Development as Freedom

by Sen, Amartya

  WELL-BEING, FREEDOM AND CAPABILITY

  I have tried to argue for some time now that for many evaluative purposes, the appropriate “space” is neither that of utilities (as claimed by welfarists), nor that of primary goods (as demanded by Rawls), but that of the substantive freedoms—the capabilities—to choose a life one has reason to value.38 If the object is to concentrate on the individual’s real opportunity to pursue her objectives (as Rawls explicitly recommends), then account would have to be taken not only of the primary goods the persons respectively hold, but also of the relevant personal characteristics that govern the conversion of primary goods into the person’s ability to promote her ends. For example, a person who is disabled may have a larger basket of primary goods and yet have less chance to lead a normal life (or to pursue her objectives) than an able-bodied person with a smaller basket of primary goods. Similarly, an older person or a person more prone to illness can be more disadvantaged in a generally accepted sense even with a larger bundle of primary goods.39

  The concept of “functionings,” which has distinctly Aristotelian roots, reflects the various things a person may value doing or being.40 The valued functionings may vary from elementary ones, such as being adequately nourished and being free from avoidable disease,41 to very complex activities or personal states, such as being able to take part in the life of the community and having self-respect.

  A person’s “capability” refers to the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve. Capability is thus a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve alternative functioning combinations (or, less formally put, the freedom to achieve various lifestyles). For example, an affluent person who fasts may have the same functioning achievement in terms of eating or nourishment as a destitute person who is forced to starve, but the first person does have a different “capability set” than the second (the first can choose to eat well and be well nourished in a way the second cannot).

  There can be substantial debates on the particular functionings that should be included in the list of important achievements and the corresponding capabilities.42 This valuational issue is inescapable in an evaluative exercise of this kind, and one of the main merits of the approach is the need to address these judgmental questions in an explicit way, rather than hiding them in some implicit framework.

  This is not the occasion to go much into the technicalities of representation and analysis of functionings and capabilities. The amount or the extent of each functioning enjoyed by a person may be represented by a real number, and when this is done, a person’s actual achievement can be seen as a functioning vector. The “capability set” would consist of the alternative functioning vectors that she can choose from.43 While the combination of a person’s functionings reflects her actual achievements, the capability set represents the freedom to achieve: the alternative functioning combinations from which this person can choose.44

  The evaluative focus of this “capability approach” can be either on the realized functionings (what a person is actually able to do) or on the capability set of alternatives she has (her real opportunities). The two give different types of information—the former about the things a person does and the latter about the things a person is substantively free to do. Both versions of the capability approach have been used in the literature, and sometimes they have been combined.45

  According to a well-established tradition in economics, the real value of a set of options lies in the best use that can be made of them, and—given maximizing behavior and the absence of uncertainty—the use that is actually made. The use value of the opportunity, then, lies derivatively on the value of one element of it (to wit, the best option or the actually chosen option).46 In this case, the focusing on a chosen functioning vector coincides with concentration on the capability set, since the latter is judged, ultimately, by the former.

  The freedom reflected in the capability set can be used in other ways as well, since the value of a set need not invariably be identified with the value of the best—or the chosen—element of it. It is possible to attach importance to having opportunities that are not taken up. This is a natural direction to go if the process through which outcomes are generated has significance of its own.47 Indeed, “choosing” itself can be seen as a valuable functioning, and having an x when there is no alternative may be sensibly distinguished from choosing x when substantial alternatives exist.48 Fasting is not the same thing as being forced to starve. Having the option of eating makes fasting what it is, to wit, choosing not to eat when one could have eaten.

  WEIGHTS, VALUATIONS AND SOCIAL CHOICE

  Individual functionings can lend themselves to easier interpersonal comparison than comparisons of utilities (or happiness, pleasures or desires). Also, many of the relevant functionings—typically the non-mental characteristics—can be seen distinctly from their mental assessment (not subsumed in “mental adjustment”). The variability in the conversion of means into ends (or into freedom to pursue ends) is already reflected in the extents of those achievements and freedoms that may figure in the list of ends. These are advantages in using the capability perspective for evaluation and assessment.

