[CA 02] The helicopter view: What is the capability approach?

There seems to be an important false premise here – that there is some sort of theoretical vector to an end state of fulfilling “capability.” The selfish gene has wired us to be restless, questing creatures. Thus, there is no durable environmental optimum. We will be cranky, cantankerous, and rebellious, even after the conquest of all diseases, universal guaranteed basic incomes, free education, and unlimited access to art and entertainment have been attained. Ennui, envy, resentment, and regret will be with us forever, no matter how perfectly we engineer our institutions.

CA theory exports analytical difficulty into the conveniently vague domain of “things a person has reason to value doing or being.” But these things are constantly shifting and morphing. Thus the great weakness of a theory of social values focused on enabling capability is that it is critically dependent on what we wish to enable. The pragmatic pillars of constructing an enabling society rest on the shifting sands of cultural and psychological preferences, and thus are structurally unsound.

I don’t think Sen or Nussbaum want to leave ‘things we have reason to value’ at that: it’s a promissory note (cashed out e.g. in chapter 2, ‘The Central Capabilities’, of Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities).

I also don’t think they’d claim to have the finished answer to ‘what do we have reason to value?’, leaving nothing left to be done but working out tactics for achieving their list. Their own unfinished account of what the central human capabilities are is an intervention in an ongoing discussion, to be read, criticized, and superseded.

This is really helpful. Thanks. To kind of echo Sam Clark, I tend to think of CA almost exclusively in the context of theories of distributive justice, and this is a useful corrective.

That’s an interesting way of thinking about utilitarianism – as a kind of first sweep with a broom to sweep up the grit.

Sen has an argument somewhere (I think the Adler/Posner anthology on Cost-Benefit Analysis) which looks for all the world like utilitarianism, except urging that we should consider different costs and benefits than those traditionally used (which – I might be going beyond Sen’s argument here – come with a bias, i.e. considering costs in just financial terms seems to be biased towards concerns which seek to explain everything in those terms, so favors highly capitalized groups over wildlife and local citizens). I’m not sure it’s nearly correct enough to say “CBA = utilitarianism” but it is moving in that direction.

I don’t think that is necessarily against the possibility of revolutionary changes in the concept of “the meaning of life” or goals. Any society will necessarily have its predispositions towards a concept of well-being based on its own conceptions. Think of the supercomputer AI analogy: A dog thinking 100 times faster than a normal dog is still not going to achieve much, and the same for a human. To get to the next breakthrough (and whether you can actually achieve much more is also an unsettled question) takes at least a revolution in thought.

In any case, I have a hard time really believing that people have, or could have, a radically different concept of well-being across the ages, in terms of the meaning of life and things of that sort – now justice for minorities and many other issues obviously have a direct claim towards being viewed in a particular way so we don’t fall into the trap of moral relativism.

@10

In any case, I have a hard time really believing that people have, or could have, a radically different concept of well-being across the ages

The “capabilities” sought by medieval monks, Mongol warriors, and modern American consumers are wildly different.

Can anyone further expand on what “a new variant of nonwelfarist welfare economics” means?

MPAV,

I just lost a 3-para response to the virtual wilderness. I’ll try to see if I can recreate a bit later. In the meantime, here are a couple of links from the SEP: welfarism, welfare economics.

@15

I don’t think that what’s good for an ancient monk in China is actually radically different from what’s good for me, or from an early hunter-gatherer, or even from a pre-human ancestor.

I don’t think the CA approach is limited to food, clothing, and shelter. Once past enabling access to the most rudimentary necessities, it becomes obvious that giving people the capability for killing and enslaving others conflicts with giving people the capability to live a tranquil existence.

For most of human history, violent conquest has been highly prized as a badge of merit for individuals, tribes, and nations. In many subcultures today, this remains a dominant ethos. How does maximizing the capability for violent predation lead us to a constructive social outcome?

I appreciate the help and the links js.

@ Straightwood: Rebellion in what context? If we mean just randomness, and rebellion against established order – as my earlier post attempted to argue, there are multiple acceptable statuses a person can occupy. If we mean rebellion against a particular order, then perhaps we can say that they should be able to appeal to some kind of reason. Maybe it’s floating out there somewhere as a Platonic entity!

Interesting comment about Camus vs. Sen…been so long since I read The Stranger, and I really don’t know what you mean though.

I think the problem here is that political philosophers don’t believe that Godel’s theorem applies to their systems. There are deal-breaking exceptions for frameworks like CA arising from cultural diversity, evolutionary dynamics, and philosophical challenges. Comparing CA to competing political science theories is a feeble test. The great challenges to CA are posed by theories of human behavior from other domains.

