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

118 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
and the ‘capability determinants’ (the social structures, social norms,
institutions, etc.) can all be part of our evaluation — we just need to
keep in mind which parts of what we evaluate are the means, which
are the ends and why we evaluate a certain dimension. In the case of
the evaluation of the means, one important reason could be to see how
those means have changed over time, as well as whether there is any
scope to improve the contribution that those particular means can make
to the increase of capability sets.
capability approach?
The capability approach is closely related to notions of wellbeing and
the quality of life. Sometimes it is assumed that the capability approach
is a theory of wellbeing, which cannot be quite right since the capability
approach can be used for many purposes, such as the construction of
a theory of justice, poverty measurement or policy evaluation. Yet on
the other hand, with its proposition that interpersonal comparisons
be made in terms of functionings and/or capabilities, the capability
approach is clearly also involved in offering us an account of wellbeing
(Sen 1984c, 1985c, 2009a; Alkire 2016; Qizilbash 2013). But what, exactly,
is the nature of the account of wellbeing in the capability approach?
I will argue in this chapter that the more precise formulation is that
the capability approach entails several slightly different accounts
of wellbeing, which can be used for different purposes. Different
capability theories have different purposes (module B1) and different
meta-theoretical commitments (module B7), and the choices made in
those modules will require different accounts of wellbeing for such
capability theories.
When one looks at the accounts of wellbeing in the various disciplines
in which the notion of ‘wellbeing’ plays a central role, one quickly
notices that there are a range of quite different accounts proposed
in different paradigms or disciplines, and that there is very limited
discussion between those fields (Gasper 2010). In particular, there is
surprisingly little interaction between the very large philosophical
literature on wellbeing (Crisp 2013; Fletcher 2015) and the (theoretical
and empirical) literature in psychology and economics, or the uses of
the term wellbeing in particular fields, such as development studies