View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Erasmus University Digital Repository REASONING ABOUT DEVELOPMENT: ESSAYS ON AMARTYA SEN’S CAPABILITY APPROACH REDENEREN OVER ONTWIKKELING: ESSAYS OVER AMARTYA SEN’S CAPABILITY APPROACH THESIS to obtain the degree of Doctor from the Erasmus University Rotterdam by command of the rector magnificus Prof.dr. H.G. Schmidt and in accordance with the decision of the Doctorate Board. The public defence shall be held on Thursday 27 June 2013 at 13.30 hrs by THOMAS RODHAM WELLS born in Zomba, Malawi. Doctoral Committee Promoters: Prof.dr. J.J. Vromen Prof.dr. I. Robeyns Other members: Prof.dr. I. van Staveren Dr. R.J.G. Claassen Dr. G. van Oenen Contents Introduction: How Should We Think about Poverty and Development? .. 1 Chapter 1: An Outline of Sen’s Capability Approach .................................. 12 Chapter 2: Two Critiques of Sen ....................................................................... 39 Chapter 3: Judgement in Sen’s Capability Approach .................................. 59 Chapter 4. Sen’s Adaptive Preferences and Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator ................................................................................................................. 88 Chapter 5: Transformation Without Paternalism ....................................... 111 Chapter 6. Which Capabilities Matter for Social Justice? Democratic Politics Versus Philosophy. .............................................................................. 145 Conclusion: Evaluation and Valuation .......................................................... 180 Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 187 Appendix A: Nederlandse Samenvatting ...................................................... 199 Appendix B: Curriculum Vitae......................................................................... 203 Introduction: How Should We Think about Poverty and Development? Most of the world is enjoying the best standard of living, the greatest wealth, and the greatest freedom to live valuable and meaningful lives of any time in human history. But at the same time vast numbers of people are living lives of stark deprivation which are made even more appalling by the contrast. Indeed, it is the perspicuous contrast between the quality of life open to some people but not others that both defines and condemns poverty in the contemporary world: poverty is an unnecessary state of deprivation that can and should be remedied. In the poor world the general term for the removal of entrenched deprivation is ‘development’. Moreover, remediable deprivation exists not only in faraway places with small economies, armed conflicts, or government repression, but also within the rich world, with its homeless, jobless, sick, and socially excluded or stigmatised. Deprivation can co-exist with great opulence. For instance, even in a relatively wealthy country with an effective welfare state, where urgent and straightforward human physiological needs are largely met, there may be a great deal of absolutely real ‘relative poverty’, such as deprivation in the “social bases of self- respect” (cf Rawls 1999). The rich world too seems to be in need of development. We are continually confronted with images of poverty and its dramatic consequences for human lives on our television screens and newspapers, and also with public debate about how to understand it and what to do about it. But poverty is so pervasive that it seems to escape human comprehension let alone solution. There are vast numbers of people affected in many different contexts. Their poverty is apparent in many different ways, from poor health to disabilities to lack of opportunities or aspirations. The causes of poverty are likewise numerous and include the interaction of physiological, environmental, economic, social, and political factors. The basic concern is with our capability to lead the kinds of lives we have reason to value. (Sen 1999a, 285) Over the last 30 years the Indian philosopher-economist Amartya Sen has developed a distinctive normative approach to evaluating well- being in terms of individuals’ freedom to achieve the kind of lives they 2 have reason to value, and development as the expansion of that freedom. This freedom is analysed in terms of an individual’s ‘capability’ to achieve combinations of such intrinsically valuable ‘beings and doings’ (‘functionings’) as being sufficiently nourished and freely expressing one’s political views. Development in this perspective is understood in liberationist terms: of removing unfreedoms – ‘the domination of circumstances and chance over individuals’- and of respecting and supporting individual agency and societal self-determination to decide on and pursue the flourishing life. Hence the title of Sen’s most influential book, Development as Freedom (Sen 1999a). Those who argue for the moral priority of increasing or redistributing wealth justify this because wealth is generally useful for the freedom to live a flourishing life. Sen argues that we should focus directly on achieving that goal rather than ‘fetishising’ one of the means to its achievement. Others argue that happiness is the true measure and goal of objective well-being. Sen argues that while happiness is obviously important it is not obvious that it is the only aspect of life we have reason to value. Sen’s capability approach has been enormously influential, and has been taken up and developed by academics in many disciplines, as well as NGO, governmental, and inter-governmental institutions concerned with development and well-being (such as the United Nations Development Programme). It may be helpful to analyse the diffusion of Sen’s ideas in terms of the distinction between persuasion and recruitment coined by Albert Hirschman (Hirschman 1992, 34). While persuasion concerns the direct influence of new ideas and arguments on those already working on a certain area, recruitment is concerned with the indirect influence those ideas have by exciting the interest of outsiders to come into the field. Perhaps because Sen has been seen as excessively free with the standard theoretical structures for understanding poverty and development it may be noted that Sen has struggled to persuade many theorists, particularly in economics, to take up his approach.1 But he has been very successful in recruiting across 1 Sen’s contributions across several different fields of economics were recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize in 1998. Yet the direct influence of Sen’s capability approach itself on mainstream economics has not been as great as one might expect. In many development economics textbooks, for example, his earlier work on poverty indexes and famines is given significant attention but capabilities are mentioned superficially, dismissively or not at all. (E.g. “For Sen, poverty is not low well-being but the inability to pursue well-being because of the lack of economic means” (Nafziger 2006, 178).) Its influence on orthodox welfare economics has been perhaps even 3 inter-disciplinary boundaries, spawning a complex and sprawling literature across academic disciplines as varied as ethics, sociology, and even design and ICT. Martha Nussbaum, for example, then best known as a classicist and Aristotelian philosopher, was drawn to Sen’s capability approach by its non-utilitarian, non-Rawlsian features (Nussbaum 1988) and collaborated with Sen at the World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki from 1987 to 1989. Indeed, the attraction of Sen’s capability approach is not unrelated to the fact that readers from many different backgrounds can see in it, or project onto it, their own interests and concerns. This recruitment effect can of course lead to fruitful inter-disciplinary research very much in the spirit of Sen’s work. But it can also generate some confusion (and frustration) as researchers from quite different backgrounds bring quite different beliefs about what the capability approach really is - a theory of justice, an account of agency, a non- Welfarist welfare economics, a theory of sustainable development, and so on - and therefore how it should be analysed and developed (cf Robeyns 2005, 193–4). Freedom is thus at the heart of its appeal, but also its difficulties in developing as a convincing coherent account. Coherence and consistency are central virtues of analytical moral philosophy, and so it is not surprising that the capability approach has received a great deal of critical attention from philosophers. For example, some have claimed that it is illiberal because it is not neutral about the nature of the flourishing life (e.g. Sugden 2006); that it is under-theorised (e.g. Pogge 2002); that it is excessively individualist (e.g. Gore 1997); that its focus on freedom is ambiguous (e.g. Nussbaum 2003) or incoherent (e.g. Cohen 1993; Dowding 2006); that its philosophical-economic understanding of agency is too abstract and rationalistic (e.g. Giri 2000; Gasper 2002). Part of my thesis is concerned with outlining my own understanding of the philosophical character of Sen’s capability approach, often to the effect of showing that such criticisms are misplaced if not mistaken. But one particular issue in the philosophical approach to Sen’s writing on the capability approach bears mentioning earlier because it relates to the approach I have taken in this thesis. slighter. While Sen’s work on social choice