If political scientists read more literature, they would understand that unhappiness in advanced societies stems from confronting chance, self-ignorance, and death, not from a shortage of “capabilities.” Americans, among the most free and prosperous people on Earth, consume 67% of antidepressants sold worldwide. What Camus tells us is that tinkering with social structures is no more likely to vanquish despair than buying more stuff. Anxiety and sorrow are fundamental components of human existence. There is no conceivable set of “capabilities,” short of changing the biology of Homo Sapiens, that will make us substantially happier.

Not at all Ingrid! I understand that this is an academic blog and I appreciate the opportunity to participate when I can. Thank you for providing a bit of background on “welfarist”.

Straightwood@26: I don’t think capabilities theorists in particular (or welfare economists in general) see it as their business to deal with upper middle-class ennui, self-ignorance, existential angst at the absurdity of the human condition, or any other so-called “first world problems”. They are mainly motivated by developing better analytical frameworks for evaluating and ameliorating human suffering caused by genuine poverty and deprivation. For example, much of Sen’s work in welfare economics (including his work on capabilities) was originally motivated by the problems of developing economies like India.

That having been said, there is still plenty of poverty, deprivation, and lack of opportunity even in rich countries like the U.S. So, while capabilities theorists (or welfare economists in general) might not have much to say about ennui in the top 1% of the income distribution in the U.S., they would certainly be very concerned about poor health, inadequate educational opportunities, and social breakdown in, say, the bottom 20% (at the very least).

Also, I don’t really see what this has to do with Godel’s theorem. Unless for you “Godel’s theorem” is just some placeholder for the vague idea that “all human philosophical systems are doomed to collapse in incoherence and failure.” In which case that isn’t called Godel’s theorem, because that’s not what Godel’s theorem says.

I’m hoping to say something about quantitative representation and non-welfarist approaches very soon. Unfortunately, my functioning is currently dominated by a previously overlooked and now urgent grant application, but once that’s done I’ll have a bit more capability to talk about interesting and important things ;-)

Ingrid Robeyns @24: Just a slight (pedantic) correction: not all “welfarist” theories define “welfare” as “preference satisfaction”. There are “hedonic” theories which define welfare in terms of either “moment-to-moment happiness” or “overall life satisfaction” (which are not the same thing). One could also imagine a notion of “welfare” which includes some eudaimonic component.

My understanding of “welfarism” is that broadly, it is any theory which purports that it is possible to represent all ethically relevant information about a person’s well-being or flourishing in terms of a single quantitative index (call it “utility” or “welfare” or “ophelimity” whatever you want), such that the quantitative indices of different individuals can then be aggregated in via some “social welfare function” (including, but not restricted to, a utilitarian sum). In contrast, capabilities approaches are inherently multidimensional (because different kinds of functionings/capabilities may be fundamentally incommensurable) and perhaps essentially non-quantitative (if some functionings/capabilities cannot be quantified).

This, as I understand it, is the gist of Jameson Quinn’s question @7: in the end, if you are going to do some kind of welfare economics, it would seem that you need some sort of quantity that you are trying to maximize. This is perhaps the reason why many welfare economists are reluctant to engage with the capabilities approach.

Straightwood @33: All theories in welfare economics (or theories of justice more broadly) are fundamentally about how to reconcile the competing interests of different people in society to achieve some notion of “collective good”. So clearly, if pandering to the desires of one religious minority group would undermine the long-term viability of the entire society (and in the process, jeopardize everyone else’s well-being), then pretty much any sensible theory (including the capabilities approach) would say that it is not just to pander to the minority group.

Sen’s approach is going to be (from what little I know) related to bringing more considerations to the fore – if the argument is that the CA is aggressively reductionist, I don’t think that’s likely true at all. Certainly Sen isn’t reductionist (as I read him).

I have read Ingrid’s posts so far, though not all the comments. I am not familiar with the CA literature (except a little bit at second-hand).

My concern (or one of my concerns) is that the CA will perhaps tend to sound like, more or less, simply a lot of nice verbiage unless it is put into some intellectual-historical context. Ingrid made the point in post [CA 01] that the CA is not just about development and poverty; however, it did, I believe, originate in Sen’s interest in development. So it would be helpful, for me at least, to know what it was about existing approaches to conceptualizing development that Sen found wanting. For example, why didn’t he like the ‘basic needs’ approach, which was all the rage in some circles in the late 1970s/early ’80s and which always seemed to me to make a considerable amount of sense.