  However, interpersonal comparisons of overall advantages also require “aggregation” over heterogeneous components. The capability perspective is inescapably pluralist. First, there are different functionings, some more important than others. Second, there is the issue of what weight to attach to substantive freedom (the capability set) vis-à-vis the actual achievement (the chosen functioning vector). Finally, since it is not claimed that the capability perspective exhausts all relevant concerns for evaluative purposes (we might, for example, attach importance to rules and procedures and not just to freedoms and outcomes), there is the underlying issue of how much weight should be placed on the capabilities, compared with any other relevant consideration.49

  Is this plurality an embarrassment for advocacy of the capability perspective for evaluative purposes? Quite the contrary. To insist that there should be only one homogeneous magnitude that we value is to reduce drastically the range of our evaluative reasoning. It is not, for example, to the credit of classical utilitarianism that it values only pleasure, without taking any direct interest in freedom, rights, creativity or actual living conditions. To insist on the mechanical comfort of having just one homogeneous “good thing” would be to deny our humanity as reasoning creatures. It is like seeking to make the life of the chef easier by finding something which—and which alone—we all like (such as smoked salmon, or perhaps even french fries), or some one quality which we must all try to maximize (such as the saltiness of the food).

  Heterogeneity of factors that influence individual advantage is a pervasive feature of actual evaluation. While we can decide to close our eyes to this issue by simply assuming that there is some one homogeneous thing (such as “income” or “utility”) in terms of which everyone’s overall advantage can be judged and interpersonally compared (and that variations of needs, personal circumstances and so on can be assumed away), this does not resolve the problem but only evades it. Preference fulfillment may have some obvious attraction in dealing with one person’s individual needs, but (as was discussed earlier) it does little, on its own, for interpersonal comparisons, central to any social evaluation. Even when each person’s preference is taken to be the ultimate arbiter of the well-being for that person, even when everything other than well-being (such as freedom) is ignored, and even when—to take a very special case—everyone has the same demand function or preference map, the comparison of market valuations of commodity bundles (or their relative placement on a shared system-of-indifference map in the commodity space) tells us little about interpersonal comparisons.

  In evaluative traditions involving fuller specification, considerable heterogeneity is explicitly admitted. For example, in Rawlsian analysis primary goods are taken to be constitutively diverse (including “rights, liberties and opportunities, income a
nd wealth, and the social basis of self-respect”), and Rawls deals with them through an overall “index” of primary goods holdings.50 While a similar exercise of judging over a space with heterogeneity is involved both in the Rawlsian approach and in the use of functionings, the former is informationally poorer, for reasons discussed already, because of the parametric variation of resources and primary goods vis-à-vis the opportunity to achieve high quality of living.

  The problem of valuation is not, however, one of an all-or-nothing kind. Some judgments, with incomplete reach, follow immediately from the specification of a focal space. When some functionings are selected as significant, such a focal space is specified, and the relation of dominance itself leads to a “partial ordering” over the alternative states of affairs. If person i has more of a significant functioning than person j, and at least as much of all such functionings, then i clearly has a higher valued functioning vector than j has. This partial ordering can be “extended” by further specifying the possible weights. A unique set of weights will, of course, be sufficient to generate a complete order, but it is typically not necessary. Given a “range” of weights on which there is agreement (that is, when it is agreed that the weights are to be chosen from a specified range, even without any agreement as to the exact point on that range), there will be a partial ordering based on the intersection of rankings. This partial ordering will get systematically extended as the range is made more and more narrow. Somewhere in the process of narrowing the range—possibly well before the weights are unique—the partial ordering will become complete.51

  It is of course crucial to ask, in any evaluative exercise of this kind, how the weights are to be selected. This judgmental exercise can be resolved only through reasoned evaluation. For a particular person, who is making his or her own judgments, the selection of weights will require reflection, rather than any interpersonal agreement (or consensus). However, in arriving at an “agreed” range for social evaluation (for example, in social studies of poverty), there has to be some kind of a reasoned “consensus” on weights, or at least on a range of weights. This is a “social choice” exercise, and it requires public discussion and a democratic understanding and acceptance.52 It is not a special problem that is associated only with the use of the functioning space.

  There is an interesting choice here between “technocracy” and “democracy” in the selection of weights, which may be worth discussing a little. A choice procedure that relies on a democratic search for agreement or a consensus can be extremely messy, and many technocrats are sufficiently disgusted by its messiness to pine for some wonderful formula that would simply give us ready-made weights that are “just right.” However, no such magic formula does, of course, exist, since the issue of weighting is one of valuation and judgment, and not one of some impersonal technology.

  We are not prevented, by any means, from proposing that some particular formula—rather than any alternative formula—be used for aggregation, but in this inescapably social-choice exercise its status must depend on its acceptability to others. There is nevertheless a hankering after some “obviously correct” formula to which reasonable people cannot object. A good example comes from T. N. Srinivasan’s forceful critique of the capability approach (and its partial use in UNDP’s Human Development Reports), where he worries about the “varying importance of different capabilities” and proposes the rejection of this approach in favor of the advantage of “the real-income framework” which “includes an operational metric for weighting commodities—the metric of exchange value.”53 How convincing is this critique? There is certainly some metric in market valuation, but what does it tell us?

