Entitlements and Capabilities1

ENTITLEMENTS AND CAPABILITIES1 1 Introduction Among the important contributions of Amartya Sen are the capability approach and the entitlement framework. What is the relation between these, if any? The capability approach provides a basis for assessing well-being that is freedom-based and not concerned merely with states that are achieved. It is also irreducibly plural in its concerns. However, its plural concerns are ultimately justified by their constitutive role in human flourishing, which is a single overarching idea. The capability framework provides a way of evaluating “how people’s lives go”. It can undergird evaluative exercises of various kinds, related to the lives of persons considered individually and together. It is not a full- fledged normative doctrine applicable to all aspects of normative evaluation but rather an account of how to approach those aspects of normative reasoning specifically concerned with the assessment of lives, including the diverse aspects of well-being and the freedoms to achieve them. Contrary to one view2, it does not by itself constitute a theory of justice, nor of morality, though it may be referred to within an account of either. A theory of justice may or may not be concerned with reducing the inequality of capabilities; it is possible to subscribe to an account of social justice in which there is no such demand (such as a libertarian theory centered on non-interference) while also subscribing to the view that the capability framework provides an appropriate way to assess how well individual lives go. A theory of personal morality may or may not mandate a concern with promoting other persons’ capabilities; it is possible to subscribe to an account of personal morality in which there is no such demand (such as an account which requires non-interference with others but entails no obligations to promote their well-being) while also holding that the capability framework provides an appropriate way to assess how well individual lives go. Similarly, although the capability approach does not provide a complete account of how to undertake economic evaluation, it does provide one part of such an account, by helping to answer the question, “what should we value (when considering the effect of policies on human lives)?”. It may thus inform our specification of the “objective function” to be employed in economic policy, and perhaps also of the constraints, such as the respects in which policies must avoid harming people, as these may also be shaped by normative concerns. However, it cannot in itself answer what specific form the objective function or the constraints should take. The focus on the space of capabilities does not in itself help to answer, for instance, questions such as that of how, if ever, to permit trade-offs across capabilities of different kinds, or among those that are possessed by different persons, or of what place capabilities should have in determining the claims that may be made on behalf of persons relative to other information that ought also to play a role in social evaluation (to take one example, the history of past respect or lack of it for their rights). The focus on the capabilities of persons may, as with any such evaluative framework, give us something to be explained, but it does not in and of itself help us to answer explanatory questions (in 1 By Sanjay G. Reddy and Adel Daoud. 2 Pogge (2002). 2 particular, of what has caused the capabilities possessed by persons to be what they are, or to determine what would be necessary to change them). In contrast, the entitlement framework provides a way of analyzing the reasons that a person establishes command or fails to do so over specific commodities, and thus does answer an explanatory question. In Amartya Sen’s (1981) foundational formulation, the focus in particular had been on command over food, needed for nutritional adequacy and indeed for survival. If a person establishes command over food it must be in one or another way and if a person fails to establish command over food it must be because she has failed to do so in all the different ways that she could possibly do so. As such, the entitlement framework is a tautology rather than a theory. However, it is an exceedingly helpful tautology as it provides an invitation to examine the different specific ways (e.g. own-production entitlements, exchange entitlements, entitlements to social transfers etc.) in which a person can establish sufficient command over food or, contrarily, why it is that a person should fail to do so. It provides a language with which these pathways may be identified, and it is in this respect that it provides an explanatory framework, although not an explanatory theory. A disaggregated study of the various reasons for individual starvation or indeed mass famine and their proximate as well as ultimate causes helps to overcome a simplistically unitary emphasis on a ‘Food Availability Decline’ perspective in explaining famine, and leads instead to the recognition that it may be the failure of purchasing power or other sources of individual command over food that play the crucial role in accounting for famine deaths (the most famous point associated with Sen’s original exploration)3. The force of entitlement analysis in its classical application derives from its focus on command over essential resources (i.e. foods) which are necessary for an integral aspect of human flourishing (i.e. adequate nourishment) and thus have self-evident evaluative significance. Despite this anchoring in an evaluative concern, the entitlement framework was presented primarily as an aid to causal analysis. Assessing life circumstances is not the same as understanding how those life circumstances came to be what they are. The lack of identity between the two concerns is no embarrassment. On the contrary, recognizing the distinctness of the questions enables us to see that each framework provides a necessary complement to the other. Essential commodities are needed because they help to promote elementary capabilities, many though not all of which are dependent crucially for their realization on adequate material resources of appropriate kinds. Understanding this helps to anchor and orient the analysis of essential commodities (for example by identifying thresholds of adequacy). The capability framework in turn highlights the evaluative reasons for concern with specific capabilities possessed by individuals but cannot itself provide an account of how they came to be possessed to a specific extent or not in a particular economic and social setting. For this it must be complemented by an analysis of the different ways in which people can or cannot establish command over the essential commodities needed for attaining the relevant capabilities, i.e. an entitlement analysis. The entitlement framework highlights possible routes to explanation of how people come to have or not to have commodities but cannot provide an account of why to focus on certain commodities, or why to value certain pathways to possessing them, rather than others. These are questions that must be answered by a suitable evaluative approach, such as the capability framework. Specifically, the capability framework allows us to see certain commodities as having value because they contribute to valuable capabilities. For instance, food is valuable 3 Daoud (2018) attempts to clarify the relation between these approaches. 3 because it advances the capability of being adequately nourished (or differently conceived, because it advances the ability to live a long and healthy life). Because of its broad concerns including a recognition of the value of freedom the capability approach also helps us to make sense of the role of process considerations in defining and assessing entitlements. For instance, the focus on the ability to be adequately nourished rather than on actually being so enables one to make an evaluative distinction between fasting and starving. This distinction is implicitly recognized in the entitlement framework, because of its focus on the ability to establish command over food (e.g. through adequate purchasing power) rather than on food intake, but the underlying normative as well as explanatory role of this distinction is left hidden. Further, the capability framework can help us to understand the role of contextual and interpersonal variations in the appropriate application of the entitlement framework. Whether command over a particular bundle of commodities enables possession over capabilities to the required degree depends on specificities shaped by such variations, which may be related to biology, environment and culture. To be employed at the level of individuals as well as of populations, the entitlement framework must take note of empirical regularities linking command over commodities to capabilities (e.g. that all human beings need food in order to survive) but must also recognize relevant variations in order to explain when commodities do or do not actually suffice to attain capabilities for particular sub-groups (e.g. for girls and women as opposed to boys and men, or for active manual labourers as opposed to sedentary workers) or for particular contexts (e.g. in extreme weather conditions or in the presence of relevant cultural norms deserving of recognition that proscribe or mandate certain foods). In what follows, we elaborate on the complementary or “dual” relation between the two ideas: the entitlement approach requires an evaluative perspective to make sense of its objects of concern and its methods of application whereas the capability approach requires an explanatory framework in order to make sense of how and why people come to have the capabilities that they have. The capability approach provides the evaluative perspective and the entitlement framework highlights the possible explanations that are respectively required. Indeed, the element of ‘helpful tautology’ in the entitlement approach can make the latter relationship a logical necessity.

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