The Idea of Justice

by Amartya Sen

  Second, the environment is not only a matter of passive preservation, but also one of active pursuit. Even though many human activities that accompany the process of development may have destructive consequences, it is also within human power to enhance and improve the environment in which we live. In thinking about the steps that may be taken to halt environmental destruction, we have to include constructive human intervention. Our power to intervene with effectiveness and reasoning can be substantially enhanced by the process of development itself. For example, greater female education and women’s employment can help to reduce fertility rates, which in the long run can reduce the pressure on global warming and the increasing destruction of natural habitats. Similarly, the spread of school education and improvements in its quality can make us more environmentally conscious; better communication and a more active and better informed media can make us more aware of the need for environment-oriented thinking. It is easy to find many other examples of positive involvement. In general, seeing development in terms of increasing the effective freedom of human beings brings the constructive agency of people engaged in environment-friendly activities directly within the domain of developmental achievements.

  Development is fundamentally an empowering process, and this power can be used to preserve and enrich the environment, and not only to decimate it. We must not, therefore, think of the environment exclusively in terms of conserving pre-existing natural conditions, since the environment can also include the results of human creation.

  For example, purification of water is a part of improving the environment in which we live. The elimination of epidemics contributes both to development and to environmental enhancement.

  There is, however, scope for argument on how exactly we should think about the demands of sustainable development. The Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as meeting ‘the needs of the 249

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. This initiative in addressing the issue of sustainability has done much good already. But we still have to ask whether the conception of human beings implicit in this understanding of sustainability takes an adequately capacious view of humanity.

  Certainly, people do have needs, but they also have values and, in particular, cherish their ability to reason, appraise, choose, participate and act. Seeing people only in terms of their needs may give us a rather meagre view of humanity.

  Brundtland’s concept of sustainability has been further refined and elegantly extended by one of the foremost economists of our time, Robert Solow, in a monograph called An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability.20 Solow’s formulation sees sustainability as the requirement that the next generation must be left with ‘whatever it takes to achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own and to look after their next generation similarly’. His formulation has several attractive features. First, by focusing on sustaining living standards, which provides the motivation for environmental preservation, Solow extends the reach of Brundtland’s concentration on the fulfilment of needs.

  Second, in Solow’s neatly recursive formulation, the interests of all future generations receive attention through provisions to be made by each generation for its successor. There is an admirable comprehensiveness in the generational coverage for which Solow makes room.

  But does even the Solow reformulation of sustainable development incorporate an adequately broad view of humanity? While the concentration on maintaining living standards has some clear merits (there is something deeply appealing in Solow’s formula about trying to make sure that future generations can ‘achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own’), it can still be asked whether the coverage of living standards is sufficiently inclusive. In particular, sustaining living standards is not the same thing as sustaining people’s freedom and capability to have – and safeguard – what they value and have reason to attach importance to. Our reason for valuing particular opportunities need not always lie in their contribution to our living standards, or more generally to our own interests.*

  * See the discussion on this in Chapter 8, ‘Rationality and Other People’.

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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 To illustrate, consider our sense of responsibility towards the future of other species that are threatened with destruction. We may attach importance to the preservation of species not merely because – nor only to the extent that – the presence of these species enhances our own living standards. For example, a person may judge that we ought to do what we can to ensure the preservation of some threatened animal species, say, spotted owls. There would be no contradiction if the person were to say: ‘My living standards would be largely, indeed completely, unaffected by the presence or absence of spotted owls – I have in fact never even seen one – but I do strongly believe that we should not let those owls become extinct, for reasons that have nothing much to do with human living standards.’*

  This is where Gautama Buddha’s argument, presented in Sutta-Nipata (discussed in Chapter 9, ‘Plurality of Impartial Reasons’), becomes directly and immediately relevant. Since we are enormously more powerful than other species, we have some responsibility towards them that links with this asymmetry of power. We can have many reasons for our conservational efforts – not all of which are parasitic on our own living standards (or need fulfilment) and some of which turn precisely on our sense of values and on our acknowledgement of our fiduciary responsibility.

  If the importance of human lives lies not merely in our living standard and need-fulfilment, but also in the freedom that we enjoy, then the idea of sustainable development has to be correspondingly reformulated. There is cogency in thinking not just about sustaining the fulfilment of our needs, but more broadly about sustaining – or extending – our freedom (including the freedom to meet our needs).

