Lives and Capabilities – Amartya Sen

Lives and Capabilities

Part – I

Harshit Sharma

Alumnus (BHU)

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CH1. Equality of What? on Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities

Introduction

Amartya Sen’s Tanner Lecture of 1979 posed the question of what metric should be used to evaluate equality in society, specifically asking what aspect of a person’s condition should be considered fundamental for egalitarians.
The focus of the study is on how recent philosophical literature answers this question, particularly the approach taken by those who support egalitarianism.
The central assumption is that justice requires equal amounts of something, though this equality is subject to being balanced with competing values.
John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971) shifted the discourse on political philosophy, critiquing utilitarianism for its aggregative nature and lack of attention to distribution.
Rawls also criticized the utilitarian view that welfare is the central aspect of a person’s condition that deserves normative attention. He replaced welfare with primary goods and proposed equality in those goods rather than an aggregate approach.
Rawls’s critique of welfare led to his shift toward primary goods, but his failure to explore equality of opportunity for welfare is seen as a key shortcoming, which remains relevant in egalitarian thought.
Sen critiqued not only the welfare metric but also equality of opportunity for welfare, focusing on an individual’s capabilities rather than goods or welfare.
Sen proposed a shift from evaluating actual states (welfare or goods) to evaluating opportunities, and from focusing on goods and welfare to functionings (actual achievements in life).
The central innovation in Sen’s framework is the emphasis on capabilities, distinguishing it from welfare or goods, and focusing on what individuals can achieve rather than just what they have.
Sen’s achievement is significant but may be misrepresented by the ambiguous use of the term capability, which blends his two distinct shifts: from welfare to opportunity and from goods to functionings.
The critique involves exposing the ambiguity in Sen’s use of the term capability, proposing a more precise answer to the question of what should be equal in society.

Rawlsian Criticism of Equality of Welfare

Welfare is defined in two main ways in this context: hedonic welfare (pleasure or agreeable states of consciousness) and preference satisfaction (preferences ordering states of the world, where satisfaction occurs whether or not one is aware of it).
Rawls critiques equality of welfare, offering two key objections: the offensive tastes criticism and the expensive tastes criticism, both of which apply to both hedonic and preference welfare interpretations.
The offensive tastes criticism suggests that harmful pleasures (e.g., discriminating against others) should not be counted as equal in the distribution of welfare, even if they contribute to a person’s overall welfare.
This objection can be addressed by welfare egalitarians by shifting toward equality of inoffensive welfare, which excludes harmful preferences while maintaining equality of welfare.
The expensive tastes criticism focuses on the idea that people with expensive tastes (e.g., craving luxury goods) require more resources to be satisfied than those with modest tastes, which seems unfair in welfare equality.
Rawls argues that people are responsible for their preferences, including expensive tastes, and should not be compensated for them. This aligns with his view that primary goods (goods people can use to pursue their ends) are the appropriate metric for justice.
The expensive tastes argument suggests that if people are responsible for their tastes, welfare deficits due to expensive tastes should not be compensated, leading to a call for equality of opportunity for welfare instead of equality of welfare.
Equality of opportunity for welfare permits differences in welfare based on individual choices, such as someone choosing to risk welfare for potential gain (e.g., gambling).
Rawls’s primary goods metric is criticized as inadequate because it does not address equality of opportunity for welfare, which better accommodates individual responsibility for choices.
Rawls’s framework faces a tension in reconciling his emphasis on responsibility for taste formation with his skepticism about rewarding effort, particularly in the context of expensive tastes.
Nozick criticizes Rawls‘s view, questioning whether a person’s autonomy and responsibility for their actions can align with Rawls’s theory of distributive justice.
The dilemma posed by Nozick is: either people have real freedom of choice (and deserve credit for their efforts), or they do not (and thus egalitarian policies should downplay individual responsibility).
Rawls’s inconsistency is highlighted between his view on the responsibility for effort (which cannot be fully credited) and his treatment of the responsibility for tastes (where full responsibility is assigned).
The natural position is that people are partly responsible for both their efforts and the development of tastes, though the extent of responsibility is difficult to determine in practice.

