powers and prerogatives of offices, the social bases of self-respect, and so on.