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

104 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
Is Taylor’s opportunity concept of freedom the kind of freedom we
are searching for in our attempt to understand the nature of capabilities?
His concept comes close, but it is narrower than the conception of
freedom contained in the idea of capabilities. For Taylor, only external
obstacles count in the definition of negative freedom (Taylor 1979,
176, 193; Kukathas 2007, 688). He holds that the acknowledgement of
internal obstacles to action, including the action to choose between
different opportunities, merges an element of the exercise concept of
freedom into the opportunity concept. The notion of opportunity in
Taylor’s concept of opportunity freedom thus resembles a formal notion
of opportunity more closely than a substantive notion.
Here’s an example to illustrate the difference between Taylor’s
opportunity concept of freedom and the notion of ‘capabilities’. If, in
a patriarchal community, men have all the power, and in a verbally
aggressive manner they teach girls and remind women that their place
is inside the house, then surely these women do not have the same
opportunity freedom to find employment in the nearest city where
women from more liberal communities are holding jobs. In formal
terms, the women from both communities may be able to work outside
the home since there are jobs available to women in the city, they are
able-bodied and are able to commute to the city. Yet the women from the
patriarchal community would face much bigger costs and would need
to gather much more courage, and resist the subtle working of social
norms, before they could effectively access this formal opportunity. Put
in capability terms, we would say that the first group of women has
a much smaller capability to work outside the home than the women
living in less patriarchal communities. If the costs and burdens borne
by the women from strongly patriarchal communities are excessive, we
could even conclude that the capability to work in the city is virtually
nonexistent.
Luckily, more recent debates in political philosophy have further
developed this discussion, in a way that is helpful in answering the
question of how capabilities should be understood. Philip Pettit (2003)
has argued that the philosophical debate on social freedom could
benefit from being clear on the distinction between option-freedom
and agency-freedom. While option-freedom is a property of options,