Sen and Capability

Sen’s critique of Rawls and the primary goods metric argues that differently constructed and situated people require different amounts of goods to satisfy the same needs, leading to inequalities in actual advantage that primary goods do not address.
Primary goods fail to recognize that what matters is not the quantity of goods but what those goods do to human beings in terms of their ability to achieve certain capabilities.
Sen critiques a focus on the stock of wealth as an inappropriate way to assess well-being, as it neglects the individual’s needs and situation. For example, a paraplegic requires more resources to achieve the same mobility that a healthy person does, which primary goods ignore.
Welfare-based metrics (hedonic and preference satisfaction) also fail because they focus on mental reactions or attitudes toward goods, rather than the actual capabilities enabled by those goods.
The fact that a person can adapt to adversity or has a sunny disposition should not invalidate claims for compensation if their objective disadvantage remains (e.g., the crippled person still needs assistance despite a high welfare score).
The case of Tiny Tim, who is happy despite being disadvantaged, illustrates that welfare and opportunity for welfareare insufficient metrics; what matters is the actual need for resources or opportunities (e.g., the need for a wheelchair).
Sen’s concept of capability is introduced as a counter-proposal to the welfare and primary goods metrics, but the term has dual meanings that blur the clarity of his argument.
One aspect of capability concerns the freedom to achieve certain states or functionings, but another aspect, which is not clearly distinguished, concerns the actual ability to function. Both are important, but the distinction is not well articulated in Sen’s exposition.
Sen’s terminology of capability obscures this duality, making it difficult to fully grasp the normative significance of each aspect in his theory.
Sen proposed a new metric for well-being called capability, aiming to fill the gap between primary goods and utilityby focusing on what goods enable individuals to do.
The term capability was initially described as something missing from prior frameworks, referring to the basic things a person should be able to do with resources.
However, Sen‘s characterization of capability was inconsistent; he mistakenly linked it to what goods provide (the capacity to do things) rather than what goods actually do for individuals in a broader sense.
Midfare, a new concept introduced, lies between goods and utility, representing the non-utility effects of goods on individuals. This includes:
- The capability goods endow individuals with (the capacity to act),
- The performance of valuable activities made possible by goods, and
- The direct effects goods have on individuals (e.g., food protecting from illness).
Capability, as a part of midfare, doesn’t exhaust the range of effects goods have on individuals.
Two major strands of egalitarian thinking:
- Rawlsians focus on the goods themselves and their distribution, considering them too objective.
- Welfarists focus on utility but neglect the intermediary state between goods and utility, which Sen identifies as midfare.
Both Rawlsians and welfarists should find midfare a better focus for assessing well-being because it recognizes more than just the goods themselves or the utility they produce.
Sen’s proposal was groundbreaking because it shifted the focus from evaluating goods or utility to considering a person’s condition in abstraction from its utility, such as looking at nutrition levels rather than just food supply or utility.
The midfare state includes capabilities but also involves other non-utility effects that goods have on individuals, which welfarists and Rawlsians ignore.
The case of food illustrates the distinction between capability and midfare: while food provides the capability to nourish oneself, its primary effect is to nourish the person, which is often more important than the exercise of capability.
The question of how well nourished someone is is distinct from how well they have nourished themselves, and the focus is on the outcome (nourishment) rather than the process (exercising the capability).
Midfare and capability are distinct concepts, with midfare representing the effects goods have on individuals that generate utility, while capability refers to a person’s ability to achieve certain functionings.
Small babies exemplify the distinction: babies cannot exercise capability but still benefit from midfare (e.g., being nourished by food or protected by clothing).
Midfare involves the benefits that goods provide, such as nutrition, warmth, and protection, even when individuals do not actively exercise capabilities.
Capability is insufficiently general to capture all the effects goods have, especially in cases like clothing or hospital drips, where there is no active exercise of capability but important benefits still occur.