  Thus recharacterized, sustainable freedom can be broadened from the formulations proposed by Brundtland and Solow to encompass the preservation, and when possible expansion, of the substantive freedoms and capabilities of people today ‘without compromising the

  * There is also a need for going beyond self-concerned motivations in understanding the commitment of many people to help protect vulnerable populations from environmental adversities that may not directly affect the lives of the individuals who make this commitment. The dangers of flooding in, say, the Maldives or Bangladesh from a rising sea level may influence the thoughts and actions of many people who would not themselves be affected by the threats facing the precariously placed populations.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e capability of future generations’ to have similar – or more – freedom.

  To use a medieval distinction, we are not only ‘patients’ whose needs deserve consideration, but also ‘agents’ whose freedom to decide what to value and how to pursue what we value can extend far beyond our own interests and needs. The significance of our lives cannot be put into the little box of our own living standards, or our need-fulfilment. The manifest needs of the patient, important as they are, cannot eclipse the momentous relevance of the agent’s reasoned values.

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  12

  Capabilities and Resources

  That income or wealth is an inadequate way of judging advantage was discussed with great clarity by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics:

  ‘wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else’.1 Wealth is not something we value for its own sake. Nor is it invariably a good indicator of what kind of lives we can achieve on the basis of our wealth. A person with severe disability cannot be judged to be more advantaged merely because she has a larger income or wealth than her able-bodied neighbour. Indeed, a richer person with disability may be subject to many restraints that the poorer person without the physical disadvantage may not have. In judging the advantages that the different people ha
ve compared with each other, we have to look at the overall capabilities they manage to enjoy. This is certainly one important argument for using the capability approach over the resource-centred concentration on income and wealth as the basis of evaluation.

  Since the idea of capability is linked with substantive freedom, it gives a central role to a person’s actual ability to do the different things that she values doing. The capability approach focuses on human lives, and not just on the resources people have, in the form of owning – or having use of – objects of convenience that a person may possess.

  Income and wealth are often taken to be the main criteria of human success. By proposing a fundamental shift in the focus of attention from the means of living to the actual opportunities a person has, the capability approach aims at a fairly radical change in the standard evaluative approaches widely used in economics and social studies.

  It also initiates a very substantial departure from the means-orientation in some of the standard approaches in political philosophy, 253

  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e for example John Rawls’s focus on ‘primary goods’ (incorporated in his ‘Difference Principle’) in assessing distributional issues in his theory of justice. Primary goods are all-purpose means such as income and wealth, powers and prerogatives of office, the social bases of self-respect and so on. They are not valuable in themselves, but they can, to varying extents, help the pursuit of what we really value. Nevertheless, even though primary goods are, at best, means to the valued ends of human life, they themselves have been seen as the primary indicator of judging distributional equity in the Rawlsian principles of justice.

  Through the explicit recognition that the means of satisfactory human living are not themselves the ends of good living (the point that Aristotle was making), the capability approach helps to bring about a significant extension of the reach of the evaluative exercise.*

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  One of the central issues in this context is the criterion of poverty.

  The identification of poverty with low income is well established, but there is, by now, quite a substantial literature on its inadequacies.

  Rawls’s focus on primary goods is more inclusive than income (indeed, income is only one of its constituents), but the identification of primary goods is still guided, in Rawlsian analysis, by his search for general all-purpose means, of which income and wealth are particular – and particularly important – examples. However, different people can have quite different opportunities for converting income and other primary goods into characteristics of good living and into the kind of freedom valued in human life. Thus, the relationship between resources and poverty is both variable and deeply contingent on the characteristics of the respective people and the environment in which they live – both natural and social.†

  * I have presented arguments for this change of focus in ‘Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984’, Journal of Philosophy, 82 (April 1985), and

  ‘Justice: Means versus Freedoms’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19 (Spring 1990).

  † In an early contribution in 1901, Rowntree noted an aspect of the problem by referring to ‘secondary poverty’, in contrast with ‘primary poverty’, defined in terms 254

  c a p a b i l i t i e s a n d r e s o u r c e s There are, in fact, various types of contingencies which result in variations in the conversion of income into the kinds of lives that people can lead. There are at least four important sources of variation.

  (1) Personal heterogeneities: People have disparate physical characteristics in relation to age, gender, disability, proneness to illness and so on, making their needs extremely diverse; for example, a disabled or an ill person may need more income to do the same elementary things that a less afflicted person can do with a given level of income. Indeed, some disadvantages, for example severe disabilities, may not be entirely correctable even with huge expenditure on treatment or prosthesis.

