Capabilities
The capabilities approach is arguably the most influential, recent innovation in debates about justice and poverty. Does it offer a convincing basis for an ecosocial understanding of poverty? This chapter explores three subjects – philosophy, social policy and environmentalism – in response to that question. My view is that for all its virtues, the capabilities approach contains serious flaws. First, it is not clear that it offers a secure enough grounding for ecosocial principles; and second, it has been too dismissive of the material-distributive paradigm (with specific reference to resources such as income and wealth), with all the attendant dangers we warned against in the Introduction earlier. That said, since the capabilities approach represents a broad church of opinion, offering a variety of perspectives on and responses to the ‘distributive paradigm’, neither should we reject it entirely.
To this end, I adapt the concept of a meta-capability that will lead us into the discussion of resources that follows, in Chapter Two.
Philosophy
Outline
The central claim of the capabilities approach is that there is no straightforward metric of justice and wellbeing (Nussbaum, 2006, 2011; Sen, 2009; Anderson, 2010, pp 87-95). Those who focus on an ‘equality of welfare’ or an ‘equality of resources’ are being insufficiently comprehensive. The basic argument is this.
We can know approximately what it means to be well and to fare well. All humans (indeed, all living creatures) require adequate levels of nourishment, shelter, health, communal interaction, and so forth. But the capabilities required to realise these basic ‘functionings’ are highly diverse. Capabilities must imply some notion of substantive freedoms and opportunities, but what these mean will vary from context to context. The capabilities that you need in order to achieve a decent life will not be entirely identical to those in other geographical places and historical eras.
The originators of the capabilities approach part company at this point. Sen (2009, pp 231-47; see also Levine and Rizvi, 2005) believes that the best we can do is to mark out a ‘space of capabilities’ that equips people with the freedoms they need to live their lives as best they can. By contrast, Nussbaum (2006, pp 392-401) offers a list of capabilities that she holds to be universally applicable:
• live a life of normal length;
• possess bodily health and integrity;
• cultivate and express imagination and thought;
• form emotional attachments;
• form and pursue a conception of the good and engage in critical reflection about one’s life;
• interact and be respected by others;
• relate to the natural environment and other species;
• play and enjoy;
• have some control over one’s political and material circumstances.
Peoples and communities must be empowered to shape and control the social, political, cultural and economic institutions that translate these abstractions into concrete social realities. Therefore, both Sen and Nussbaum reject any attempt to be over-prescriptive and top-down.
The implications of the capabilities approach are wide-ranging and profound.
For instance, recent research has shown that affluence does not necessarily translate into wellbeing (Offer, 2006). You may have a higher income this year, but you are not necessarily better off in other, non-monetary terms than you were last year. Such findings chime with the view of the capabilities approach that the characteristics of wellbeing are highly diverse (Massey, 2005). As such, income is only one of a range of relevant indicators. The value of £1,000 to a person with a disability will not be equivalent to its value for a non-disabled person, since the former will typically have to spend more of that £1,000 on basic living costs (Burchardt, 2004, pp 739-44; Terzi, 2010). We therefore need not a single metric but a much wider range of indicators that take into account the many factors – the personal and social endowments – that enable a life to go well or badly. Since the 1990s, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has published an annual ‘human development’ report that gives figures for literacy, participation in education, gender and racial equality, life expectancy, and so forth.
Yet the implications of this go beyond the methodologies of economists and statisticians; they are also political. For example, the Left has often seen the redistribution of income and wealth as essential to improving social justice. But for the capabilities approach, income and wealth merely enable people to do certain things; whether people are actually able to do them depends on a host of other factors, as in the example of the £1,000 above. Just distributions are only one facet of social justice.
