The Origins of the Capability Approach: Two Problems
The capability approach developed in a variety of ways to address different problems in different disciplines. Before giving some more insight into these developments in Section 12.3, we shall briefly discuss in this section what it is commonly taken to be and how it originated from criticism of existing theories.
The capability framework is a claim on how human wellbeing and related concepts, such as development or poverty, should be conceptualised and assessed. What matters in the assessment of a person's well-being are all the different life paths that she has reason to value and that are open to her. Life paths are made up of all ‘doings and beings', a person's so-called functionings, that she can realise in them. These can range from ‘being well nourished' over ‘having access to family and friends' or ‘enjoying good health'. Dependent on a person's resource endowment, her physical requirements and the culture and environment she is living in, different life paths, or bundles of functionings might be open to her. The capability set comprises all the functioning bundles she can choose from, and reflects her freedom to pursue different life paths she has reason to value. There is great consensus among capability scholars that only those bundles of functionings that a person has reason to value will increase the freedom offered by a person's capability set and with it a person's wellbeing. However, it remains a matter of dispute how these valuable ‘doings and beings' that matter to people can and should be identified. Some (Sen 1999) argue that they should be identified in a process of reflection, deliberation and discussion among all concerned people, while others (Nussbaum 2000) defend a list of objectively valuable functionings.Though it has been claimed (see for example Qizilbash 2016) that its roots go back to Aristotle, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the origins of modern capability theory lie in the writings of Sen (1980, 1985) and Nussbaum (1988) in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Even at the start, writings on capability ranged over very different fields of the literature, crossing disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, economics, development studies and political science. Especially in political philosophy and in welfare economics, the capability approach emerged out of criticism of existing theories.In welfare economics, one can see how the approach emerged out of criticism of traditional welfare economic approaches.2,3 One of Sen's major
2 In this chapter we follow the definition employed in the introduction to this volume and use the term welfarism, or welfarist approaches, to refer to approaches that restrict the informational basis of social assessments to the individual welfare of the people concerned, depicted by (ordinal and interpersonally non-comparable) preferences. For a discussion about the change in meaning of the term welfarism in the history of welfare economics, see Baujard (2016). For a more detailed discussion about the origins and historical development of welfarism, see the introduction to this volume.
3 See Qizilbash (2007) for a discussion of the capability approach in relation to social choice theory.
concerns in his writings on welfare economics was the broadening of the informational basis for the conceptualisation of well-being and the assessment of social states. He prominently criticised the ‘informational poverty’ of welfarist welfare economics, that restricts the information relevant to the assessment of societal states or the market mechanism, to individual welfare, understood as the satisfaction of people’s preferences (ruling out interpersonal comparisons) (Sen 1977,1979a, 1999). Otherinformation or values, such as the rights and freedom people enjoy in a certain state, were excluded from the informational basis of welfare economics at the time.[141]
In political philosophy, beside Nussbaum’s work (1988, 2000), one of the most prominent early accounts of the capability approach was put forward by Sen (1980) as an answer to the question ‘equality of what?’.
He argued that all theories in political philosophy ascribe importance to the equality of human beings in some way. However, what differs is the informational space in which equality is sought. Utilitarianism aims for the utility of each person to be counted equally, whereas what matters in Nozickean accounts of justice is the equality of rights (Nozick 1974). Yet again in resource-based accounts, among which Sen includes the Rawlsian approach (Rawls 1971), equality of resources or primary goods is the goal. Sen pointed to problems that can occur if equality is sought in each of these spaces, namely preference adaptation and neglect of diversity. Nussbaum (2000, 2001) discussed the problem preference-adaptation phenomena can pose in the assessment of well-being and defended the capability approach as a promising alternative to utilitarian theories in political philosophy. Unlike Sen, however, she focused mainly on political philosophy and combined Aristotelian approaches to the good life with the capability approach in her earlier work, while gradually moving towards developing it into a theory of justice, overcoming lacunae in the Rawlsian theory of justice (2006).Thus, both in the welfare economic literature, as well as in political philosophy, the development of the capability approach was motivated by a criticism of the informational basis of conventional approaches. In the following, we shall focus on the two problems that received particular attention: the problem of preference adaptation, which is a criticism voiced against many variants of utilitarianism, and the problem of diversity-neglect, which, according to Sen (1980), applies to resource-based approaches.[142]
Problems involving preference adaptation can occur in utilitarian approaches, where utility is equated with the satisfaction of the preferences people actually have at any time (Sen 1984). Drawing on a phenomenon identified by Elster (1982, 1983), Sen described preference adaptation as a process in which people in long-term hardship unconsciously adapt their preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.6 More specifically, if a person perceives her goals to be beyond her reach, her preferences may unconsciously change, so that she prefers what is within her reach over her previously preferred but unattainable option.
For example, consider a person growing up in a poor neighbourhood who originally aspired to become a doctor. Over the years this goal seems more and more beyond her reach and so, in order to reduce frustration and cognitive dissonance, her preferences might unconsciously change so that she comes to prefer a feasible option, such as becoming a nurse or even a shoe cleaner, over the seemingly unattainable option of becoming a doctor. Ifher well-being is assessed in terms of her newly adapted preferences (and she indeed became a nurse or a shoe cleaner), the result would be an overestimation of her well-being, neglecting the fact that she could not pursue her originally preferred option of becoming a doctor.In the case of approaches that aim for an equal distribution of resources, whether this is expressed in terms of money, as when one focuses on GDP per capita, or primary goods, as is the case in Rawlsian theory, Sen (1980) pointed out the problem of diversity neglect (see also Sen 1987; Nussbaum 2001). The problem is that the diversity among human beings and their different abilities to convert resources at their command into actual ‘doings and beings’ is neglected by a focus on resources. Whether a person can obtain the ‘doings and beings’ she has reason to value, say to be well- nourished, from a certain amount of resources, such as a certain amount of meat at her disposal, will not only depend on her physical state and age and the calorie intake she requires every day, but also on the social norms of meat eating or social festivities (for which the meat can be used) in the respective society and the environmental and climate conditions (say how long meat can be preserved). Thus, if one were to focus on the equality of
form of welfarist approaches (along the definition adopted in this volume/chapter). All those (utilitarian) approaches that take people’s actual (and thus possibly non-reflected /scrutinised) preferences as the basis of welfare assessments are taken to be vulnerable to the adaptation problem.
6 For early discussions about the adaptation phenomenon and the capability approach, see Sen (1984, 1995) and Nussbaum (1993). For a more recent account of the literature on adaptive preference, see Khader (2011).
resources among people, a neglect of the diversity along these various dimensions between human beings would risk leading to inequalities as to what people can actually do or be given the resources at their command.
The question of the proper informational basis was thus present at the origin of the capability approach both in welfare economics and in political philosophy. The capability approach can thus be understood as one answer to the question how the informational basis in welfare economics can be broadened and how the question ‘equality of what?’ can be answered in political philosophy, such that the problems of existing theories can be avoided. However, in the light of a large number of different variants of the capability approach that are meant to address different questions and problems in different areas and disciplines, it is not always straightforward anymore as to whether and how they succeed in addressing these problems. In the following section we shall provide a short exploration of the plurality of the various ways the capability framework is used in different disciplines and discuss proposals on how to categorise this plurality. In the subsequent section we then move to a discussion as to whether all of these variants of the approach do indeed succeed in avoiding the problems of human diversity neglect and preference adaptation.
12.3