Therefore, evaluation of how well people are doing must seek to be as open-minded as possible. In particular, he argues that, whatever their particular strengths, none of them provide an analysis of well-being that is suitable as a general concept; they are all focused on the wrong particular things whether utility, liberty, commodities, or primary goods , and they are too narrowly focused they exclude too many important aspects from evaluation.
According to act consequentialism, actions should be assessed only in terms of the goodness or badness of their consequences. This excludes any consideration of the morality of the process by which consequences are brought about, for example, whether it respects principles of fairness or individual agency.
For example, it matters not only whether people have an equal capability to live a long life, but how that equality is achieved. Under the same circumstances women generally live longer than men, for largely biological reasons. If the only thing that mattered was achieving equality in the capability to live a long life this fact suggests that health care provision should be biased in favor of men.
However, as Sen argues, trying to achieve equality in this way would override important moral claims of fairness which should be included in a comprehensive evaluation. Welfarism is the view that goodness should be assessed only in terms of subjective utility. Second, because it is concerned only with feelings it neglects information about physical health, though this would seem obviously relevant to assessing well-being. People can become so normalized to their conditions of material deprivation and social injustice that they may claim to be entirely satisfied.
As Sen puts it,. Our mental reactions to what we actually get and what we can sensibly expect to get may frequently involve compromises with a harsh reality. The destitute thrown into beggary, the vulnerable landless labourer precariously surviving at the edge of subsistence, the overworked domestic servant working round the clock, the subdued and subjugated housewife reconciled to her role and her fate, all tend to come to terms with their respective predicaments.
The deprivations are suppressed and muffled in the scale of utilities reflected by desire-fulfilment and happiness by the necessity of endurance in uneventful survival. Sen , Sum-ranking focuses on maximizing the total amount of welfare in a society without regard for how it is distributed, although this is generally felt to be important by the individuals concerned.
Sen argues, together with liberal philosophers such as Bernard Williams and John Rawls, that sum-ranking does not take seriously the distinction between persons. Sen also points out that individuals differ in their ability to convert resources such as income into welfare.
For example, a disabled person may need expensive medical and transport equipment to achieve the same level of welfare. A society that tried to maximize the total amount of welfare would distribute resources so that the marginal increase in welfare from giving an extra dollar to any person would be the same.
Resources would therefore be distributed away from the sick and disabled to people who are more efficient convertors of resources into utility. Resourcism is defined by its neutrality about what constitutes the good life. It therefore assesses how well people are doing in terms of their possession of the general purpose resources necessary for the construction of any particular good life.
Sen believes such cases are far from abnormal and excluding them at the beginning risks building a structure that excludes them permanently. Nevertheless Sen acknowledges that although the distribution of resources should not be the direct concern in evaluating how well people are doing, it is very relevant to considerations of procedural fairness.
When evaluating well-being, Sen argues, the most important thing is to consider what people are actually able to be and do. The commodities or wealth people have or their mental reactions utility are an inappropriate focus because they provide only limited or indirect information about how well a life is going. Sen illustrates his point with the example of a standard bicycle. It might be considered a generally useful tool for most people to extend their mobility, but it obviously will not do that for a person without legs.
Even if that person, by some quirk, finds the bicycle delightful, we should nevertheless be able to note within our evaluative system that she still lacks transportation. Nor does this mental reaction show that the same person would not appreciate transportation if it were really available to her. The Capability Approach focuses directly on the quality of life that individuals are actually able to achieve.
Figure 1. Outline of the core relationships in the Capability Approach. Figure 1 outlines the core relationships of the Capability Approach and how they relate to the main alternative approaches focused on resources and utility.
Achieved functionings are those they actually select. The functioning they actually select to get to work may be the public bus. Utility is considered both an output and a functioning.
Utility is an output because what people choose to do and to be naturally has an effect on their sense of subjective well-being for example, the pleasure of bicycling to work on a sunny day. However the Capability Approach also considers subjective well-being — feeling happy — as a valuable functioning in its own right and incorporates it into the capability framework. Sen argues that the correct focus for evaluating how well off people are is their capability to live a life we have reason to value, not their resource wealth or subjective well-being.
But in order to begin to evaluate how people are performing in terms of capability, we first need to determine which functionings matter for the good life and how much, or at least we need to specify a valuation procedure for determining this. One way of addressing the problem is to specify a list of the constituents of the flourishing life, and do this on philosophical grounds Martha Nussbaum does this for her Capability Theory of Justice.
