Development as Freedom (14 page)

In the same way, a family in contemporary America or Western Europe may find it hard to take part in the life of the community without possessing some specific commodities (such as a telephone, a television or an automobile) that are not necessary for community life in poorer societies. The focus has to be, in this analysis, on the freedoms generated by commodities, rather than on the commodities seen on their own.

I have tried to argue for some time now that for many evaluative purposes, the appropriate “space” is neither that of utilities (as claimed by welfarists), nor that of primary goods (as demanded by Rawls), but that of the substantive freedoms—the capabilities—to choose a life one has reason to value.
³⁸
If the object is to concentrate on the individual’s real opportunity to pursue her objectives (as Rawls explicitly recommends), then account would have to be taken not only of the primary goods the persons respectively hold, but also of the relevant personal characteristics that govern the
conversion
of primary goods into the person’s ability to promote her ends. For example, a person who is disabled may have a larger basket of primary goods and yet have less chance to lead a normal life (or to pursue her objectives) than an able-bodied person with a smaller basket of primary goods. Similarly, an older person or a person more prone to illness can be more disadvantaged in a generally accepted sense even with a larger bundle of primary goods.
³⁹

The concept of “functionings,” which has distinctly Aristotelian roots, reflects the various things a person may value doing or being.
⁴⁰
The valued functionings may vary from elementary ones, such as being adequately nourished and being free from avoidable disease,
⁴¹
to very complex activities or personal states, such as being able to take part in the life of the community and having self-respect.

A person’s “capability” refers to the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve. Capability is thus a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve alternative functioning combinations (or, less formally put, the freedom to achieve various lifestyles). For example, an affluent person who fasts may have the same functioning achievement in terms of eating or nourishment as a destitute person who is forced to starve, but the first person does have a different “capability set” than the second (the first
can
choose to eat well and be well nourished in a way the second cannot).

There can be substantial debates on the particular functionings that should be included in the list of important achievements and the corresponding capabilities.
⁴²
This valuational issue is inescapable in an evaluative exercise of this kind, and one of the main merits of the approach is the need to address these judgmental questions in an explicit way, rather than hiding them in some implicit framework.

This is not the occasion to go much into the technicalities of representation and analysis of functionings and capabilities. The amount or the extent of each functioning enjoyed by a person may be represented by a real number, and when this is done, a person’s actual achievement can be seen as a
functioning vector
. The “capability set” would consist of the alternative functioning vectors that she can choose from.
⁴³
While the combination of a person’s functionings reflects her actual
achievements
, the capability set represents the
freedom
to achieve: the alternative functioning combinations from which this person can choose.
⁴⁴

The evaluative focus of this “capability approach” can be either on the
realized
functionings (what a person is actually able to do) or on the
capability set
of alternatives she has (her real opportunities). The two give different types of information—the former about the things a person does and the latter about the things a person is substantively free to do. Both versions of the capability approach have been used in the literature, and sometimes they have been combined.
⁴⁵

According to a well-established tradition in economics, the real value of a set of options lies in the best use that can be made of them, and—given maximizing behavior and the absence of uncertainty—the use that is
actually
made. The use value of the opportunity, then, lies derivatively on the value of one element of it (to wit, the best option or the actually chosen option).
⁴⁶
In this case, the focusing on a
chosen functioning vector
coincides with concentration on the
capability set
, since the latter is judged, ultimately, by the former.

The freedom reflected in the capability set can be used in other ways as well, since the value of a set need not invariably be identified with the value of the best—or the chosen—element of it. It is possible to attach importance to having opportunities that are
not
taken up. This is a natural direction to go if the
process
through which outcomes are generated has significance of its own.
⁴⁷
Indeed, “choosing” itself can be seen as a valuable functioning, and having an
x
when there is no alternative may be sensibly distinguished from choosing
x
when substantial alternatives exist.
⁴⁸
Fasting is not the same thing as being forced to starve. Having the option of eating makes fasting what it is, to wit, choosing not to eat when one could have eaten.

Individual functionings can lend themselves to easier interpersonal comparison than comparisons of utilities (or happiness, pleasures or desires). Also, many of the relevant functionings—typically the non-mental characteristics—can be seen distinctly from their mental assessment (not subsumed in “mental adjustment”). The variability in the conversion of means into ends (or into freedom to pursue ends) is already reflected in the extents of those achievements and freedoms that may figure in the list of ends. These are advantages in using the capability perspective for evaluation and assessment.

However, interpersonal comparisons of
overall
advantages also require “aggregation” over heterogeneous components. The capability perspective is inescapably pluralist. First, there are different functionings, some more important than others. Second, there is the issue of what weight to attach to substantive freedom (the capability set) vis-à-vis the actual achievement (the chosen functioning vector).
Finally, since it is not claimed that the capability perspective exhausts all relevant concerns for evaluative purposes (we might, for example, attach importance to rules and procedures and not just to freedoms and outcomes), there is the underlying issue of how much weight should be placed on the capabilities, compared with any other relevant consideration.
⁴⁹

Is this plurality an embarrassment for advocacy of the capability perspective for evaluative purposes? Quite the contrary. To insist that there should be only one homogeneous magnitude that we value is to reduce drastically the range of our evaluative reasoning. It is not, for example, to the credit of classical utilitarianism that it values only pleasure, without taking any direct interest in freedom, rights, creativity or actual living conditions. To insist on the mechanical comfort of having just one homogeneous “good thing” would be to deny our humanity as reasoning creatures. It is like seeking to make the life of the chef easier by finding something which—and which
alone
—we all like (such as smoked salmon, or perhaps even french fries), or some one quality which we must all try to maximize (such as the saltiness of the food).

