Development as Freedom (11 page)

There are a number of interesting issues of practical reason in this simple example, but the point I want to emphasize here is that the differences in the principles involved relate to the particular information that is taken to be decisive. If all the three facts are known, the decision rests on which information is given the most weight. The principles thus can best be seen in terms of their respective “informational bases.” Dinu’s income-egalitarian case focuses on income-poverty; Bishanno’s classical utilitarian case concentrates on the metric of pleasure and happiness; Rogini’s quality-of-life case centers on the kinds of life the three respectively can lead. The first two arguments are among the most discussed and most used in the economic and ethical literatures. I shall present some arguments for the third. But for the moment my intention is very modest: only to illustrate the critical importance of the informational bases of competing principles.

In the discussion that follows, I comment on both (1) the general question of the importance of the informational base for evaluative judgments and (2) the particular issues of the adequacy of the
respective informational bases of some standard theories of social ethics and justice, in particular utilitarianism, libertarianism and Rawlsian theory of justice. While there is clearly much to be learned from the way the informational issue is dealt with in these major approaches in political philosophy, it is also argued that each of the informational bases respectively used—explicitly or implicity—by utilitarianism, libertarianism and Rawlsian justice has serious flaws, if substantive individual freedoms are taken to be important. This diagnosis motivates the discussion of an alternative approach to evaluation that focuses directly on freedom, seen in the form of individual capabilities to do things that a person has reason to value.

It is this last, constructive part of the analysis that is extensively utilized in the rest of the book. If the reader is not much interested in the critiques of other approaches (and the respective advantages and difficulties of utilitarianism, libertarianism or Rawlsian justice), there would be no particular problem in skipping these critical discussions and proceeding directly to the latter part of the chapter.

Each evaluative approach can, to a great extent, be characterized by its informational basis: the information that is needed for making judgments using that approach and—no less important—the information that is “excluded” from a direct evaluative role in that approach.
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Informational
exclusions
are important constituents of an evaluative approach. The excluded information is not permitted to have any direct influence on evaluative judgments, and while this is usually done in an implicit way, the character of the approach may be strongly influenced by insensitivity to the excluded information.

For example, utilitarian principles rest ultimately on utilities only, and even though much instrumental account may be taken of incentives, it is utility information that is seen, eventually, as the only proper basis for evaluation of states of affairs, or for the assessment of actions or rules. In utilitarianism’s classical form, as developed particularly by Jeremy Bentham, utility is defined as pleasure, or happiness, or satisfaction, and everything thus turns on these mental achievements.
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Such potentially momentous matters as individual freedom, the fulfillment or violation of recognized rights, aspects of quality of life not adequately reflected in the statistics of pleasure,
cannot directly swing a normative evaluation in this utilitarian structure. They can have an indirect role only
through
their effects on utility numbers (that is, only to the extent that they may have an impact on mental satisfaction, pleasure or happiness). Furthermore, the aggregative framework of utilitarianism has no interest in—or sensitivity to—the actual
distribution
of utilities, since the concentration is entirely on the
total
utility of everyone taken together. All this produces a very limited informational base, and this pervasive insensitivity is a significant limitation of utilitarian ethics.
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In modern forms of utilitarianism, the content of “utility” is often seen differently: not as pleasure, satisfaction or happiness, but as the fulfillment of desire, or as some kind of representation of a person’s choice behavior.
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I shall consider these distinctions presently, but it is not hard to see that this redefinition of utility does not in itself eliminate the indifference to freedoms, rights and liberties that is a characteristic feature of utilitarianism in general.

Turning now to libertarianism, it has, in contrast with utilitarian theory, no direct interest either in happiness or in desire fulfillment, and its informational base consists entirely of liberties and rights of various kinds. Even without going into the exact formulas that are used by utilitarianism or by libertarianism respectively to characterize justice, it is clear from the mere contrast of their informational bases that they must take very different—and typically incompatible—views of justice.

In fact, the real “bite” of a theory of justice can, to a great extent, be understood from its informational base: what information is—or is not—taken to be directly relevant.
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For example, classical utilitarianism tries to make use of the information of different persons’ respective happiness or pleasures (seen in a comparative framework), whereas libertarianism demands compliance with certain rules of liberty and propriety, assessing the situation through information on this compliance. They go in different directions, largely driven by what information they respectively take as being central to judging the justice or acceptability of different social scenarios. The informational basis of normative theories in general, and of theories of justice in particular, is of decisive significance, and can be the crucial point of focus in many debates on practical policies (as will be seen in arguments to be taken up later).

In the next few pages, the informational bases of some distinguished
approaches to justice will be examined, beginning with utilitarianism. The merits and limitations of each approach can, to a great extent, be understood by examining the reach and limits of its informational base. On the basis of the problems encountered in the different approaches that are commonly used in the context of evaluation and policy making, an alternative approach to justice will be briefly outlined. It concentrates on the informational base of individual freedoms (not utilities), but incorporates sensitivity to consequences which, I would argue, is an appreciable asset of the utilitarian perspective. I shall examine this “capability approach” to justice more fully later on in the present chapter and in the next one.