For those interested in understanding and alleviating poverty, the implications are therefore both methodological and political (Grusky and Kanbur, 2005). The capabilities approach agrees – and is in many respects related to – the emphasis on social exclusion that emerged in Europe in the 1980s. It is not enough to offer a snapshot of poverty since poverty is complex and dynamic. It helps to have a poverty line that everyone can understand, yet it is also wise to develop a range of poverty thresholds and indicators that try to capture the multifaceted characteristics of what poverty and exclusion really mean. The politics of reducing poverty, and the social policies needed to make this happen, are much more complex than we
used to think. For instance, unlike generations of Marxists, we cannot imagine that poverty is caused merely by capitalists extracting surplus value from workers through wage exploitation. Workplace relations and contracts may be important but they, by themselves, do not explain why women are typically poorer than men and black people typically poorer than white people. Instead, we need to conceive of a ‘poverty of capabilities’ that encompasses both absolute definitions and relative ones (Burchardt, 2008; see also Townsend, 1993). Poverty is what Sen (2009, pp 254-60) calls ‘capability deprivation’. Ultimately, what poor people are deprived of is the right to live lives of dignity, freedom and respect in which they possess the opportunities to fulfil their potential.
So how should we assess the capabilities approach? How much of it should influence an ecosocial understanding of poverty? There are two critiques I wish to offer here (cf Brighouse and Robeyns, 2010).
First critique
While the capabilities approach is a stimulating ‘broad church’ of perspectives, this can also make it seem fuzzy and indistinct. ‘Sen’s capabilities have never been operationalised satisfactorily’, says Bradshaw (2011, p 94). In particular, although it refers to something as fundamental as ‘beings and doings’, we may worry about the foundations on which the approach is meant to rely.
This, after all, is something that Nussbaum and Sen also appear to worry about. For Nussbaum (2011, pp 70-6), Sen is both too diverse and not diverse enough. She views him as not being diverse enough because, for Sen, freedom is the overarching social good. But, according to Nussbaum, not everything that we should define as good can be included under the heading of ‘freedom’. Some freedoms are more important than others and some freedoms conflict with others.
We have to prioritise freedoms, she argues, and therefore need additional principles and concepts if we are to do so effectively. A simple appeal to ‘freedom’ cannot provide a sufficient framework when what that framework has to do is adjudicate between competing freedoms. Nussbaum acknowledges Sen’s commitment to democratic deliberation, but argues that this then risks being too diverse since conversations must be shaped and directed by formal mechanisms (political institutions, constitutions, legal procedures) if they are to be efficacious. If we allow majority opinion too much power, there is a danger that the capabilities of unpopular minorities may be undermined. Finally, Nussbaum (2011, p 76) argues in favour of political liberalism and against using ‘the idea of capability as a comprehensive theory of the value or quality of life.’
We consider Sen’s response shortly. For now, it is important to appreciate that while at first glance the disagreement between Nussbaum and Sen appears fairly trivial, should we develop a list of capabilities or not? The difference is actually quite substantial because it goes to the heart of what, for decades now, has been a central problem for philosophies and politics of justice.
To what extent is justice a universal principle? Anti-universalists have contended that universalist accounts are too insensitive to social constructions, cultural traditions, contextual meanings and local understandings of how and why people interrelate (Flyvbjerg, 2001) – Kantianism is often the exemplar here (Fitzpatrick, 2008a, Chapter 3). Universalists have replied that without some shared, common denominator, there is no basis for human rights, social progress and communication across cultural-national contexts (Habermas, 2005, pp 104-08, 260-6). Much of the sound and fury that characterised these debates in the 1960s-1980s has abated, with many theorists content to accommodate a spectrum of alternative ways of balancing the universal and the particular. This also seems true of the capabilities approach. The approach, however, risks offering a paradoxical embrace of both excessive universalism and excessive particularism.
For this, essentially, is the accusation which Nussbaum and Sen both level against one another!
Nussbaum’s critique runs as follows. Sen prefers an account of the good that is so comprehensive that it risks eclipsing other, distinct understandings of the good (such as ‘care’). But as well as being too universalist, Sen is also too much of a particularist. Without a cross-contextual set of liberal institutions there is no guarantee that freedom will prevail. Although ‘freedom’ can accommodate diverse models of social and political interaction – in short, there are many different ways of ‘living reasonably’ – for liberals like Nussbaum there must come a point when a community ceases to be free and therefore ceases to be just. Sen does not specify what that point is, and so does not consider what happens when freedom is undermined by those who either reject freedom outright or who subvert it while claiming to support it. In short, Sen gives too much prominence to freedom and to the capacity of communities to respect and institutionalise those freedoms.