What’s wrong with saying “let’s ensure people have a certain level of resources (defined broadly to include eg access to education) and then what they do with those resources is up to them”? The emphasis on what people are actually able to do seems hard to operationalize or implement or measure, since two people with identical levels of resources will not be actually able to do the same things. Give an artistic genius three crayons and a piece of paper and she or he will produce something on the order of a Rembrandt or a Manet or a Mondrian. Give me three crayons and a piece of paper and I will produce a mess, or at any rate something way less good. At a general level we are both able to produce drawings, but then you would have known that already once you had given us the crayons, hence the “able to” or “capability” part doesn’t seem to add anything in this case. Trying to determine what each person is “actually able” to do seems v. difficult, whereas trying to ensure everyone has certain resources (or means) seems more feasible.

js. @43:
I’d agree that in that example it makes sense to look at what the disabled person is able to do. I’d still like a better sense than I now have of what was the initial impetus for the whole approach, but perhaps Ingrid will be getting to that. (For several reasons I’m feeling none too coherent at the moment, so I think I’d better leave it at that.)

“What Camus tells us is that tinkering with social structures is no more likely to vanquish despair than buying more stuff. ”

Perhaps the CA approach would take Fanon over Camus here.

“mais il ajoute aussitôt que « si ce nègre se trouve à ce point submergé par le désir d’être blanc, c’est qu’il vit dans une société qui rend possible son complexe d’infériorité, dans une société qui tire sa consistance du maintien de ce complexe, dans une société qui affirme la supériorité d’une race ; c’est dans l’exacte mesure où cette société lui fait des difficultés, qu’il se trouve placé dans une situation névrotique. Ce qui apparaît alors, c’est la nécessité d’une action couplée sur l’individu et sur le groupe. En tant que psychanalyste, je dois aider mon client à « conscienciser » son inconscient, à ne plus tenter une lactification hallucinatoire, mais bien à agir dans le sens d’un changement des structures sociales »”

Straightwood:

Or, to grasp at another example, your interest in trolling the thread conflicts with my interest in reading the thread without it being derailed by your contributions. As I understand it, we could try to use CA to assess your level of freedom to provoke other contributors / become the centre of attention or, alternatively, my level of freedom to read the thread / become better informed.

Who can say which of those is a more noble set of goals? Happily, that isn’t what the OP is about – rather, it’s an attempt to pin down CA and distinguish it from the fields in which it could be used. Your attempt to mire everyone in argument about specific contexts misses the point. But I’m sure that you know that already.

Ingrid, like some others I’m not even at the level of good questions yet, but I’m fascinated by this series. Thanks for doing it.

Above I tried to blockquote the part of the OP that described the 2 normative claims so people would have to scroll up to see what I am referring to but I am obviously an HTML noob.

two normative claims: first, that the freedom to achieve well-being is of central moral importance, and second, that freedom to achieve well-being is to be understood in terms of people’s valuable capabilities, that is, their real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value.

@53

Since the lexical silly-putty of “well-being” can be deformed into shapes different from happiness, there is no possibility of perfect equivalence, but people do know happiness when they find it. Happiness is a self-validating phenomenon, unlike what you call well-being, which appears to be best observed and proclaimed from the vantage point of advanced study.

The instances of well-being divergent from happiness you cite are drawn from speculative fiction that is far removed from the general experience of mankind. Those who would prescribe and enforce conditions for well-being that conflict with human happiness will carry a heavy burden of justification, one which CA theory will presumably be able to support, if the preservation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of well-being become our new desiderata.

Straightwood (last reply before signing off for the weekend):

Happiness is a self-validating phenomenon, unlike what you call well-being, which appears to be best observed and proclaimed from the vantage point of advanced study.

So, wait, having spent a lot of time thinking about and studying this matter counts against my arguments? In any case, I haven’t asserted any account of well-being: all I’ve said, against your confident pronouncements, is that the answer to the question ‘what is well-being?’ isn’t obvious. The ‘self-validating’ argument you gesture at here is actually an interesting one. But to argue for your view of well-being, you’re going to have to accept that it isn’t obvious.

The instances of well-being divergent from happiness you cite are drawn from speculative fiction that is far removed from the general experience of mankind.

Oh for goodness sake: I used literary examples because one of your earlier interventions in this thread complained about political scientists who don’t read enough literature. I could just as easily have described the ordinary human experiences they’re dramatising: the hollow happiness of consumerism, ignorance as bliss, deliberately sacrificing happiness to something that matters more to you. All of these are plainly part of human life, and plainly raise questions about what it is for a life to go best.