Sen rejects this approach because he argues that it denies the relevance of the values people may come to have and the role of democracy Sen b. Philosophers and social scientists may provide helpful ideas and arguments, but the legitimate source of decisions about the nature of the life we have reason to value must be the people concerned. Sen therefore proposes a social choice exercise requiring both public reasoning and democratic procedures of decision-making.
One reason that social scientists and philosophers are so keen to specify a list is that it can be used as an index: by ranking all the different constituents of the flourishing life with respect to each other it would allow easier evaluation of how well people are doing. But Sen argues that substantial action-guiding agreement is possible. Sen does suggest that in many cases a sub-set of crucially important capabilities associated with basic needs may be relatively easily identified and agreed upon as urgent moral and political priorities.
They may be particularly helpful in assessing the extent and nature of poverty in developing countries. Evaluating capability is a second order exercise concerned with mapping the set of valuable functionings people have real access to.
Since it takes the value of functionings as given, its conclusions will reflect any ambiguity in the valuation stage. Assessing capability is more informationally demanding than other accounts of advantage since it not only takes a much broader view of what well-being achievement consists in but also tries to assess the freedom people actually have to choose high quality options.
This is not a purely procedural matter of adding up the number of options available, since the option to purchase a tenth brand of washing powder has a rather different significance than the option to vote in democratic elections.
The informational focus can be tightened depending on the purpose of the evaluation exercise and relevant valuational and informational constraints. In order to achieve the same functionings, people may have particular needs for non-standard commodities — such as prosthetics for a disability — or they may need more of the standard commodities — such as additional food in the case of intestinal parasites. These can impose particular costs such as more or less expensive heating or clothing requirements.
Conventions and customs determine the commodity requirements of expected standards of behaviour and consumption, so that relative income poverty in a rich community may translate into absolute poverty in the space of capability. The diagnosis of capability failures, or significant interpersonal variations in capability, directs attention to the relevant causal pathways responsible.
For example, the physically handicapped often have more expensive requirements to achieve the same capabilities, such as mobility, while at the same time they also have greater difficulty earning income in the first place.
The concept of a capability has a global-local character in that its definition abstracts from particular circumstances, but its realization depends on specific local requirements. This makes the Capability Approach applicable across political, economic, and cultural borders.
For example, Sen points out that being relatively income poor in a wealthy society can entail absolute poverty in some important capabilities, because they may require more resources to achieve. For example, the capability for employment may require more years of education in a richer society. Many capabilities will have underlying requirements that vary strongly with social circumstances although others, such as adequate nourishment, may vary less. Presently in Saudi Arabia, for example, women must have the company of a close male relative to appear in public, and require a chauffeur and private car to move between private spaces since they are not permitted to use public transport or drive a car themselves.
The Capability Approach only identifies such capability failures and diagnoses their causes. However, if there is general agreement in the first place that such capabilities should be equally guaranteed for all, there is a clear basis for criticizing clearly unjust social norms as the source of relative deprivation and thus as inconsistent with the spirit of such a guarantee. The capability approach takes a multi-dimensional approach to evaluation. Capability analysis rejects the presumption that unusual achievement in some dimensions compensates for shortfalls in others.
Capability evaluation is informationally demanding and its precision is limited by the level of agreement about which functionings are valuable. However, Sen has shown that even where only elementary evaluation of quite basic capabilities is possible for example, life-expectancy or literacy outcomes , this can still provide much more, and more relevant, action-guiding information than the standard alternatives. In particular, by making perspicuous contrasts between successes and failures the capability approach can direct political and public attention to neglected dimensions of human well-being.
For example, countries with similar levels of wealth can have dramatically different levels of aggregate achievement — and inequality — on such non-controversially important dimensions as longevity and literacy.
And, vice versa , countries with very small economies can sometimes score as highly on these dimensions as the richest. This demonstrates both the limitations of relying exclusively on economic metrics for evaluating development, and the fact that national wealth does not pose a rigid constraint on such achievements that GNP is not destiny. Figure 2. Perspicuous contrasts: The Philippines does more with less. Rawls suggests that this constitutes the privileging of a particular non-political comprehensive conception of rational advantage or the good.
Theories of justice that focus on the distribution of means implicitly assume that they will provide the same effective freedom to live the life one has reason to value to all, but this excludes relevant information about the relationship between particular people and resources.
That means that even if it happened that everyone had the same conception of the good, and the same bundle of resources, the fact of heterogeneity would mean that people would have differential real capability to pursue the life they had reason to value.
