by Amartya Sen
* Even though it is often convenient to talk about individual capabilities (seen in terms of the ability to achieve the corresponding individual functionings), it is important to bear in mind that the capability approach is ultimately concerned with the ability to achieve combinations of valued functionings. There may be, for example, a trade-off between a person’s capability to be well nourished and her capability to be well sheltered (poverty may make such difficult choices inescapable), and we have to see the person’s overall capability in terms of combined achievements that are open to her. And yet it is often convenient to talk about individual capabilities (with some implicit assumption about the fulfilment of other demands), and I shall do that from time to time, for the simplicity of presentation, in what follows.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e While primary goods are, at best, means to the valued ends of human life, in the Rawlsian formulation of principles of justice they become the central issues in judging distributional equity. This, I have argued, is a mistake, for primary goods are merely means to other things, in particular freedom (as was briefly discussed in Chapter 2).
But it was also briefly mentioned in that discussion that the motivation behind Rawlsian reasoning, in particular his focus on advancing human freedom, is quite compatible with – and may be better served by – a direct concentration on the assessment of freedom, rather than counting the means towards achieving it (so that I see the contrast as being less foundational than it might first appear). These issues will be more fully considered in the next chapter. The capability approach is particularly concerned with correcting this focus on means rather than on the opportunity to fulfil ends and the substantive freedom to achieve those reasoned ends.*
It is not hard to see that the reasoning underlying this departure in favour of capability can make a significant, and constructive, difference; for example, if a person has a high income but is also very prone to persistent illness, or is handicapped by some serious physical disability, then the person need not necessarily be seen as being very advantaged, on the mere ground that her income is high. She certainly has more of one of the means of living well (that is, a lot of income), but she faces difficulty in translating that into good living (that is, living in a way that she has reason to celebrate) because of the adversities of illness and physical handicap. We have to look instead at the extent to which she can actually achieve, if she so chooses, a state of good health and wellness, and being fit enough to do what she has reason to value. To understand that the means of satisfactory human living are not themselves the ends of good living helps to bring about a significant extension of the reach of the evaluative exercise. And the use of the capability perspective begins right there. Various aspects of the contribution that the capability perspective makes have been
* The relevance of ‘human capability formation’ for freedom suggests the need for new lines of investigation dealing with the development of cognitive and constructive powers. An important departure can be seen in James J. Heckman, ‘The Economics, Technology, and Neuroscience of Human Capability Formation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (2007).
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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 brought out by the contributions of a number of researchers in this field, including Sabina Alkire, Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, Flavio Comim, David A. Crocker, Reiko Gotoh, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Jennifer Prah Ruger, Ingrid Robeyns, Tania Burchardt and Polly Vizard.10
There are other features of the capability approach that may also be worth commenting on here (if only to prevent misinterpret-ations), dealing respectively with (1) the contrast between capability and achievement; (2) the plural composition of capabilities and role of reasoning (including public reasoning) in the use of the capability approach; and (3) the place of individuals and communities and their interrelations in the conception of capabilities. I take these up in turn.
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The focus of the capability approach is thus not just on what a person actually ends up doing, but also on what she is in fact able to do, whether or not she chooses to make use of that opportunity.
This aspect of the capability approach has been questioned by a number of critics (such as Richard Arneson and G. A. Cohen), who have presented arguments, with at least some apparent plausibility, in favour of paying attention to the actual achievement of functionings (emphasized also by Paul Streeten and Frances Stewart), rather than to the capability to choose between different achievements.11
That line of reasoning is often driven by the view that life consists of what really happens, not of what could have happened had the persons involved been differently inclined. There is a bit of an oversimplification here, since our freedom and choices are parts of our actual lives. Kim’s life is affected, in the example considered earlier, if he is forced to stay at home, rather than choosing to stay at home when he has other alternatives. Yet the achievement-based critique of the capability approach deserves serious consideration since it resonates with many people, and it is important to ask whether it would be more appropriate to base social judgements of the advantages or 235
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e disadvantages of people on their actual achievements rather than on their respective capabilities to achieve.*
In response to this critique, I start first with a small and rather technical point, which is methodologically quite important but which many critics might find too formal to be really interesting. Capabilities are defined derivatively on functionings, and include inter alia all the information on the functioning combinations that a person can choose. The cluster of functionings actually chosen is obviously among the feasible combinations. And, if we were really keen on concentrating only on achieved functionings, there is nothing to prevent us from basing the evaluation of a capability set on the assessment of the chosen combination of functionings from that set.12 If freedom had only instrumental importance for a person’s well-being, and choice had no intrinsic relevance, then this could indeed be the appropriate informational focus for the analysis of capability.