  (2) Diversities in the physical environment: How far a given income will go will depend also on environmental conditions, including climatic circumstances, such as temperature ranges, or flooding.

  The environmental conditions need not be unalterable – they could be improved with communal efforts, or worsened by pollution or depletion. But an isolated individual may have to take much of the environmental conditions as given in converting incomes and personal resources into functionings and quality of life.

  (3) Variations in social climate: The conversion of personal resources into functionings is influenced also by social conditions, including public healthcare and epidemiology, public educational arrangements and the prevalence or absence of crime and violence in the particular location. Aside from public facilities, the nature of community relationships can be very important, as the recent literature on ‘social capital’ has tended to emphasize.2

  (4) Differences in relational perspectives: Established patterns of behaviour in a community may also substantially vary the need for income to achieve the same elementary functionings; for example, to be able to ‘appear in public without shame’ may require higher standards of clothing and other visible consumption of low income (B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty. A Study of Town Life (London: Macmillan, 1901)). In pursuing the phenomenon of secondary poverty, Rowntree focused specifically on influences of habits and behaviour patterns that affect the commodity composition of a family’s consumption. That issue remains important even today, but the distance between low income and actual deprivation can arise for other reasons as well.

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  t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e in a richer society than in a poorer one (as Adam Smith noted more than two centuries ago in the Wealth of Nations).* The same applies to the personal resources needed for taking part in the life of the community, and in many contexts, even to fulfil the elementary requirements of self-respect. This is primarily an inter-societal variation, but it influences the relative advantages of two persons located in different countries.†

  There can also be some ‘coupling’ of disadvantages between different sources of deprivation, and this can be a critically important consideration in understanding poverty and in making public policy to tackle it.3 Handicaps, such as age or disability or illness, reduce one’s ability to earn an income. But they also make it harder to convert income into capability, since an older, or more disabled or more seriously ill person may need more income (for assistance, for pros-thetics, for treatment) to achieve the same functionings (even if that achievement were, in fact, at all possible).‡ Thus real poverty (in terms of capability deprivation) can easily be much more intense than we can deduce from income data. This can be a crucial concern in assessing public action to assist the elderly and other groups with

  * See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; republished, R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)), pp. 351–2. On the relation between relative disadvantage and poverty, see the more recent works of W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1966), and Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).

  † In fact, relative deprivation in terms of incomes can yield absolute deprivation in terms of capabilities. Being relatively poor in a rich country can be a great capability handicap, even when one’s absolute income is high by world standards. In a generally opulent country, more income is needed to buy enough commodities to achieve the same social functioning. On this, see my ‘Poor, Relatively Speaking’, Oxford Economic Papers, 35 (1983), reprinted in Resources, Values and Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

  ‡ There is also a problem of coupling in (1) under-nutrition generated by income poverty, and (2) income poverty resulting from work deprivation due to under-nutrition. On these connections, see Partha Dasgupta and Debraj Ray
, ‘Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Theory’, Economic Journal, 96

  (1986), and ‘Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Policy’, Economic Journal, 97 (1987).

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  c a p a b i l i t i e s a n d r e s o u r c e s conversion difficulties in addition to their low income-earning ability.*

  Distribution of facilities and opportunities within the family raises further complications for the income approach to poverty. Income accrues to the family through its earning members, and not to all the individuals within it irrespective of age, gender and working ability.

  If the family income is disproportionately used to advance the interests of some family members and not others (for example, if there is a systematic preference for boys over girls in the family allocation of resources), then the extent of the deprivation of the neglected members (girls, in the example considered) may not be adequately reflected by the aggregate value of the family income.4 This is a substantial issue in many contexts; sex bias does appear to be a major factor in the family allocation in many countries in Asia and north Africa. The deprivation of girls is more readily – and more reliably – assessed by looking at capability deprivation reflected, for example, in greater mortality, morbidity, undernourishment or medical neglect, than can be found on the basis of comparing incomes of different families.†

  * The contribution of such handicaps to the prevalence of income poverty in Britain was brought out sharply by a pioneering empirical study by A. B. Atkinson, Poverty in Britain and the Reform of Social Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). In his later works, Atkinson has further pursued the connection between income handicap and deprivation of other kinds; see his ‘On the Measurement of Poverty’, Econometrica, 55 (1987), and Poverty and Social Security (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989). For a powerful examination of the general idea of disadvantage and its far-reaching relevance both for social evaulation and for public policy, see Jonathan Wolff, with Avner De-Shalit, Disadvantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).