by Amartya Sen
Making choices with non-commensurable rewards is like speaking prose. It is, in general, not particularly hard to speak in prose (even if M. Jourdain in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme may have marvelled at our ability to perform so exacting a feat). But this does not negate the recognition that speaking can sometimes be very difficult, not because expressing oneself in prose is in itself arduous, but, for example, when one is overwhelmed by emotions. The presence of non-commensurable results only indicates that the choice-decisions will not be trivial (reducible just to counting what is ‘more’ and what is ‘less’), but it does not at all indicate that it is impossible – or even that it must always be particularly difficult.
va l u a t i o n a n d p u b l i c r e a s o n i n g Reflected evaluation demands reasoning regarding relative importance, not just counting. This is an exercise in which we are constantly engaged. To that general understanding has to be added the possible importance of public reasoning as a way of extending the reach and reliability of valuations and of making them more robust. The necessity 241
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e of scrutiny and critical assessment is not just a demand for self-centred evaluation by secluded individuals, but a pointer to the fruitfulness of public discussion and of interactive public reasoning: social evaluations may be starved of useful information and good arguments if they are entirely based on separated and sequestered cogitation. Public discussion and deliberation can lead to a better understanding of the role, reach and significance of particular functionings and their combinations.
To illustrate, public discussion of gender-based inequalities in India has helped to bring out, in recent years, the importance of certain freedoms that did not receive adequate acknowledgement earlier.*
Examples include the freedom to depart from fixed and time-honoured family roles that limit the social and economic opportunities of women, and also from a social value system that is more geared to recognizing men’s deprivation than women’s. These traditional antecedents of gender inequality in well-established, male-dominated societies demand not only individual concern but also informative public discussion and, often enough, agitation.
The connection between public reasoning and the choice and weighting of capabilities in social assessment is important to emphasize. It also points to the absurdity of the argument that is sometimes presented, which claims that the capability approach would be usable
– and ‘operational’ – only if it comes with a set of ‘given’ weights on the distinct functionings in some fixed list of relevant capabilities. The search for given, pre-determined weights is not only conceptually ungrounded, but it also overlooks the fact that the valuations and weights to be used may reasonably be influenced by our own continued scrutiny and by the reach of public discussion.† It would be
* This will be discussed in Chapter 16, ‘The Practice of Democracy’.
† Aside from general variations depending on social circumstances and political priorities, there is a good case for keeping open the possibility of raising new and interesting questions about inclusions and weights. For example, there have been very interesting and important arguments raised recently on placing a special emphasis on such values as ‘civility’ in developing the application of human capabilities to understand the reach of freedom and universality; on this, see Drucilla Cornell’s insightful analysis in
‘Developing Human Capabilities: Freedom, Universality, and Civility’, in Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles (New York: Routledge, 2004).
242
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 hard to accommodate this understanding with inflexible use of some pre-determined weights in a non-contingent form.*
It can, of course, be the case that the agreement that emerges on the weights to be used may be far from total, and we shall then have good reason to use ranges of weights on which we may find some agreement. This need not fatally disrupt evaluation of injustice or the making of public policy, for reasons that have already been discussed earlier on in this book (beginning in the Introduction). For example, to show that slavery severely reduces the freedom of the slaves, or that the absence of any guarantee of medical attention curtails our substantive opportunities of living, or that severe undernourishment of children, which causes immediate agony as well as underdevelop-ment of cognitive capabilities, including reduction of the ability to reason, is detrimental to justice, we do not need a unique set of weights on the different dimensions involved in such judgements. A broad range of not fully congruent weights could yield rather similar principal guidelines.†
The approach of capability is entirely consistent with a reliance on partial rankings and on limited agreements, the importance of which has been emphasized throughout this work. The main task is to get things right on the comparative judgements that can be reached through personal and public reasoning, rather than to feel compelled to opine on every possible comparison that could be considered.
* Also, the choice of weights may depend on the nature of the exercise (for example, whether we are using the capability perspective to assess poverty or to guide health policy, or using it to assess the inequality of overall advantages of different persons).
Different questions can be addressed using the capability information, and the diversity of the exercises involved can, sensibly enough, lead to rather different choices of weights.
† The analytical and mathematical issues underlying the use of ranges of weights (rather than one unique set of weights) for generating regular partial orderings, are investigated in my ‘Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability’, Econometrica, 38 (1970); On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, expanded edition, with James Foster, 1997). See also Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, ‘A New Approach to the Evaluation of Well-being and Poverty by Fuzzy Set Theory’, Giornale degli Economisti, 53 (1994).
