Introduction
The capability approach is widely employed as a promising alternative to conventional (welfarist) approaches to the assessment of individual well-being and social states in theory and practice.
It can be understood as an answer to the question as to what information is relevant for the assessment of the way society is organised and goods are allocated. The answer to this question given by capability scholars is simple: what matters is a person's freedom to pursue life paths she has reason to value. This informational shift towards freedom constitutes an important difference from other approaches to assessing a person's well-being: welfarist approaches, for instance, consider individual preferences or utility as the sole relevant information. Freedom matters only if it contributes to one's preference satisfaction. Other approaches to wellbeing that rely on information about the resources at a person's disposal include the Rawlsian approach (1971), based on the provision of primary goods, and the monetary indicators that are often employed in economic policy assessment. To put this slightly differently, welfarist approaches to the evaluation of policy proposals focus on how far the preferences of the individual people in society are satisfied, resourcebased approaches focus on the policy's effect on resources or monetary indicators, such as GDP per capita, whereas capability approaches consider information on how the policy affects what people can actually do or be.An obvious question to ask at this point is why capability scholars choose capabilities or people’s real freedom as the (proper) informational basis for evaluating alternative states of the world, rather than individual preferences or people’s resource endowments. Why focus on freedom to pursue valuable doings and beings rather than on the resources needed to pursue these or the preference satisfaction resulting from them? The problems faced by many preference- and resource-based approaches constitute a prominent argument for this informational broadening in the beginning of the capability approach (Nussbaum and Sen 1993).
Preference adaptation (discussed in greater detail in subsequent sections) occurs when unconscious adaptation of preferences to people’s constrained circumstances leads to an overestimation of their well-being. Neglect of diversity is a problem that arises in resource or means-based approaches. Because people have diverse physical characteristics and because they live in different cultural and environmental circumstances, they may need different amounts of resources to realise the same doings and beings. This means that equalising the distribution of resources among people can lead to significant differences in what they can actually do or be.Thus, a crucial question is whether the capability approach itself succeeds in overcoming these problems. What makes an inquiry into this question difficult is the fact that the capability approach is not a well- defined and fully specified theory. It is a general framework specified in different ways in a variety of disciplines, dependent on the problem it is meant to address.[140] The open nature of the approach makes it possible to specify it in different ways and to address a variety of problems in theory and practice, such as: the assessment of states of the world in welfare economics; providing an alternative to cost-benefit analysis in policy and project assessment; or the development of a theory of justice in political philosophy. One aspect particularly relevant for the discussions about the informational basis of welfare assessments is whether these different specifications of the capability approach have the potential to overcome the problems associated with the informational basis of other approaches, such as preference-based or resource-based approaches, that motivated the move to the capability approach. Is the importance ascribed to freedom sufficient to move beyond welfarism and avoid the problems associated with it?
This chapter aims to explore the potential and limits of capability theories to move beyond welfarism by drawing on the literature about the (formal) conceptualisation of the key concepts of the approach and their measurement.
This area of the literature aims to formalise and axiomatise rankings of sets in terms of freedom or capability (Pattanaik and Xu in press). We shall draw on the insights and the formal clarity of this axiomatic literature in order to argue that a focus on freedom is not enough to address the problems (of welfarist/preference-based and resource-based approaches) the capability approach was meant to address. Whether the capability approach can hold its promise to overcome the problems that motivated it will depend on the way capability, as freedom, is conceptualised and the value assigned to it.The chapter is structured as follows. Section 12.2 outlines the origins of the capability approach, pointing to its beginning as a constructive alternative to address problems in the assessment of well-being along utilitarian or Rawlsian theories in welfare economics and political philosophy. We discuss two specific problems of resource-based and utilitarian theories that triggered the development of the capability approach, namely the neglect of diversity and preference adaptation. In Section 12.3, we give a short overview of the plurality of specifications of the capability approach that developed in recent decades. We discuss a framework developed by Robeyns (2017) that aims to categorise and systematise different versions of the capability approach by identifying a number of characterising features all capability theories share. In Section 12.4 we then explore whether two of these characterising features, namely the move from achievements to freedom and the shift from means to ends, are indeed sufficient to address the problem of diversity neglect and preference adaptation respectively. By drawing on recent developments of the freedom ranking literature we show that this is not the case and argue that whether capability theories do indeed succeed to address the problems at its origins and move beyond welfarism will depend on the way the concept of freedom underlying capability sets is conceptualised.
12.2
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