Two motivations for assessing well-being:
1. The desire to evaluate what a person can achieve, independent of their current state.
2. The desire to avoid reducing well-being assessments to resources or utility levels alone.
The language of capability best covers the first motivation, related to what one can achieve.
Sen’s phrase “what people get out of goods” can mean both an active extraction (requiring capability) or a more passive receipt, with the latter not involving capability but still being important.
Functionings in Sen’s framework can be either activities or states of being. Sometimes, functionings are activities (like reading or participating in community life), but other times they are non-activities like being nourished or free from malaria.
Sen often uses functionings in contradictory ways, sometimes defining them as activities and other times as desirable states, causing ambiguity.
Being free from malaria may be due to external factors like public health policy, not personal capabilities, but it still contributes to a person’s well-being, which Sen acknowledges.
The main concern for Sen is not just promoting capability but also addressing midfare lacks, such as being ill-fed, undernourished, or unsheltered.
Having the ability to house oneself is different from having decent living space provided, where the key issue is the availability of goods that make a good life possible, not the exercise of capability.
Sen’s focus on functionings like avoiding nutritional deficiency emphasizes outcomes (e.g., nourishment) rather than the activities involved, highlighting the importance of possibilities rather than actions.
Sen’s capability framework attempts to connect well-being with freedom but faces issues when applied broadly across different contexts.
Sen distinguishes between goods and utility, focusing on what goods do for people apart from utility. This approach is illuminating but too narrow when applying the functioning/capability language to everything goods provide.
Capabilities represent freedom to achieve specific functionings, but this concept is confused when used to describe all states of well-being, not just actions or achievements.
Freedom, in the context of Sen’s work, is associated with the ability to do things, but this does not fit all types of well-being, like freedom from hunger or disease, which are states of being rather than capabilities to act.
Sen’s use of capability implies both freedom to act and freedom from certain conditions. This ambiguity leads to confusion between actual states and opportunities.
Functioning in Sen’s framework includes both activities and states of being, making it broad but unclear when discussing freedom.
The concept of midfare is used as a bridge between goods and utility, but it stretches Sen’s terminology to encompass too many different kinds of well-being, diluting its connection to freedom.
The key motivation in Sen’s framework is to move from welfare (focused on utility) to capability, reflecting freedomto achieve certain life outcomes, but this shift also leads to a reliance on utility to assess higher capabilities.
Critics like Richard Arneson argue that higher capabilities may not matter unless they relate to a person’s desires, which complicates Sen’s claim that capabilities are always normatively significant.
The core of capability theory addresses basic needs, where capabilities are objectively important, but as needs become less basic, the relevance of utility and desire increases.
Sen’s emphasis on capability equality is rooted in the idea of opportunity rather than outcome, but its application becomes less clear when extended to more subjective or complex desires.
Basic capability equality is important in ensuring basic needs are met, but in richer contexts, ranking capabilities is difficult without invoking preferences and utility measures.
An alternative proposal, equality of access to advantage, focuses on the access to desirable states rather than the capability to achieve them. This includes even states that one did not personally bring about.
Access to advantage emphasizes that people should not lack urgent needs due to no fault of their own, suggesting a broader and more flexible egalitarian framework.
This framework contrasts with Sen’s focus on freedom and capability, arguing that justice does not depend on freedom to act but on ensuring no one is deprived of basic necessities.
The idea of equality of access does not hinge on free will or choice, thus allowing it to address inequalities that may exist even in a deterministic world.
Sen’s approach overemphasizes freedom and capability, while the equality of access to advantage better captures the egalitarian concern with ensuring everyone’s basic needs are met, regardless of how they are achieved.