243
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e c a p a b i l i t i e s , i n d i v i d u a l s a n d
c o m m u n i t i e s
I turn now to the third of the complications identified earlier. Capabilities are seen primarily as attributes of people, not of collectivities, such as communities. There is, of course, no great difficulty in thinking about capabilities of groups. For example, if we consider the ability of Australia to subdue all other cricket-playing countries in test matches (as things looked when I started writing this book, but perhaps not any more), the object of discussion is the capability of the Australian cricket team, not of any particular Australian cricket player. Should considerations of justice not take note of such group capabilities, in addition to individual capabilities?
Indeed, some critics of the capability approach have seen, in the concentration on capabilities of persons, the evil influence of what is called – it is not a term of praise – ‘methodological individualism’.
Let me begin by discussing, first, why identifying the capability approach as methodological individualism would be a significant mistake. Even though what is called methodological individualism has been defined in many different ways,* Frances Stewart and Se´verine Deneulin focus on the belief that ‘all social phenomena must be accounted for in terms of what individuals think, choose and do’.16
There have certainly been schools of thought based on individual thought, choice and action, detached from the society in which they exist. But the capability approach not only does not assume such detachment, its concern with people’s ability to live the kind of lives they have reason to value brings in social influences both in terms of what they value (for example, ‘taking part in the life of the community’) and what influences operate on their values (for example, the relevance of public reasoning in individual assessment).
It is hard, then, to envision cogently how persons in society can think, choose or act without being influenced in one way or another
* On the complexities involved in the diagnosis of methodological individualism, s
ee Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), and also his ‘Methodological Individualism Reconsidered’, British Journal of Sociology, 19 (1968), along with the references cited by Lukes.
244
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 by the nature and working of the world around them. If, for example, women in traditionally sexist societies come to accept that women’s position has to be standardly inferior to men, then that view – shared by individual women under social influence – is not, in any sense, independent of social conditions.* In pursuing a reasoned rejection of that presumption, the capability perspective demands more public engagement on such a subject. Indeed, the entire approach of the
‘impartial spectator’, on which the view developed in this work draws, focuses on the relevance of the society – and people far and near – in the valuational exercise of individuals. Uses of the capability approach (for example, in my book Development as Freedom (1999)) have been quite unequivocal in not assuming any kind of a detached view of individuals from the society around them.
Perhaps the misconstruction in this critique arises from its unwillingness to distinguish adequately between the individual characteristics that are used in the capability approach and the social influences that operate on them. The critique stops, in this sense, much too early. To note the role of ‘thinking, choosing and doing’ by individuals is just the beginning of recognizing what actually does happen (we do, of course, as individuals, think about issues and choose and perform actions), but we cannot end there without an appreciation of the deep and pervasive influence of society on our ‘thinking, choosing and doing’. When someone thinks and chooses and does something, it is, for sure, that person
– and not someone else – who is doing these things. But it would be hard to understand why and how he or she undertakes these activities without some comprehension of his or her societal relations.
The basic issue was put with admirably clarity and reach by Karl Marx more than a century and a half ago: ‘What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of ‘‘Society’’ as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual.’17 The presence of individuals who think, choose and act – a manifest reality in the world – does not make an approach methodologically individualist. It is the illegitimate invoking of any presumption of independence of the thoughts and actions of persons from the society around them that would bring the feared beast into the living room.
* This issue was discussed in Chapter 7, ‘Position, Relevance and Illusion’.
245
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e While the charge of methodological individualism would be hard to sustain, it can of course be asked: why restrict the relevant capabilities that are considered valuable, only to those of the individuals, and not of groups? There is indeed no particular analytical reason why group capabilities – the military strength of the American nation or game-playing ability of the Chinese – must be excluded a priori from the discourse on justice or injustice in their respective societies, or in the world. The case for not going that way lies in the nature of the reasoning that would be involved.
