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

102 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
in question taking everything into account (including external restraints as
well as internal limitations). In this interpretation, a violation of negative
freedom must also be — unless compensated by some other factor — a
violation of positive freedom, but not vice versa. This way of seeing
positive freedom is not the one preferred by Isaiah Berlin.
This quote also draws attention to another drawback of defining
capabilities in terms of positive freedom. Violations of negative freedoms
will, according to Sen, always lead to violations of positive freedoms; yet
for Berlin this need not be the case. In a totalitarian state which espouses
a doctrine of positive freedom, in which the state will help the citizens
to ‘liberate their true selves’, a violation of a range of negative freedoms,
such as the freedom of expression or of the freedom to hold property,
will not violate positive freedom; on the contrary, within the parameters
of that doctrine, violations of such negative freedoms may even enhance
the state-aspired positive freedom.
So where does all this terminological exegesis lead us? It has often
been remarked that there are many available definitions of negative
and positive freedom. Berlin’s conceptualisations are canonical, but his
definition of positive freedom is very different from Sen’s. Moreover, as
Charles Taylor (1979, 175) rightly pointed out, the debate on negative and
positive freedoms has been prone to polemical attacks that caricature
the views of both sides. One therefore wonders what is to be gained by
describing capabilities in terms of positive freedoms — at least, if one
is aware of the philosophical background to this term. Perhaps it may
be wiser to look further for an alternative conceptualisation that is less
prone to creating misunderstandings?
Luckily, in other parts of Amartya Sen’s writings we can find the
answer to the question of what kind of freedoms capabilities are (if any
at all). Although Sen’s first descriptions of capabilities were couched
exclusively in terms of positive freedoms, he soon offered an alternative
description in terms of opportunities. 5 In his 1984 Dewey Lectures, Sen
5 In fact, even this is not entirely correct, since in his earlier work and especially in
his work written for economists, Sen did not speak of ‘capabilities’, but rather of
‘capability sets’ and thus also of ‘opportunity sets’ (see section 3.2.1).