Identifying the value of the capability set with the value of the chosen functioning combination permits the capability approach to put as much weight – including possibly all the weight – on actual achievements. In terms of versatility, the capability perspective is more general – and more informationally inclusive – than focusing only on achieved functionings. There is, in this sense at least, no loss in looking at the broader informational base of capabilities, which permits the possibility of simply relying on the valuation of achieved functionings (should we wish to go that way), but also allows the use of other priorities in evaluation, attaching importance to opportunities and choices. This preliminary point is obviously a minimalist argument, and there is much more to be said, positively and affirmatively, for the importance of the perspective of capabilities and freedom.
First, even an exact ‘tie’ between two persons in achieved functionings may still hide significant differences between the advantages of
* There is also a pragmatic argument for paying special attention to actual achievements when there is some doubt about the reality of some capability that particular persons are supposed to have. This can be an important issue in the assessment of gender equity, in which seeking some actual evidence of critically important achievements may be reassuring in a way that a belief in the existence of the corresponding capability may not be. On this and related concerns, see Anne Philips, Engendering Democracy (London: Polity Press, 1991).
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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 the respective persons which could make us understand that one person may be really much more ‘disadvantaged’ than the other. For example, in terms of being hungry and undernourished, a person who voluntarily fasts, for political or religious reasons, may be just as deprived of food and n
ourishment as a famine-stricken victim. Their manifest under-nutrition – their achieved functioning – may be much the same, and yet the capability of the well-off person who chooses to fast may be much larger than that of the person who starves involuntarily because of poverty and destitution. The idea of capability can accommodate this important distinction, since it is oriented towards freedom and opportunities, that is, the actual ability of people to choose to live different kinds of lives within their reach, rather than confining attention only to what may be described as the culmination – or aftermath – of choice.
Second, the capability to choose between different affiliations in cultural life can have both personal and political importance. Consider the freedom of immigrants from non-Western countries to retain parts of the ancestral cultural traditions and lifestyles they value even after they have resettled in a European country or in America. This complex subject cannot be adequately assessed without distinguishing between doing something and being free to do that thing. A significant argument can be constructed in favour of immigrants having the freedom to retain at least some parts of their ancestral culture (such as their mode of religious worship, or loyalty to their native poetry and literature), if they value those things after comparing them with the prevalent behaviour patterns in the country in which they are now settled, and often after taking serious note of the prevalent reasoning in the country in favour of different practices.*
* The point is often made that tyrannical and nasty ancestral practices, such as the genital mutilation of young women, or punitive treatment of adulterous women, should not be practised in the country to which the persons have emigrated, since they are offensive to other citizens of that country. But surely the decisive argument against these practices is their terrible nature no matter where they occur, and the need to eliminate those practices is extremely strong, on the grounds of the loss of freedom of the victims, irrespective of whether the potential immigrants migrate or not. The argument is basically about the importance of freedom in general, including the freedom of the women involved. Whether these practices are offensive to others –
the older residents – is hardly the strongest argument against them, which should be concerned with the victims rather than their neighbours.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e However, the importance of this cultural freedom cannot be seen as an argument in favour of someone pursuing her ancestral lifestyle whether or not she find reasons to choose to do this. The central issue, in this argument, is the freedom to choose how to live – including the opportunity to pursue parts of her ancestral cultural preferences if so desired – and it cannot be turned into an argument in favour of her invariably pursuing those behaviour patterns, irrespective of whether she would like to do those things, or have reasons to retain those practices. The importance of capability, reflecting opportunity and choice, rather than the celebration of some particular lifestyle, irrespective of preference or choice, is central to the point at issue.
Third, there is also a policy-related question that makes the distinction between capabilities and achievements important for a different reason. This concerns the responsibilities and obligations of societies and of other people generally to help the deprived, which can be important for both public provisions within states and for the general pursuit of human rights. In considering the respective advantages of responsible adults, it may be appropriate to think that the claims of individuals on the society may be best seen in terms of freedom to achieve (given by the set of real opportunities) rather than actual achievements. For example, the importance of having some kind of a guarantee of basic healthcare is primarily concerned with giving people the capability to enhance their state of health. If a person has the opportunity for socially supported healthcare but still decides, with full knowledge, not to make use of that opportunity, then it could be argued that the deprivation is not as much of a burning social concern as would be the failure to provide the person with the opportunity for healthcare.