Heterogeneity of factors that influence individual advantage is a pervasive feature of actual evaluation. While we can decide to close our eyes to this issue by simply
assuming
that there is some one homogeneous thing (such as “income” or “utility”) in terms of which everyone’s overall advantage can be judged and interpersonally compared (and that variations of needs, personal circumstances and so on can be assumed away), this does not resolve the problem but only evades it. Preference fulfillment may have some obvious attraction in dealing with one person’s individual needs, but (as was discussed earlier) it does little, on its own, for interpersonal comparisons, central to any social evaluation. Even when each person’s preference is taken to be the ultimate arbiter of the well-being for that person, even when everything other than well-being (such as freedom) is ignored, and even when—to take a very special case—everyone has the
same
demand function or preference map, the comparison of market valuations of commodity bundles (or their relative placement on a shared system-of-indifference map in the commodity space) tells us little about interpersonal comparisons.

In evaluative traditions involving fuller specification, considerable
heterogeneity is explicitly admitted. For example, in Rawlsian analysis primary goods are taken to be constitutively diverse (including “rights, liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and the social basis of self-respect”), and Rawls deals with them through an overall “index” of primary goods holdings.
⁵⁰
While a similar exercise of judging over a space with heterogeneity is involved both in the Rawlsian approach and in the use of functionings, the former is informationally poorer, for reasons discussed already, because of the parametric variation of resources and primary goods vis-à-vis the opportunity to achieve high quality of living.

The problem of valuation is not, however, one of an all-or-nothing kind. Some judgments, with incomplete reach, follow immediately from the specification of a focal space. When some functionings are selected as significant, such a focal space is specified, and the relation of dominance itself leads to a “partial ordering” over the alternative states of affairs. If person
i
has more of a significant functioning than person
j
, and at least as much of all such functionings, then
i
clearly has a higher valued functioning vector than
j
has. This partial ordering can be “extended” by further specifying the possible weights. A unique set of weights will, of course, be
sufficient
to generate a
complete
order, but it is typically not necessary. Given a “range” of weights on which there is agreement (that is, when it is agreed that the weights are to be chosen from a specified range, even without any agreement as to the exact point on that range), there will be a partial ordering based on the intersection of rankings. This partial ordering will get systematically extended as the range is made more and more narrow. Somewhere in the process of narrowing the range—possibly well before the weights are unique—the partial ordering will become complete.
⁵¹

It is of course crucial to ask, in any evaluative exercise of this kind, how the weights are to be selected. This judgmental exercise can be resolved only through reasoned evaluation. For a particular person, who is making his or her own judgments, the selection of weights will require reflection, rather than any interpersonal agreement (or consensus). However, in arriving at an “agreed” range for
social evaluation
(for example, in social studies of poverty), there has to be some kind of a reasoned “consensus” on weights, or at least on a range of weights. This is a “social choice” exercise, and it requires
public discussion and a democratic understanding and acceptance.
⁵²
It is not a special problem that is associated only with the use of the functioning space.

There is an interesting choice here between “technocracy” and “democracy” in the selection of weights, which may be worth discussing a little. A choice procedure that relies on a democratic search for agreement or a consensus can be extremely messy, and many technocrats are sufficiently disgusted by its messiness to pine for some wonderful formula that would simply give us ready-made weights that are “just right.” However, no such magic formula does, of course, exist, since the issue of weighting is one of valuation and judgment, and not one of some impersonal technology.

We are not prevented, by any means, from proposing that some particular formula—rather than any alternative formula—be used for aggregation, but in this inescapably social-choice exercise its status must depend on its acceptability to others. There is nevertheless a hankering after some “obviously correct” formula to which reasonable people cannot object. A good example comes from T. N. Srinivasan’s forceful critique of the capability approach (and its partial use in UNDP’s
Human Development Reports
), where he worries about the “varying importance of different capabilities” and proposes the rejection of this approach in favor of the advantage of “the real-income framework” which “includes an operational metric for weighting commodities—the metric of exchange value.”
⁵³
How convincing is this critique? There is certainly some metric in market valuation, but what does it tell us?

As was already discussed, the “operational metric” of exchange value does not give us interpersonal comparisons of utility levels, since such comparisons cannot be deduced from choice behavior. There has been some confusion on this subject because of misreading the tradition of consumption theory—sensible within its context—of taking utility to be simply the numerical representation of a given person’s choice. That is a useful way to define utility for the analysis of consumption behavior of each person taken separately, but it does not, on its own, offer any procedure whatever for substantive interpersonal comparison. Paul Samuelson’s elementary point that it was “not necessary to make interpersonal comparisons of utility in describing exchange,”
⁵⁴
is the other side of the same coin: nothing
about interpersonal comparison of utility is learned from observing “the metric of exchange value.”