  As was already discussed, the “operational metric” of exchange value does not give us interpersonal comparisons of utility levels, since such comparisons cannot be deduced from choice behavior. There has been some confusion on this subject because of misreading the tradition of consumption theory—sensible within its context—of taking utility to be simply the numerical representation of a given person’s choice. That is a useful way to define utility for the analysis of consumption behavior of each person taken separately, but it does not, on its own, offer any procedure whatever for substantive interpersonal comparison. Paul Samuelson’s elementary point that it was “not necessary to make interpersonal comparisons of utility in describing exchange,”54 is the other side of the same coin: nothing about interpersonal comparison of utility is learned from observing “the metric of exchange value.”

  As noted earlier, this difficulty is present even when everyone has the same demand function. It is intensified when the individual demand functions differ, in which case even comparisons of the commodity basis of utility are problematic. There is nothing in the methodology of demand analysis, including the theory of revealed preference, that permits any reading of interpersonal comparisons of utilities or welfares from observed choices of commodity holdings, and thus from real-income comparisons.

  In fact, given interpersonal diversity, related to such factors as age, gender, inborn talents, disabilities and illnesses, the commodity holdings can actually tell us rather little about the nature of the lives that the respective people can lead. Real incomes can, thus, be rather poor indicators of important components of well-being and quality of life that people have reason to value. More generally, the need for evaluative judgments is inescapable in comparing individual well-being, or quality of life. Furthermore, anyone who values public scrutiny must be under some obligation to make clear that a judgment is being made in using real incomes for this purpose and that the weights implicitly used must be subjected to evaluative scrutiny. In this context, the fact that market-price-based evaluation of utility from commodity bundles gives the misleading impression—at least to some—that an already available “operational metric” has been preselected for evaluative use is a limitation rather than an asset. If informed scrutiny by the public is central to any such social evaluation (as I believe is the case), the implicit values have to be made more explicit, rather than being shielded from scrutiny on the spurious ground that they are part of an “already available” metric that the society can immediately use without further ado.

  Since the preference for market-price-based evaluation is quite strong among many economists, it is also important to point out that all variables other than commodity holdings (important matters such as mortality, morbidity, education, liberties and recognized rights) get—implicitly—a zero direct weight in evaluations based exclusively on the real-income approach. They can get some indirect weight only if—and only to the extent that—they enlarge real incomes and commodity holdings. The confounding of welfare comparison with real-income comparison exacts a heavy price.

  There is thus a strong methodological case for emphasizing the need to assign explicitly evaluative weights to different components of quality of life (or of well-being) and then to place the chosen weights for open public discussion and critical scrutiny. In any choice of criteria for evaluative purposes, there would not only be use of value judgments, but also, quite often, use of some judgments on which full agreement would not exist. This is inescapable in a social-choice exercise of this kind.55 The real issue is whether we can use some criteria that would have greater public support, for evaluative purposes, than the crude indicators often recommended on allegedly technological grounds, such as real-income measures. This is central for the evaluative basis of public policy.

  CAPABILITY INFORMATION: ALTERNATIVE USES

  The capability perspective can be used in rather distinct ways. The question as to which practical strategy to use for evaluating public policy has to be distinguished from the foundational issue as to how individual advantages are best judged and interpersonal comparisons most sensibly made. At the foundational level, the capability perspective has some obvious merits (for reasons already discussed) compared with concentrating on such instrumental variables as income. This does not, however, entail that the most fruitful focus of prac
tical attention would invariably be measures of capabilities.

  Some capabilities are harder to measure than others, and attempts at putting them on a “metric” may sometimes hide more than they reveal. Quite often income levels—with possible corrections for price differences and variations of individual or group circumstances—can be a very useful way of getting started in practical appraisal. The need for pragmatism is quite strong in using the motivation underlying the capability perspective for the use of available data for practical evaluation and policy analysis.

  Three alternative practical approaches may be considered in giving practical shape to the foundational concern.56

  1) The direct approach: This general approach takes the form of directly examining what can be said about respective advantages by examining and comparing vectors of functionings or capabilities. In many ways, this is the most immediate and full-blooded way of going about incorporating capability considerations in evaluation. It can, however, be used in different forms. The variants include the following:

  1.1) “total comparison,” involving the ranking of all such vectors vis-à-vis each other in terms of poverty or inequality (or whatever the subject matter is);

  1.2) “partial ranking,” involving the ranking of some vectors vis-à-vis others, but not demanding completeness of the evaluative ranking;

  1.3) “distinguished capability comparison,” involving the comparison of some particular capability chosen as the focus, without looking for completeness of coverage.