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 has been very influential, only a few welfare economists have followed up his reformist agenda for a non-welfarist Welfare Economics (for example Marc Fleurbaey, Erik Schokkaert, and Wiebke Kuklys). 4 Reading Sen as a Philosopher Philosophers have shown interest in Sen’s practical philosophy right from the beginning, but they have not always read him as charitably as they might.2 The Oxford Companion to Philosophy defines the principle of charity in interpretation as holding “that (other things being equal) one's interpretation of another speaker's words should minimize the ascription of false beliefs to that speaker” (Mackie 2005). It seems to me that quite a number of Sen’s critics in academic philosophy have not tried hard enough to set their own views temporarily aside and to understand Sen’s work as far as possible in its own terms. They have moved too quickly to identify his differences with their own views and expectations as errors. Consequently some of the problems they identify with Sen’s account are the products of misinterpretation rather than bone fide problems for its credibility (cf Robeyns 2000). This can result in the premature dismissal of Sen’s substantive claims (e.g. Roemer 1998; Pogge 2002; Dowding 2006; Sugden 2006) or excessively drastic reconstructions (such as by Nussbaum, who rejects much of Sen’s framework as too vague, worrying, or unworkable).3 I think that this unfortunate lapse may be partly explained (though not justified) by Sen’s somewhat unorthodox style of doing philosophy, which may in turn be related to his background in economics and its rather more pragmatic orientation to theoretical work.4 Three aspects of this unorthodox style seem to me particularly relevant to reading Sen as a philosopher. 2 Exceptions to this, and somewhat responsible for the high profile Sen’s capability approach has had in academic philosophy from the outset, include Bernard Williams, a leading British moral philosopher, who provided comments on Sen’s second Tanner Lecture on the capability approach (Williams 1989); Hilary Putnam who has written extensively on Sen’s ‘Smithian economics’ (Putnam 2002; e.g. Putnam 2008); and John Rawls, who taught a course on Social Justice at Harvard University with Amartya Sen (and Kenneth Arrow) in 1968-9, and adapted his concept of primary goods somewhat in the light of Sen’s “forceful” critique (Williams 1989, 168 fn. 8; Rawls 2005, 178–187 particularly 179 fn. 6). This influence can also be attributed to Sen’s early interest in philosophical topics even at the start of his economics career (e.g. Sen 1966; Sen 1967) and the close links he developed with leading Anglo-Saxon philosophers (including, apart from those named above, Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Dworkin, Derek Parfit, Thomas Scanlon, and Robert Nozick). 3 I discuss two such critiques, by Thomas Pogge and Nussbaum, in some detail in chapter 2. 4 This small-p pragmatism is also apparent in Sen’s underlying concern with better- worse relations rather than right-wrong dichotomies in his approach to rationality, ethics, and political philosophy. 5 First, Sen often bypasses traditional philosophical distinctions and coins his own in order to focus on specific aspects relevant to what he wants to say, which is often something different than the standard vocabulary is most useful for. For example, freedom is a complex and ambiguous idea but one influential distinction in the philosophical literature (popularised particularly by Isaiah Berlin) is between the concepts of positive and negative freedom. Yet Sen largely bypasses that terminology and opts instead for a distinction between the “aspects” of opportunity and process in freedom (Sen 2002a, 585–7) which is more apt for the social choice perspective he wants to bring.5 Though it has something in common with Berlin’s distinction it brings a different way of looking at freedom. The philosophical reader has to be aware of the unconventionality of Sen’s terminology in order to avoid attributing positions to him that he does not hold.6 I believe such a misreading accounts, among others, for G.A. Cohen’s accusation that Sen distorts the proper meaning of freedom as individual control in talking of such things as “freedom from malaria” (Cohen 1993; Cohen 1994; cf Kaufman 2006); and Martha Nussbaum’s rejection of Sen’s freedom talk because of her construal of it as negative liberty and her association of that with neo-liberalism (Nussbaum 2003, 44–7), a point I discuss further in chapter 2. The second aspect of Sen’s unorthodox style is the limited and pragmatic use he often makes of the terminology he coins. It often seems intended to further a particular argumentative point by labelling a relevant distinction, rather than to identify viable operative concepts suitable for systematic theoretical analysis in the manner the analytical philosopher is trained to expect. Failing to recognise this aspect of Sen’s style can lead to confusion or frustration in the philosophical reader and to the perception of Sen’s work as unphilosophical and in need of reconstruction (or outright rejection). Consider Sen on commitments, a ‘concept’ that has been taken up by academic philosophers and has even had a special issue of Economics 5 Opportunity freedom is about access to valuable states (i.e. capability), while process freedom is concerned at the systemic level with properties like fairness and at personal level with properties like non-interference (Sen 2002b, 624). 6 And this is not only the case for philosophical terminology. For instance, Sen’s carefully worded endorsement of “maximisation” in his account of rationality has sometimes been misunderstood (e.g. Anderson 2001; Sen 2001, 57–58). Economists often conflate “utility optimisation” with “maximising behaviour” but Sen distinguishes the two. While optimisation requires choosing the best option, maximisation “only requires choosing an alternative that is not judged to be worse than any other” (e.g. Sen 1997a, 746). 6 and Philosophy devoted to it (21(1), 2005). This is the closest Sen came to defining it in his famous Rational Fools paper: Commitment is, of course, closely connected with one’s morals. But moral this question is in a very broad sense, covering a variety of influences from religious to political, from the ill-understood to the well-argued (Sen 1977, 329). As a positive definition of a philosophical concept this is distinctly unsatisfactory. It is vague and ambiguous in exactly the way many philosophical critics of Sen accuse him of being. Yet if one looks instead at how Sen uses the term ‘commitment’ to draw a perspicuous contrast to assumptions of egoism in economic theory it is as precise, clear, and effective as one could wish a philosophical argument to be. If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy; if it does not make you feel personally worse off, but you think it is wrong and you are ready to do something to stop it, it is a case of commitment. I do not wish to claim that the words chosen have any very great merit, but the distinction is, I think, important..... The characteristic of commitment with which I am most concerned here is the fact that it drives a wedge between personal choice and personal welfare, and much of traditional economic theory relies on the identity of the two. (Sen 1977, 326, 329 emphases added) It seems to me that philosophical readers are sometimes distracted from considering what Sen is very clearly saying because they are overly concerned with what exactly his terms mean. In this case a distinction that pretty effectively demolishes a foundational tenet of orthodox utility theory may be misread as proposing a unitary concept of commitment. Without ever attempting to clarify the nature of commitment as a concept, rather than a class of exceptions to (extended) egoism, Sen goes on to show that his distinction does real work, by opening a space for a broader understanding of rational choice that better fits how humans actually behave as well as better recognising human agency (e.g. Sen 2005, 10–12). The third aspect of Sen’s style that needs to be stressed is the philosophically unorthodox way that the ‘concepts’ he identifies relate to each other. Many of these are negative rather than positive. That is, like ‘commitment’, they are meant to show the insufficiency of a particular theoretical perspective rather than the sufficiency of a new operative concept. Yet even Sen’s positive conceptual apparatus seems