Development as Freedom

by Sen, Amartya

  UTILITY AS AN INFORMATIONAL BASE

  The informational base of standard utilitarianism is the utility sum total in the states of affairs. In the classical, Benthamite form of utilitarianism, the “utility” of a person stands for some measure of his or her pleasure or happiness. The idea is to pay attention to each person’s well-being, and in particular to see well-being as essentially a mental characteristic, viz., the pleasure or happiness generated. Interpersonal comparisons of happiness cannot, of course, be done very precisely, nor through standard scientific methods.6 Nevertheless, most of us do not find it absurd (or “meaningless”) to identify some people as being decidedly less happy and more miserable than others.

  Utilitarianism has been the dominant ethical theory—and, inter alia, the most influential theory of justice—for much over a century. The traditional economics of welfare and of public policy was for a very long time dominated by this approach, initiated in its modern form by Jeremy Bentham, and pursued by such economists as John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons, Henry Sidgwick, Francis Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall and A. C. Pigou.7

  The requirements of utilitarian evaluation can be split into three distinct components. The first component is “consequentialism” (not a prepossessing word), and it stands for the claim that all choices (of actions, rules, institutions, and so on) must be judged by their consequences, that is, by the results they generate. This focus on the consequent state of affairs denies particularly the tendency of some normative theories to regard some principles to be right irrespective of their results. In fact, it goes further than demanding only consequence-sensitivity, since it rules out that anything other than consequences can ultimately matter. How much of a restriction is imposed by consequentialism has to be judged further, but it is worth mentioning here that this must partly depend on what is or is not included in the list of consequences (for example, whether an action performed can be seen as one of the “consequences” of that action, which—in an obvious sense—it clearly is).

  The second component of utilitarianism is “welfarism,” which restricts the judgments of state of affairs to the utilities in the respective states (paying no direct attention to such things as the fulfillment or violation of rights, duties, and so on). When welfarism is combined with consequentialism, we get the requirement that every choice must be judged by the respective utilities it generates. For example, any action is judged by the consequent state of affairs (because of consequentialism), and the consequent state of affairs is judged by utilities in that state (because of welfarism).

  The third component is “sum-ranking,” which requires that the utilities of different people be simply summed together to get their aggregate merit, without paying attention to the distribution of that total over the individuals (that is, the utility sum is to be maximized irrespective of the extent of inequality in the distribution of utilities). The three components together yield the classic utilitarian formula of judging every choice by the sum total of utilities generated through that choice.8

  In this utilitarian view, injustice consists in aggregate loss of utility compared with what could have been achieved. An unjust society, in this view, is one in which people are significantly less happy, taken together, than they need be. The concentration on happiness or pleasure has been removed in some modern forms of utilitarianism. In one variation, utility is defined as desire fulfillment. In this view, what is relevant is the strength of the desire that is being fulfilled, and not the intensity of the happiness that is generated.

  Since neither happiness nor desire is very easy to measure, utility is often defined in modern economic analysis as some numerical representation of a person’s observable choices. There are some technical issues in representability, which need not detain us here. The basic formula is this: if a person would choose an alternative x over another, y, then and only then that person has more utility from x than from y. The “scaling” of utility has to follow this rule, among others, and in this framework it is not substantively different to affirm that a person has more utility from x than from y than to say that she would choose x given the choice between the two.9

  MERITS OF THE UTILITARIAN APPROACH

  The procedure of choice-based accounting has some general merits as well as demerits. In the context of utilitarian calculus, its major demerit is that it does not lead immediately to any way of making interpersonal comparisons, since it concentrates on each individual’s choice seen separately. This is obviously inadequate for utilitarianism, since it cannot accommodate sum-ranking, which does require interpersonal comparability. As a matter of fact, the choice-based view of utility has been used mainly in the context of approaches that invoke welfarism and consequentialism only. It is a kind of utility-based approach without being utilitarianism proper.

  While the merits of the utilitarian approach can be subjected to some debate, it does make insightful points, in particular:

  1) the importance of taking account of the results of social arrangements in judging them (the case for consequence-sensitivity may be very plausible even when full consequentialism seems too extreme);

  2) the need to pay attention to the well-being of the people involved when judging social arrangements and their results (the interest in people’s well-being has obvious attractions, even if we disagree on the utility-centered mental-metric way of judging well-being).

  To illustrate the relevance of results, consider the fact that many social arrangements are advocated because of the attractions of their constitutive features, without any note being taken of their consequential outcomes. Take property rights. Some have found it to be constitutive of individual independence and have gone on to ask that no restriction be placed on the ownership, inheritance and use of property, rejecting even the idea of taxing property or income. Others, on the opposite side of the political divide, have been repelled by the idea of inequalities of ownership—some having so much while others have so little—and they have gone on to demand the abolition of private property.

