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

114 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
Sen (1992a, xi) has argued, interpersonal variations should be of central
importance to inequality analysis:
Investigations of equality — theoretical as well as practical — that
proceed with the assumption of antecedent uniformity (including the
presumption that ‘all men are created equal’) thus miss out on a major
aspect of the problem. Human diversity is no secondary complication (to
be ignored, or to be introduced ‘later on’); it is a fundamental aspect of
our interest in equality.
Indeed, if human beings were not diverse, then inequality in one space,
say income, would more or less be identical with inequality in another
space, like capabilities. The entire question of what the appropriate
evaluative space should be would become obsolete if there weren’t
any interpersonal difference in the mapping of outcomes in one space
onto another. If people were all the same and had the same needs and
abilities, then the capability approach would lose much of its force
and significance, since resources would be excellent proxies for our
wellbeing and wellbeing freedom. But as it happens, human beings are
very diverse.
However, we also need to acknowledge that there is significant
scholarly dispute about the question of which dimensions and
parameters of human diversity are salient, and which are not. Scholars
embrace very different accounts of human diversity, which is why
we have module B3 in the capability approach. One’s account of
human diversity can often be traced back to the ontological accounts
one accepts of diversity-related factors, as well as the role of groups
in explanatory accounts. An example of the former is the account of
gender and race that one embraces. If one holds a theory of gender and
race that regards these as rather superficial phenomena that do not
have an important impact on people’s behaviour and opportunities in
life, then the attention given to diversity in a capability application or
capability theory will be rather minimal. This is logically consistent with
the structure of capability theories (as laid out in chapter 2), but it is also
a view that has not been widely embraced in the capability literature.
Instead, the capability approach attracts scholars who endorse accounts
of dimensions of gender, race, and other dimensions of human diversity
that are much richer. Presumably, these scholars recognise the ways in
which the capability approach can account for human diversity, hence