That is brilliantly useful context, Ingrid. Thank you.

One more thank you for the post @57. Super helpful.

Ingrid: welldone on these posts. They are really a nice effort to present some of the main ideas given the multi-disciplinary literature, and secondary literature that is often misguiding. I just had a comment on the ‘initial impetus’ for the CA. While you are right that it had its origins in both economics and philosophy, I would more specifically identify the origins of the capability approach in Sen’s re-evaluation of famines, and the Malthusian theory. The shifting of the paradigm of the analysis of famine starvation from the availability of food (i.e. commodities) to the entitlement sets (what bundles of food people are actually able to acquire) and the different factors that affect the different amounts of nutrition they need is then abstracted in the philosophical discussions about recognition of human diversity and commodities being the wrong target. Also, it is in the famine analysis where he also presents the issue that asking people, particularly women, about how they are doing in the midst of a famine results in misleading subjective assessments of wellbeing (i.e. mental states and subjective assessments are not sufficient or right targets.)

Once people understand that wellbeing is best assessed by what people are actually able to be and do, taken into account how a particular context is determines their abilities, then entitlement or capability set can be discussed in philosophical terms of distributive, relational, or other forms of justice. The famine analyis has been really useful for me in teaching about the conceptual and philosophical framework of the capapbilities approach as well as making the move from nutrition to health and wellbeing.

looking forward to your future installments! S.

Or perhaps it does, in which case I demand my nuclear bombs!

Alex @62
Isn’t part of the point of the CA to get around the issue of whether we are prescribing certain value-laden goods or activities or beliefs as being the stuff of a decent life, by leaving what they might be open to the individual?

If so, in this particular respect CA would not really differ, istm, from Rawls in TJ or from standard versions of liberalism. (In the perhaps-now-played-out communitarianism-liberalism debates, one of the former’s points against the latter was its supposed reluctance to make judgments about whether certain activities are ‘better’ than others.)

According to Ingrid @57, Sen did not want to think in terms of ‘goods’ and also thought that Rawls’s ‘primary goods’ were too materially focused (though R. said that “self-respect” is prob. the most important primary good). Anyway, I don’t want to turn this into a thread on Rawls (we’ve had those before here and there’s no particular need, istm, for another one). Sen’s reasons for being dissatisfied w R’s approach I’m sure wd become clearer to me on reading some of his work (I’ve read things that quote and cite him but not much of Sen himself).

I am also curious about where/how/when normative elements come into the CA framework—some of this also dovetails with Matt’s comments on the other thread (and apologies in advance if this is somewhat OT). Anyway here’s what I was thinking about:

There’s the bit in ‘Equality of What’ (linked @57), where it looks like Sen balks at Rawls’ view that satisfaction derived from morally reprehensible actions or practices—e.g. enslaving someone—shouldn’t count at all in a determination of social value. To quote (p. 211 via the @57 link):

Welfarism requires the endorsement not merely of the widely shared intuition that any pleasure has some value—and one would have to be a bit of a kill-joy to dissent from this—but also the much more dubious proposition that pleasures must be relatively weighed only according to their respective intensities, irrespective of the source of the pleasure and the nature of the activity that goes with it. [emph. added–js.]

This suggests, at least to me, that contrary to LFC’s suggestion (@67), Sen is more permissive than Rawls when it comes to determining which functionings are or can be valuable. In other words, as per Ingrid’s suggestion here and in the other threads, Sen wants to stay quite neutral regarding which capabilities and functionings might have value—even intuitively reprehensible ones may turn out to have some value. I guess I find this unpersuasive. In particular, I don’t see how one can build up to a more robust conception of justice unless one is already relying on some sort of a normative (or proto-normative?) framework that allows us to make normatively grounded distinctions between different sorts of capabilities and functionings. But perhaps Sen provides this elsewhere? Or maybe Nussbaum is a good person to go to for this sort of question?

[Brief excursus on Rawls deleted in order to stay vaguely on topic.]

I was just about to come over here and paste the “reason to value” quote; would love to hear more about that at some point, Ingrid.

Right, yes. I made it sound like you did, but I didn’t mean to do that. Sorry.

I am confused about the nature of the problem with the more permissive “reason to value” criteria from Sen, over a more-rigid system. I think the wording still implies that somebody out there gets a vote on what somebody else’s goods are – say a politician or bureaucrat – so the libertarian will not be pleased. Still this seems like an improvement over a more rigid system, while the system does not become too unwieldy to use.