He is both too universalist and too particularist. To avoid the possibility of the capabilities approach becoming all things to all communities, Nussbaum offers a list designed to anchor cross-cultural debates about desirable social reforms.
Yet Sen throws a similar accusation back at Nussbaum. For Sen (2006, pp 49-50, 92-3), it is liberalism that is too universalist, leaving liberals deaf to their specific western accent, overestimating their record as champions of tolerance, democracy and progress, while underestimating the extent to which the values of freedom have been advanced by non-western and non-liberal traditions. Western liberalism has enabled the west to claim ownership of, and therefore expropriate, ideals and values that are actually global in origin. We should therefore enter into a dialogue with a multiplicity of global voices rather than reaching prematurely for a transcendentalist universalism that offers closed, limited models of public reasoning. Sen (2009, pp 388-415) advocates ‘open impartiality’ which rejects parochial assumptions. So, in accepting Rawls’ (1999) view that we should seek an overlapping consensus of reasonable doctrines, Nussbaum risks allowing a prescriptive and elitist western liberalism to set the terms of a debate that should be genuinely global.
Therefore, according to Sen, it is Nussbaum’s list of capabilities which is too particularist. It does not offer a sound basis for making cross-contextual judgements because the content and the boundaries of human capabilities should always be open to question, contestation and revision by communities. Even a skeletal list of capabilities risks closing down legitimate debate. In short, liberalism needs to de-westernise itself through a truly global, pluralist ethic rather than a static universal one. Thus it is Nussbaum who risks an excessive particularism, closing the door on a genuine cross-cultural discourse. For Sen, suspicious of those with lists of ‘dos and don’ts’, the capabilities approach should merely offer a tool for ranking different sets. The capabilities approach tell us,
• If you want x, y and z, then do 1
• If you want y, z and x, then do 2
• If you want z, x and y, then do 3
and leaves communities to make decisions about which of these to prefer.
In short, the dispute between Sen and Nussbaum is actually considerable since it concerns fundamental disagreement about the extent to which justice is universal, about the nature of liberalism and so about the role of liberalism in trying to promote justice.
Now perhaps I am overstating the problem here. It may well be that further thinking and discussion will resolve the disagreement between Sen and Nussbaum.
(They each acknowledge this possibility.) Or, even if this does not happen, perhaps it does not matter. Maybe the capabilities approach is simply a wide field of debate that usefully directs us away from simplified accounts of justice.
Perhaps. Yet it may also be that the capabilities approach introduces indeterminacy into debates about justice and, by extension, the injustices of poverty. If both Sen and Nussbaum have a point in their criticism of the other, it may be that each has identified something about the capabilities approach that makes it insufficiently grounded: vague, generic, slippery, indefinite, indistinct and overextended in both scope and ambition. This is not to reject the capabilities approach necessarily, but it may be better to regard it is an adjunct to existing politics rather than something which is radically distinct (see also Daniels, 2010).
This takes me to my second critique.
Second critique
Capabilities theorists demonstrate varying degrees of scepticism towards the idea that the just distribution of material and economic resources is a central component of social justice (see Fitzpatrick, 2008b). To a large extent this involves rejection of Rawls’ emphasis on primary goods, especially the prominence he gives to income and wealth. Rawls, they insist, concentrates too much on what people possess and not enough on what people can substantively achieve. For instance,
Sen and I both argue that Rawls’s theory would be better able to give an account of the relevant social equalities and inequalities if the list of primary goods were formulated as a list of capabilities rather than as a list of things. (Nussbaum, 2006, pp 50-1)
A woman may be as well off as her husband in terms of income and wealth, and yet unable to function well in the workplace, because of burdens of caregiving at home. (Nussbaum, 2006, p 53)
Sen proposes that we should pretty much reject Rawls; Nussbaum argues that we can and should adapt parts of the Rawlsian system (cf Iversen, 2003). The sentiment of the second quote recurs often in the capabilities literature and, in response to it, Pogge (2010, pp 20-1) observes that those who focus on resources do not overlook intrafamily distributions; they merely conceptualise them differently.