  One can indeed entertain different views on the intrinsic attractions or repulsive features of private property. The consequentialist approach suggests that we must not be swayed only by these features, and must examine the consequences of having—or not having—property rights. Indeed, the more influential defenses of private property tend to come from pointers to its positive consequences. It is pointed out that private property has proved to be, in terms of results, quite a powerful engine of economic expansion and general prosperity. In the consequentialist perspective that fact must occupy a central position in assessing the merits of private property. On the other side, once again in terms of results, there is also much evidence to suggest that unconstrained use of private property—without restrictions and taxes—can contribute to entrenched poverty and make it difficult to have social support for those who fall behind for reasons beyond their control (including disability, age, illness and economic and social misfortune). It can also be defective in ensuring environmental preservation, and in the development of social infrastructure.10

  Thus, neither of the purist approaches emerges unscathed in terms of analysis by results, suggesting that arrangements regarding property may have to be judged, at least partly, by their likely consequences. This conclusion is in line with the utilitarian spirit, even though full utilitarianism would insist on a very specific way of judging consequences and their relevance. The general case for taking full note of results in judging policies and institutions is a momentous and plausible requirement, which has gained much from the advocacy of utilitarian ethics.

  Similar arguments can be presented in favor of taking note of human well-being in judging results, rather than looking only at some abstract and alienated characteristics of states of affairs. The focusing on consequences and on well-being, thus, have points in their favor, and this endorsement—it is only a partial endorsement—of the utilitarian approach to justice relates directly to its informational base.

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sp; LIMITATIONS OF THE UTILITARIAN PERSPECTIVE

  The handicaps of the utilitarian approach can also be traced to its informational base. Indeed, it is not hard to find fault with the utilitarian conception of justice.11 To mention just a few, the following would appear to be among the deficiencies that a fully utilitarian approach yields.

  1) Distributional indifference: The utilitarian calculus tends to ignore inequalities in the distribution of happiness (only the sum total matters—no matter how unequally distributed). We may be interested in general happiness, and yet want to pay attention not just to “aggregate” magnitudes, but also to extents of inequalities in happiness.

  2) Neglect of rights, freedoms and other non-utility concerns: The utilitarian approach attaches no intrinsic importance to claims of rights and freedoms (they are valued only indirectly and only to the extent they influence utilities). It is sensible enough to take note of happiness, but we do not necessarily want to be happy slaves or delirious vassals.

  3) Adaptation and mental conditioning: Even the view the utilitarian approach takes of individual well-being is not very robust, since it can be easily swayed by mental conditioning and adaptive attitudes.

  The first two criticisms are rather more immediate than the third, and perhaps I should comment a little only on the third—the issue of mental conditioning and its effect on the utilitarian calculus. Concentrating exclusively on mental characteristics (such as pleasure, happiness or desires) can be particularly restrictive when making interpersonal comparisons of well-being and deprivation. Our desires and pleasure-taking abilities adjust to circumstances, especially to make life bearable in adverse situations. The utility calculus can be deeply unfair to those who are persistently deprived: for example, the usual underdogs in stratified societies, perennially oppressed minorities in intolerant communities, traditionally precarious sharecroppers living in a world of uncertainty, routinely overworked sweatshop employees in exploitative economic arrangements, hopelessly subdued housewives in severely sexist cultures. The deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible.12 The mental metric of pleasure or desire is just too malleable to be a firm guide to deprivation and disadvantage.

  It is thus important not only to take note of the fact that in the scale of utilities the deprivation of the persistently deprived may look muffled and muted, but also to favor the creation of conditions in which people have real opportunities of judging the kind of lives they would like to lead. Social and economic factors such as basic education, elementary health care, and secure employment are important not only on their own, but also for the role they can play in giving people the opportunity to approach the world with courage and freedom. These considerations require a broader informational base, focusing particularly on people’s capability to choose the lives they have reason to value.

  JOHN RAWLS AND THE PRIORITY OF LIBERTY

  I turn now to the most influential—and in many ways the most important—of contemporary theories of justice, that of John Rawls.13 His theory has many components, but I start with a particular requirement that John Rawls has called “the priority of liberty.” Rawls’s own formulation of this priority is comparatively moderate, but that priority takes a particularly sharp form in modern libertarian theory, which in some formulations (for example, in the elegantly uncompromising construction presented by Robert Nozick) puts extensive classes of rights—varying from personal liberties to property rights—as having nearly complete political precedence over the pursuit of social goals (including the removal of deprivation and destitution).14 These rights take the form of “side constraints,” which simply must not be violated. The procedures that are devised to guarantee rights, which are to be accepted no matter what consequences follow from them, are simply not on the same plane (so the argument goes) as the things that we may judge to be desirable (utilities, well-being, equity of outcomes or opportunities, and so on). The issue, then, in this formulation, is not the comparative importance of rights, but their absolute priority.