Therefore, Sen argues, a theory of justice based on fairness should be directly and deeply concerned with the effective freedom — capability — of actual people to achieve the lives they have reason to value. Sen does not say which capabilities are important or how they are to be distributed: he argues that those are political decisions for the society itself to decide. Different capability theorists have taken different approaches to the valuation of capabilities, from procedural accounts to ones based on substantive understandings of human nature.
There are related concerns about the institutional structure of the Capability Approach, for example, brought by the Rawlsian social justice theorist, Thomas Pogge Pogge How should capabilities be weighted against each other and non-capability concerns? For example, should some basic capabilities be prioritized as more urgent? What does the Capability Approach imply for interpersonal equality? How should capability enhancement be paid for? How much responsibility should individuals take for the results of their own choices?
What should be done about non-remediable deprivations, such as blindness? There are several components to this family of criticisms.
Martha Nussbaum, for example, points out that a just society requires balancing and even limiting certain freedoms, such as regarding the expression of racist views, and in order to do so must make commitments about which freedoms are good or bad, important or trivial Nussbaum Nevertheless Sen is clear in his view that the value of social goods is only derivative upon the reflective choices of those concerned see, for example, Sen a. With regard to freedom, Sen distinguishes the ability to choose between different options from the value of those options.
These two together make up effective freedom or capability. This relates to its concern with tracing the causal pathways of specific deprivations, with how exactly different people are able or unable to convert resources into valuable functionings. However it has been criticized for its crudeness. It contains only three dimensions — longevity, literacy mean years of schooling , and Gross National Income per capita — which are weighted equally.
It also requires detailed information on the real inter-personal variations in translating commodities into functionings. It is not clear however that such informational ambitions could ever be realized.
Nevertheless it has succeeded in demonstrating that capability related information can be used systematically as a credible supplement to economic metrics. Sen accepts that some information about capabilities is easier to obtain than others. Firstly, he argues that we already have quite extensive information about some basic capabilities even for many quite poor countries, such as about health, that can and should be systematically assessed.
There is therefore no need to limit our assessment to economic metrics which firstly count the wrong things means and secondly also come with significant measurement error despite their apparent numerical precision. Secondly, he argues that if researchers accept the capability space as the new priority for evaluation that will motivate the development of new data collection priorities and methods.
Nevertheless, the Capability Approach is not concerned with information collection for its own sake, but rather with the appropriate use of information for assessment. It is therefore not committed to, nor does its effective use require, building a perfect information collection and assessment bureaucracy.
Some theoretical accounts are primarily concerned with operationalising the evaluative dimension of the Capability Approach: the assessment of quality of life, well-being and human development. This section provides a brief outline of some of these. Instead she proposes a procedural approach to the selection of capabilities for particular purposes, such as the evaluation of gender inequality in terms of capabilities Robeyns She claims that valuational procedures that meet her criteria provide epistemic, academic, and political legitimacy for empirically evaluating capability.
Her five criteria are:. All proposed list elements should be explicit, so they can be discussed and debated. The method of generating the list should be made explicit so it can be scrutinized.
The level of abstraction of the list should be appropriate to its purposes, whether for philosophical, legal, political, or social discussion. If the list is intended for empirical application or public policy then it should be drawn up in two distinct stages, first an ideal stage and then a pragmatic one that reflects perhaps temporary feasibility constraints on information and resources. The list should include all important elements and those elements should not be reducible to others though they may overlap.
Sabina Alkire has developed a philosophically grounded framework for the participatory valuation and evaluation of development projects in terms of capability enhancement Alkire The approach was originally pioneered within political philosophy and welfare economics by Nobel laureate Prof. Amartya Sen and was further developed by Martha Nussbaum and other scholars. The Capability approach was first proposed by Prof.
Different human begins will have different abilities to convert primary goods into well-being. Thus, Sen and Nussbaum argue that equality and well- being should be assessed in terms of the capabilities that human beings actually possess, which depend not only on the goods and resources they possess but also on the conversion factors that enable human beings to convert goods and resource into well-being.
However, Sen criticizes the use of utility as the space in which to assess equality and well-being. Sen argues that utility is a subjective measure, which depends on subjective preferences and may not reflect human well-being. For example, if our preferences become adapted to a given situation, our utility level may increase, but that subjective phenomenon does not mean that there is an increase in well-being.
Thus, human well-being should be assessed in terms of the human functionings. Furthermore, the capability approach provides a multi-dimensional perspective on human well-being, since it focuses on various human functionings.
