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Wollstonecraft and Adaptive Preferences View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Bilkent University Institutional Repository Utilitas http://journals.cambridge.org/UTI Additional services for Utilitas: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Why Women Hug their Chains: Wollstonecraft and Adaptive Preferences SANDRINE BERGES Utilitas / Volume 23 / Issue 01 / March 2011, pp 72 - 87 DOI: 10.1017/S0953820810000452, Published online: 15 February 2011 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0953820810000452 How to cite this article: SANDRINE BERGES (2011). Why Women Hug their Chains: Wollstonecraft and Adaptive Preferences. Utilitas, 23, pp 72-87 doi:10.1017/S0953820810000452 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/UTI, IP address: 139.179.2.250 on 20 May 2014 Why Women Hug their Chains: Wollstonecraft and Adaptive Preferences SANDRINE BERGES Bilkent University In a recent article,1 Amartya Sen writes that one important influence on his theory of adaptive preferences is Wollstonecraft’s account of how some women, though clearly oppressed, are apparently satisfied with their lot. Wollstonecraft’s arguments have received little attention so far from contemporary political philosophers, and one might be tempted to dismiss Sen’s acknowledgment as a form of gallantry.2 That would be wrong. Wollstonecraft does have a lot of interest to say on the topic of why her contemporaries appeared to choose what struck her as oppression, and her views can still help us reflect on contemporary problems such as the ones identified and discussed by Amartya Sen. In this article I will argue that a close look at Wollstonecraft’s arguments may lead us to rethink some aspects of Sen’s discussion of the phenomenon of adaptive preferences. 1. SEN’S CONCEPT OF ADAPTIVE PREFERENCES In Inequality Re-examined, Sen describes the phenomenon of adaptive preferences as follows: A thoroughly deprived person, leading a very reduced life, might not appear to be badly off in terms of the mental metric of desire and its fulfillment, if the hardship is accepted with non-grumbling resignation. In situations of long- standing deprivation, the victims do not go on grieving and lamenting all the time, and very often make great effort to take pleasure in small mercies and to cut down personal desires to modest – ‘realistic’ – proportions.3 Sen’s theory is based in great part on his own observations of how the destitute and the oppressed tend to describe their own well-being. If, for instance, the inhabitants of a comparatively well-off region of India, Kerala, complain of ill health more than the inhabitants or a poorer region, Bihar, there is likely more to the explanation than that the poor are more resistant to illness than the rich.4 Sen’s explanation is 1 Amartya Sen, ‘Reason, Freedom, and Well-Being’, Utilitas 18 (2006), pp. 80–6. 2 For recent philosophical papers on Wollstonecraft see Lena Halldenius, ‘The Primacy of Right: On the Triad of Liberty, Equality and Virtue in Wollstonecraft’s Political Thought’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15 (2007), pp. 75–99; Elizabeth Wingrove, ‘Getting Intimate with Wollstonecraft: In the Republic of Letters’, Political Theory 33 (2005), pp. 344–69; and Laura Brace, ‘ “Not Empire but Equality”: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Marriage State and the Sexual Contract’, Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000), pp. 33–45. 3 Amartya Sen, Inequality Re-examined (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 55. 4 See Sen, ‘Reason’, p. 88. © Cambridge University Press 2011 Utilitas Vol. 23, No. 1, March 2011 doi:10.1017/S0953820810000452 Wollstonecraft and Adaptive Preferences 73 that where standards of healthcare are known to be low, people tend to complain less. Faced with necessary deprivation, people need to forget the gap in their life, they need, for the sake of survival, to became convinced that it was never there. This is how, in another of Sen’s examples, women in rural India came to believe that their nutritional needs were close to non-existent, and in any case, inferior to those of their husbands and children. Sen’s identification of this phenomenon led him to reject measurements of well-being based on satisfaction. Because preferences are malleable, being satisfied with one’s lot is not a reliable way to measure well-being (with a view to distributing resources). People learn to live with what they can get, and do not waste energy wishing they could get what is unavailable to them. This phenomenon has also been described as sour grapes, after Aesop’s fable in which a fox decides that he does not desire the grapes he cannot reach, and tells himself, knowing that it is false, that they were sour