  In less demanding formulations of “priority of liberty” presented in liberal theories (most notably, in the writings of John Rawls), the rights that receive precedence are much less extensive, and essentially consist of various personal liberties, including some basic political and civil rights.15 But the precedence that these more limited rights receive is meant to be quite complete, and while these rights are much more confined in coverage than those in libertarian theory, they too cannot be in any way compromised by the force of economic needs.

  The case for such a complete priority can be disputed by demonstrating the force of other considerations, including that of economic needs. Why should the status of intense economic needs, which can be matters of life and death, be lower than that of personal liberties? This issue was forcefully raised in a general form by Herbert Hart a long time ago (in a famous article in 1973). John Rawls has acknowledged the force of this argument in his later book Political Liberalism and suggested ways of accommodating it within the structure of his theory of justice.16

  If the “priority of liberty” is to be made plausible even in the context of countries that are intensely poor, the content of that priority would have to be, I would argue, considerably qualified. This does not, however, amount to saying that liberty should not have priority, but rather that the form of that demand should not have the effect of making economic needs be easily overlooked. It is, in fact, possible to distinguish between (1) Rawls’s strict proposal that liberty should receive overwhelming precedence in the case of a conflict, and (2) his general procedure of separating out personal liberty from other types of advantages for special treatment. The more general second claim concerns the need to assess and evaluate liberties differently from individual advantages of other kinds.

  The critical issue, I would submit, is not complete precedence, but whether a person’s liberty should get just the same kind of importance (no more) that other types of personal advantages—incomes, utilities and so on—have. In particular, the question is whether the significance of liberty for the society is adequately reflected by the weight that the person herself would tend to give to it in judging her own overall advantage. The claim of preeminence of liberty (including basic political liberties and civil rights) disputes that it is adequate to judge liberty simply as an advantage—like an extra unit of income—that the person herself receives from that liberty.

  In order to prevent a misunderstanding, I should explain that the contrast is not with the value that citizens attach—and have reason to attach—to liberty and rights in their political judgments. Quite the contrary: the safeguarding of liberty has to be ultimately related to the general political acceptability of its importance. The contrast, rather, is with the extent to which having more liberty or rights increases an individual’s own personal advantage, which is only a part of what is involved. The claim here is that the political significance of rights can far exceed the extent to which the personal advantage of the holders of these rights is enhanced by having these rights. The interests of others are also involved (since liberties of different people are interlinked), and also the violation of liberty is a procedural transgression that we may have reason to resist as a bad thing in itself. There is, thus, an asymmetry with other sources of individual advantage, for example incomes, which would be valued largely on the basis of how much they contribute to the respective personal advantages. The safeguarding of liberty and basic political rights would have the procedural priority that follows from this asymmetric prominence.

  This issue is particularly important in the context of the constitutive role of liberty and political and civil rights in making it possible to have public discourse and communicative emergence of agreed norms and social values. I shall examine this difficult issue more fully in chapt
ers 6 and 10.

  ROBERT NOZICK AND LIBERTARIANISM

  I return now to the issue of complete priority of rights, including property rights, in the more demanding versions of libertarian theory. For example, in Nozick’s theory (as presented in Anarchy, State and Utopia), the “entitlements” that people have through the exercise of these rights cannot, in general, be outweighed because of their results—no matter how nasty those results may be. A very exceptional exemption is given by Nozick to what he calls “catastrophic moral horrors,” but this exemption is not very well integrated with the rest of Nozick’s approach, nor is this exemption matched with a proper justification (it remains quite ad hoc). The uncompromising priority of libertarian rights can be particularly problematic since the actual consequences of the operation of these entitlements can, quite possibly, include rather terrible results. It can, in particular, lead to the violation of the substantive freedom of individuals to achieve those things to which they have reason to attach great importance, including escaping avoidable mortality, being well nourished and healthy, being able to read, write and count and so on. The importance of these freedoms cannot be ignored on grounds of the “priority of liberty.”

  For example, as is shown in my Poverty and Famines, even gigantic famines can result without anyone’s libertarian rights (including property rights) being violated.17 The destitutes such as the unemployed or the impoverished may starve precisely because their “entitlements”—legitimate as they are—do not give them enough food. This might look like a special case of a “catastrophic moral horror,” but horrors of any degree of seriousness—all the way from gigantic famines to regular undernourishment and endemic but nonextreme hunger—can be shown to be consistent with a system in which no one’s libertarian rights are violated. Similarly, deprivation of other types (for example, the lack of medical care for curable illnesses) can coexist with all libertarian rights (including rights of property ownership) being fully satisfied.