The informational base of standard utilitarianism is the utility sum total in the states of affairs. In the classical, Benthamite form of utilitarianism, the “utility” of a person stands for some measure of his or her pleasure or happiness. The idea is to pay attention to each person’s well-being, and in particular to see well-being as essentially a mental characteristic, viz., the pleasure or happiness generated. Interpersonal comparisons of happiness cannot, of course, be done very precisely, nor through standard scientific methods.
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Nevertheless, most of us do not find it absurd (or “meaningless”) to identify some people as being decidedly less happy and more miserable than others.

Utilitarianism has been the dominant ethical theory—and, inter alia, the most influential theory of justice—for much over a century. The traditional economics of welfare and of public policy was for a very long time dominated by this approach, initiated in its modern form by Jeremy Bentham, and pursued by such economists as John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons, Henry Sidgwick, Francis Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall and A. C. Pigou.
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The requirements of utilitarian evaluation can be split into three distinct components. The first component is “consequentialism” (not a prepossessing word), and it stands for the claim that all choices (of actions, rules, institutions, and so on) must be judged by their consequences, that is, by the results they generate. This focus on the consequent state of affairs denies particularly the tendency of some normative theories to regard some principles to be right
irrespective
of their results. In fact, it goes further than demanding only consequence-sensitivity, since it rules out that anything other than consequences can ultimately matter. How much of a restriction is imposed by consequentialism has to be judged further, but it is worth mentioning here that this must partly depend on what is or is not included in the list of consequences (for example, whether an action performed can be seen as one of the “consequences” of that action, which—in an obvious sense—it clearly is).

The second component of utilitarianism is “welfarism,” which restricts the judgments of state of affairs to the utilities in the respective states (paying no direct attention to such things as the fulfillment or violation of rights, duties, and so on). When welfarism is combined with consequentialism, we get the requirement that every choice must be judged by the respective utilities it generates. For example, any action is judged by the consequent state of affairs (because of consequentialism), and the consequent state of affairs is judged by utilities in that state (because of welfarism).

The third component is “sum-ranking,” which requires that the utilities of different people be simply summed together to get their aggregate merit, without paying attention to the distribution of that total over the individuals (that is, the utility sum is to be maximized irrespective of the extent of inequality in the distribution of utilities). The three components together yield the classic utilitarian formula of judging every choice by the sum total of utilities generated through that choice.
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In this utilitarian view,
injustice
consists in aggregate loss of utility compared with what could have been achieved. An unjust society, in this view, is one in which people are significantly less happy, taken together, than they need be. The concentration on happiness or pleasure has been removed in some modern forms of utilitarianism. In one variation, utility is defined as desire fulfillment. In this view, what is relevant is the strength of the desire that is being fulfilled, and not the intensity of the happiness that is generated.

Since neither happiness nor desire is very easy to measure, utility is often defined in modern economic analysis as some numerical representation of a person’s observable
choices
. There are some technical issues in representability, which need not detain us here. The basic formula is this: if a person would choose an alternative
x
over
another,
y
, then and only then that person has more utility from
x
than from
y
. The “scaling” of utility has to follow this rule, among others, and in this framework it is not substantively different to affirm that a person has more utility from
x
than from
y
than to say that she would choose
x
given the choice between the two.
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The procedure of choice-based accounting has some general merits as well as demerits. In the context of utilitarian calculus, its major demerit is that it does not lead immediately to any way of making interpersonal comparisons, since it concentrates on each individual’s choice seen separately. This is obviously inadequate for utilitarianism, since it cannot accommodate sum-ranking, which does require interpersonal comparability. As a matter of fact, the choice-based view of utility has been used mainly in the context of approaches that invoke welfarism and consequentialism only. It is a kind of utility-based approach without being utilitarianism proper.

While the merits of the utilitarian approach can be subjected to some debate, it does make insightful points, in particular:

To illustrate the relevance of results, consider the fact that many social arrangements are advocated because of the attractions of their constitutive features, without any note being taken of their consequential outcomes. Take property rights. Some have found it to be constitutive of individual independence and have gone on to ask that no restriction be placed on the ownership, inheritance and use of property, rejecting even the idea of taxing property or income. Others,
on the opposite side of the political divide, have been repelled by the idea of inequalities of ownership—some having so much while others have so little—and they have gone on to demand the abolition of private property.

One can indeed entertain different views on the intrinsic attractions or repulsive features of private property. The consequentialist approach suggests that we must not be swayed only by these features, and must examine the consequences of having—or not having—property rights. Indeed, the more influential defenses of private property tend to come from pointers to its positive consequences. It is pointed out that private property has proved to be, in terms of results, quite a powerful engine of economic expansion and general prosperity. In the consequentialist perspective that fact must occupy a central position in assessing the merits of private property. On the other side, once again in terms of results, there is also much evidence to suggest that unconstrained use of private property—without restrictions and taxes—can contribute to entrenched poverty and make it difficult to have social support for those who fall behind for reasons beyond their control (including disability, age, illness and economic and social misfortune). It can also be defective in ensuring environmental preservation, and in the development of social infrastructure.
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