Since groups do not think in the obvious sense in which individuals do, the importance of capabilities that groups have would tend to be understood, for reasons that are clear enough, in terms of the value that members of the group (or for that matter, other people) place on the proficiency of that group. Ultimately, it is individual valuation on which we would have to draw, while recognizing the profound interdependence of the valuations of individuals who interact with each other. The valuation involved would tend to be based on the importance that people attach to being able to do certain things in collaboration with others.* In valuing a person’s ability to take part in the life of the society, there is an implicit valuation of the life of the society itself, and that is an important enough aspect of the capability perspective.†
There is also a second issue that is relevant here. A person belongs to many different groups (related to gender, class, language group, profession, nationality, community, race, religion and so on), and to see them merely as a member of just one particular group would be a major denial of the freedom of each person to decide how exactly to
* There is also scope for distinguishing between ‘collective guilt’ and the guilt of individuals who constitute the collectivity. ‘Collective guilt feelings’ can also be distinguished from feelings of guilt of the individuals in that group; on this, see Margaret Gilbert, ‘Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings’, Journal of Ethics, 6 (2002).
† There is obviously no prohibition against taking note of such interrelated capabilities, indeed the argument for taking note can be quite strong. James E. Foster and Christopher Handy have investigated the role and operation of interdependent capabilities in their insightful paper, ‘External Capabilities’, mimeographed (Vanderbilt University, January 2008). See also James E. Foster, ‘Freedom, Opportunity and Well-being’, mimeographed (Vanderbilt University, 2008), and also Sabina Alkire and James E. Foster, ‘Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement’, OPHI Working Paper 7 (Oxford University, 2007).
246
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 see himself or herself. The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’,
‘you must commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).
As it happens, one of the early warnings against ignoring the multiple membership of individuals to different groups came from Karl Marx.
Marx pointed, in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, to the need to go beyond class analysis even as one appreciates its social relevance (a subject on which he had, of course, made major contributions): unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers, and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.18
I believe the warning here, against seeing someone merely as a member of a group to which he or she belongs (Marx was protesting here against the Gotha Programme of the United Workers’ Party of Germany which considered workers ‘only as workers’), is particularly important in the present intellectual climate in which individuals tend to be identified as belonging to one social category to the exclusion of all others (‘nothing more is seen in them’), such as being a Muslim or a Christian or a Hindu, an Arab or a Jew, a Hutu or a Tutsi, or a member of Western civilization (whether or not it is seen as clash-ing inevitably with other civilizations). Individual human beings with their various plural identities, multiple affiliations and diverse associations are quintessentially social creatures with different types of societal interactions. Proposals to see a person merely as a member of one social group tend to be based on an inadequate understanding of the breadth and complexity of any society in the world.*
* On this, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), and Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., and London: Allen Lane, 2006).
247
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e s u s t a i n a b l e d e v e l o p m e n t a n d t h e e n v i r o n m e n t
I end this discussion of the relevance of freedom and capabilities with a practical illustration that deals with sustainable development. The threat that the environment faces today has rightly been emphasized in recent discussions, but there is a need for clarity in deciding how to think about environmental challenges in the contemporary world.
Focusing
on the quality of life can help in this understanding, and throw light not only on the demands of sustainable development, but also on the content and relevance of what we can identify as
‘environmental issues’.
The environment is sometimes seen (I believe oversimply) as the
‘state of nature’, including such measures as the extent of forest cover, the depth of the groundwater table, the number of living species and so on. To the extent that it is assumed that this pre-existing nature will stay intact unless we add impurities and pollutants to it, it might, therefore, appear superficially plausible that the environment is best protected if we interfere with it as little as possible. This understanding is, however, deeply defective for two important reasons.
First, the value of the environment cannot be just a matter of what there is, but must also consist of the opportunities it offers to people. The impact of the environment on human lives must be among the principal considerations in assessing the value of the environment. To take an extreme example, in understanding why the eradication of smallpox is not viewed as an impoverishment of nature (we do not tend to lament: ‘the environment is poorer since the smallpox virus has disappeared’), in the way, say, the destruction of ecologically important forests would seem to be, the connection with lives in general and human lives in particular has to be taken into consideration.
It is, therefore, not surprising that environmental sustainability has typically been defined in terms of the preservation and enhancement of the quality of human life. The rightly celebrated Brundtland Report, published in 1987, defined ‘sustainable development’ as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.19 It is open to argument 248
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 whether the Brundtland Committee’s view of what to sustain is exactly right, and presently I will have more to say on Brundtland’s particular formula. But I must say first how indebted we all are to Gro Brundtland and the committee she led for the understanding they have generated that the value of the environment cannot be divorced from the lives of living creatures.