anyway.5 This self-deception can only end once the deficit is filled, once people are confident that what they were once missing is going to be reliably available from now on. So when a village has access to clean water and its inhabitants have been given basic lessons in hygiene and illness preventions, the women can say proudly ‘we are cleaner now’.6 Before, they would not have let themselves consider cleanliness to be desirable in any way. Nussbaum writes of one such woman that ‘[S]he knew that this was how things were and would be ...She didn’t even waste mental energy getting upset, since these things couldn’t be changed.’7 Sen’s view is taken up by Martha Nussbaum who argues that in order to ensure that we have an accurate account of well-being we must develop a list of capabilities which all human beings must have in order to live properly human lives. This list, although it allows for cultural variation, must be universal in order to avoid being undercut by adapted preferences. Nussbaum’s central capabilities range from life, health and bodily integrity to control over one’s environment, both political and material.8 For each item in the list the emphasis is on the capability to function, rather than the functioning itself. So for instance, Nussbaum lists affiliation as a central capability. This means that in order to live a good life, one must have the capability to live with 5 Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge, 1987) emphasizes that the phenomenon of sour grapes is causal rather than intentional. It is not the case in the examples discussed by Sen and Nussbaum that people choose to deal with disappointment by forcing themselves to forget about it, it is an unconscious process. 6 Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge, 2000), p. 114. 7 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, p. 113. 8 For a full and detailed list of the capabilities see Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, pp. 78–80. 74 Sandrine Berges others, as part of a community, while not being discriminated against because of race, gender, or anything else. But this does not entail that in order to live a good life one has to live with others. A recluse by choice could very well be happy – what matters is that it is a choice, and not something imposed by the lack of capabilities. I will discuss Wollstonecraft’s position in some detail and from this study it will emerge that only a small percentage of the phenomena that Sen and Nussbaum describe as adaptive preferences are in fact at all like sour grapes. Certainly for Wollstonecraft, I will argue, it makes more sense to talk of stunted growth of preferences9 than adapted ones. Women’s preferences were ‘grown’ in a corrupt system which provided them with a distorted frame of references in which to form their values. This kind of problematic preference raises issues that cannot be addressed without going further than Sen, for instance, is willing to go. In particular, they cannot be addressed satisfactorily in a way that wholly avoids paternalism. We need to take a stand and say that some ways of being and thinking are objectively better than others. For this reason, it will be useful to begin by taking a look at the paternalism charges against adaptive preference theory. 2. THE PATERNALISM CHARGE, AND WHETHER SEN CAN REBUT IT Sen’s theory and Nussbaum’s use of it have led to charges of paternalism being brought against both of them. Who are we, asks Sugden, to think that we ‘know better than some particular individual what is good for her’?10 What tells us that a woman who says she prefers to stay at home and care for her family, or to cover her hair when she is in mixed company, is not expressing a genuine preference? Why must we apply some universal standard to her case, especially when this universal standard appears to be molded according to the standards of the person who prescribes it? Sugden is particularly concerned with the thought that an outsider may be able to decide what an individual has or does not have reason to value, both because the concept of reason used seems to him mysterious, and because this attitude ‘opens the door to restrictions on freedom’.11 9 The use of the adjective ‘stunted’ implies that the preferences did not develop in a natural way. I refrain, however, from describing such preferences as ‘unnatural’ as what is relevant is not what the preference actually is for, but how it was formed. ‘Unatural preferences’ might be read as meaning that there are some things that are by nature preferable and others not. This is not what I am talking about here. 10 R. Sugden, ‘What we desire, what we have reason to desire, whatever we might desire: Mill and Sen on the value of opportunity’, Utilitas 18 (2006), pp.
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