However, Sen argues that equality should be assessed taking into account not only achieved functionings but also the potential to achieve, which Sen and Nussbaum designate as valuable capabilities, that is, what a human being can be or can do and have reason to value.
Functionings are countless, from simple ones, such as being rested, being happy, or being thirsty, or reading, listening to music, or cooking, to more complex ones, such as being a foster parent, participating in the life of the community, or working as a librarian. Capability refers to the real, effective opportunities that people have to choose among valued functionings; hence, they are the real freedoms to be and to do what one chooses and values.
The normative core of the capability approach is that individual well-0being as well as social arrangements and policies, should be evaluated in terms of capability, thus, in terms of the effective freedoms and opportunities to choose among valuable kind of lives. While capability and functionings are the core concepts of the approach, Sen and Nussbaum have developed different versions of the framework.
While Sen has primarily focused attention on questions of justice, freedom, and poverty; Nussbaum has given the approach a universal scope by specifying a list of central human capabilities that, in her view, characterizes what makes a life truly human.
During the past three decades, the capability approach has influenced a wide range of academic research, including philosophical theorie of social justice and the domains of social policy and development studies, as well as the work of international agencies, for example most notably by the United Nations Human development Programme, which publishes every year a Human Development Report, where the multidimensional approach of the capability approach is employed, going beyond the traditional measures that rely on the Gross Domestic Product.
Human Development Index HDI combines three variables: longevity, educational attainment, and income as indicators of capability. Longevity is included because it is felt that the longer a person lives, the more opportunity a person will have to do and experience different life activities.
Education is included because it affects how well a person understands what is going on around him or her. Apart from the UNDP Programme, the importance of the capability approach has also been emphasized in its use in understanding in education with a particular focus on questions of educational justice, disability and special-educational needs, gender, and access to higher education.
The capability approach also became influential in feminist studies and within political philosophy. The reach of the capability approach is therefore broad and inter-disciplinary and covers both theoretical and practical domains of inquiry.
According to Sen, rather than concentrating on subjective states such as satisfaction or on the resources that people have at their disposal, any account of justice should focus on what people can be and can do with their resources to achieve well-being. Sen further specifies some basic capabilities that are essential to well-being, such as being nourished and sheltered, being educated and healthy, and appearing in public without shame.
He feels that the existing theories of the standard of living, especially utility theory, are too narrow to capture the richness of the concept. The alternative approach proposed by Sen concentrates on an area of well-being that focuses on choice and opportunity. Functionings: Functionings is the term used to describe the current life condition of people. They are the realized physical and mental states of an individual or family.
The level of health, happiness, income, and nourishment are examples of functionings. Sen has never provided a list or guidelines for definitions for definition of this subset; on the contrary, he stresses that it varies through time and across space according to the intrinsic characteristics of the people concerned, to prevailing social customs and cultural norms, and to economic factors.
Functionings are important for ranking social states, but they do not provide a complete measure of the standard of living, according to Sen. This belief is based on the idea that the standard of living and quality of life is a very rich and complex one.
When individuals consider their own standard of living, they may consider many things, including their level of happiness, their health, their income, their social relations, their opportunities, and many other variables that are important to them.
When economists discuss the standard of living, they usually are referring only to utility, or commodities, or income, or a combination of these. Capabilities are the available life conditions from which a person has to choose, as well as the freedom to choose some of them. One can think of capabilities as a set of possible functionings available to an individual.
The people with the most choices, or the largest set of possible functionings, have the highest standards of living. They can be characterized as the set of possible functionings from which a person has to choose.
Thinking of capabilities in this way helps show the relationship between functionings and capabilities. For example, consider a person with four job offers. The person in this case has four possible functionings or four choices related to jobs. This set of four job offers is this person capabilities set in this one area of life. Next, assume this person chooses one of the jobs.
The job, the person picks becomes the realized functioning in this area of life. A functioning is one particular sate of living that is chosen from a group of functionings available to the individual.
This set of available functionings is the capabilities set of the person. The idea of capabilities is very closely related to freedom. Using freedom as the definition of capabilities is somewhat problematic though because of the broad and sometimes ambiguous meaning of freedom. Negative freedom amounts to a lack of external constraint imposed by some other person or sense.
The jobs may require a substantial commute, but the person may lack any mode of transportation. In such a case the person has negative freedom; no one is acting to prevent the person from accepting one of the jobs, but the person does lack positive freedom because he or she wants one of the jobs but cannot get to it. He often connects the idea of capabilities to empowerment and agency. The emphasis is on giving people the tools to make choices and to achieve.
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