So there are many affirmative reasons for which it would make sense to use the broader informational perspective of capabilities rather than concentrating only on the informationally narrower viewpoint of achieved functionings.
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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 f e a r o f n o n - c o m m e n s u r a b i l i t y Functionings and capabilities are diverse, as indeed they must be since they deal with different features of our life and our freedom. This is, of course, a most unremarkable fact, but there is such a long tradition in parts of economics and political philosophy of treating one allegedly homogeneous feature (such as income or utility) as the sole ‘good thing’ that could be effortlessly maximized (the more the merrier), that there is some nervousness in facing a problem of valuation involving heterogeneous objects, such as the evaluation of capabilities – and functionings.
The utilitarian tradition, which works towards beating every valuable thing down to some kind of an allegedly homogeneous magnitude of ‘utility’, has contributed most to this sense of security in ‘counting’
exactly one thing (‘is there more here or less?’), and has also helped to generate the suspicion of the tractability of ‘judging’ combinations of many distinct good things (‘is this combination more valuable or less?’). And yet any serious problem of social judgement can hardly escape accommodating pluralities of values, as has been discussed, particularly by Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams.13 We cannot reduce all the things we have reason to value into one homogeneous magnitude. Indeed, there is much diversity within utility itself (as Aristotle and John Stuart Mill noted), even if it is decided to overlook everything other than utility in social evaluation.*
If the long tradition of utilitarianism with the assumption of homogeneous utility has contributed to this sense of security in commensurable homogeneity, the massive use of gross national product (GNP) as the indicator of the economic condition of a nation has also made its contribution in that direction. Proposals for weaning economic evaluators away from exclusive reliance on the GNP have tended to generate the worry that with diverse objects to judge we shall not have the sense of ease that goes with just checking whether the GNP
is higher or lower. But serious exercises of social evaluation cannot
* On this question, including a discussion of Aristotle’s and Mill’s pluralism, see my
‘Plural Utility’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 81 (1980–81).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e avoid dealing, in one way or another, with the valuation of diverse objects which may compete for attention (in addition to complement-ing each other in many cases). While T. S. Eliot was insightful in noting (this occurs in ‘Burnt Norton’) that: ‘Human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality’,14 humankind should be able to face a bit more reality than a picture of a world in which there is only one good thing.
The question has sometimes been linked with that of ‘non-commensurability’ – a much-used philosophical concept that seems to arouse anxiety and panic among some valuational experts. Capabilities are clearly non-commensurable since they are irreducibly diverse, but that does not tell us much at all about how difficult – or easy – it would be to judge and compare different capability combinations.15
What exactly is commensurability? Two distinct objects can be taken to be commensurable if they are measurable in common units (like two glasses of milk). Non-commensurability is present when several dimensions of value are irreducible to one another. In the context of evaluating a choice, commensurability requires that, in assessing its results, we can see the values of all the relevant results in exactly one dimension – measuring the significance of all the distinct outcomes in a common scale – so that in deciding what would be best, we need not go beyond ‘counting’ the overall value in that one homogeneous metric. Since the results are all reduced to one dimension, we need do no more than check how much of that ‘one good thing’, to
which every value is reduced, is provided by each respective option.
We are certainly not likely to have much problem in choosing between two alternative options, each of which offers just the same good thing, but one offers more than the other. This is an agreeably trivial case, but the belief that whenever the choice problem is not so trivial, we must have ‘great difficulty’ in deciding what we should sensibly do seems peculiarly feeble (it is tempting to ask, how ‘spoilt’
can you get?). Indeed, if counting one set of real numbers is all we could do for reasoning about what to choose, then there would not be many choices that we could sensibly and intelligently make.
Whether we are deciding between buying different commodity baskets, or making choices about what to do on a holiday, or deciding 240
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 whom to vote for in an election, we are inescapably involved in evaluating alternatives with non-commensurable aspects. Anyone who has ever gone to shop would know that one has to choose between non-commensurable objects – mangoes cannot be measured in units of apples, nor can sugar be reduced to units of soap (though I have heard some parents tell me that the world would have been much better if that were the case). Non-commensurability can hardly be a remarkable discovery in the world in which we live. And it need not, by itself, make it very hard to choose sensibly.
For example, having a medical intervention and enjoying a visit to a foreign country are two quite non-commensurate achievements, but a person may not have much problem in deciding which would be more valuable in her condition, and that judgement may of course vary with what she knows about her state of health and what her other concerns are. The choice and the weighting may sometimes be difficult, but there is no general impossibility here of making reasoned choices over combinations of diverse objects.