Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

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3. Clarifications 99 of the capability approach (e.g. Cohen 1993; Gasper and Van Staveren 2003; Hill 2003; Okin 2003, 291–92). Let us therefore clarify and analyse the conceptualisation of capabilities as freedom by answering three questions. First, capabilities have been described as positive freedoms, but how should we understand that notion, and is that the best way to describe what kind of freedoms capabilities are? (Section 3.3.1) Secondly, is there a better conceptualisation of freedom that captures what capabilities are? (Section 3.3.2) Thirdly, if it is the case that capabilities can coherently be conceptualised as freedoms, are capabilities then best understood as freedoms, or is it better to avoid that terminology? (Section 3.3.3). Sen has often used the distinction between positive and negative freedoms, thereby describing capabilities as positive freedoms. For example, Sen (1984b, 315) has stated that he is trying “to outline a characterization of positive freedoms in the form of capabilities of persons”. 3 In some discourses, especially in the social sciences, the term ‘positive freedoms’ is used to refer to access to certain valuable goods, such as the freedom to affordable high quality health care or education. Positive freedoms are contrasted with negative freedoms, which refer to the absence of interference by others, such as the freedom to own a gun. 4 Yet these are by no means standard understandings of positive and negative freedom. In making the claim that capabilities are positive freedoms, Sen often approvingly refers to Isaiah Berlin’s canonical distinction between positive and negative freedom, but unfortunately doesn’t explain in detail how we should read Berlin. This is potentially confusing, since Berlin’s use of the term ‘positive freedom’ is far from crystal clear. 3 Other statements equating capabilities with positive freedoms can be found in Sen (1982, 6, 38–39; 1984c, 78, 86; 1985c, 201; 2008, 18 among other places). In his 1979 Tanner lecture in which Sen coined the term ‘capability’, he did not refer to freedoms, but did use other terms such as ‘ability’ and ‘power’. 4 According to Sen (2009c, 282) this is the understanding of positive and negative freedom in welfare economics.
100 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice Let us start from the clearest concept in Berlin — his notion of negative freedom — which Berlin (1969, 122) defines as follows: “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity”. The opposite of having negative freedom is being coerced — the deliberate interference of other persons in an area of my life in which I could, without the interference, act freely. Negative freedom thus corresponds to freedom as non-interference, and Berlin speaks approvingly of this kind of freedom: “[…] non-interference, which is the opposite of coercion, is good as such, although it is not the only good. This is the ‘negative’ conception of liberty in its classical form” (1969, 128). On positive freedom, there is much less clarity in Berlin’s work. Berlin first introduces positive freedom as the freedom to be one’s own master: I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be a somebody, not nobody, a doer — deciding, not being decided for; self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. (Berlin 1969, 131) Berlin argues that the metaphor of self-mastery historically developed into the idea that a person has two selves, a dominant self which is identified with reason and a ‘higher nature’, and a ‘heteronomous self’ which follows desires and passions and needs to be disciplined. Berlin continues that the first self, the ‘real self’, may become seen as wider than the individual, as a social whole of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’ single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members’ achieves its own, and therefore their ‘higher freedom’. (Berlin 1969, 132) Put differently, men are “coerced in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or
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Contents Acknowledgements 3 1. Intr
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3. Clarifications 89 3.1 Introducti
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4.7 What about power and political
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Acknowledgements In 1998, when I st
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Acknowledgements 5 the capability a
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1. Introduction Many people who en
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1. Introduction 9 capability approa
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1. Introduction 11 Moreover, it bri
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1. Introduction 13 Countries Outsi
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1. Introduction 15 capabilities of
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1. Introduction 17 their collaborat
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1. Introduction 19 This book has a
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Index abortion 15, 145 advantage 25
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Index 253 Fleurbaey, Marc 154 flour
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Index 255 political institutions 14
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