But it is the first quote that captures something quite common in the capabilities literature, that is, reference to income and wealth as static ‘things’. As such, some argue that it is better to relocate income and wealth so that they occupy a more marginal place within a wider formulation of capabilities:
If people were fully able to realize their capacities as human beings, the matter of riches and poverty measured in terms if commodities and incomes would become secondary. (Levine and Rizvi, 2005, p 47;
see also Levine, 2004)
Thus, the allegation is that because income and wealth are a ‘means to an end’, and not the end itself, we should not fetishise economic resources, material objects and goods into something more important than the humans who either possess or lack them (Nussbaum, 2003, pp 50-1, 53; 2011, pp 41, 57-8).
Are the capabilities theorists on to something here? Should we displace income and wealth from the central position they have long occupied within a politics of justice? Two arguments suggest that we do not have to be so drastic.
First, Pogge (2010, p 21) proposes that resources-based and capabilities-based accounts both concur about the importance of relational holdings:
...the value of any level of income depends in part on what incomes other participants enjoy and that, partly for this reason, an institutional order may be unjust because the incomes it makes available to some are too low relative to the incomes it makes available to others ... the relative size of incomes should be incorporated into an appropriate resource metric.
Similarly, those committed to the capabilities approach might accept that capabilities are bound up with the relational holdings regarding income and
wealth. In opposition to Levine and Rizvi, it could then be claimed that people would only be fully able to realise their capacities once the basic structure of society (and therefore the just distribution of riches, commodities and incomes) has been established.
This critique is more positive than a second possible response, one made by a capabilities advocate. Bourguignon (2005, p 77) proposes that systems of redistribution and social insurance ‘aimed at reducing inequality or “relative”
income poverty’ are not enough to eradicate social and economic hindrances.
Instead, the ‘income poverty paradigm’ should give way to a focus on endowments, or the multiple assets, attributes and opportunities that characterise individuals in their social environments. However, since endowment redistribution is not easy, equalising the distribution of income and wealth is an approximate way of ensuring that assets and endowments are distributed more equitably. Bourguignon (2005) therefore suggests that the poverty paradigm be extended and made complementary with the endowment paradigm (cf Fitzpatrick, 2011a).
Although it still begrudges income, wealth and the poverty paradigm as a
‘second-best’ approach, Bourguignon’s suggestion at least establishes some clear water between those (such as Levine and Rizvi) who are quite dismissive of the paradigm of income poverty, material resources and distributive justice.
If there is a risk of fetishising income and wealth (of allowing them to occupy the place that should be reserved for human attributes), there is also a risk of reifying them (of making them appear less human than they really are). This is arguably the mistake that those who characterise income and wealth as ‘things’ make (for a longer analysis see Fitzpatrick, 2008b). Sen et al cite no evidence that Rawls objectified income and wealth. But, whether he thought in such terms or not, capabilities theorists then risk adopting this caricature as their own. Income and wealth become fixed in their arguments either as objects (notes, coins or numbers in an account) or as a rigid tool of statisticians and economists. Yet income and wealth are not ‘things’, as Pogge observes – they are social relations, symbols of, and weapons deployed within, structured systems of social class power that shape not only external endowments (opportunities and liberties) but also our internal sense of worth in relation to others.
It is the displacement of income and wealth (my second critique) that perhaps feeds the indeterminacy of the capabilities approach (my first critique). In the decades since Sen gave his 1980 Tanner Lectures, ‘capital’ and ‘class’ have, if anything, become more important than they were during the heyday of state welfare in the 1950s and 1960s, when Rawls and other resourcists were developing their ideas. Free market capitalism has become virulent and class inequalities have generally deepened. Yet ‘capitalism’ and ‘class’ are rarely to be found in the indexes of the key texts of the capabilities approach.
Perhaps they just haven’t got around to it yet. Hick (2012, p 304) observes that, ‘a capability assessment should provide information for such a critique to be constructed.’ Hick repeatedly distinguishes means (resources) from ends (capabilities), saying that the latter has priority over the former (2012, p 301, cf
p 304). But capitalism is not only about outcomes; it is a system in which ends
p 304). But capitalism is not only about outcomes; it is a system in which ends