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

130 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
How about the worries related to empirical research and policy
making? The first worry at this level is raised by processes of mental
adaptation and social comparisons. Our satisfaction is to some extent
influenced by mental adaptation issues that emerge from comparisons
with the situations of others. This can have problematic implications for
public policies aiming at the highest happiness for the greatest number.
Take the mental adaptation processes first. How do these emerge? First
of all, there can be shocks in our lives that have a major effect on our
wellbeing, such as immobility after an accident. People confronted with
a major setback in health and mobility through such an impairment
will first experience a strong deterioration of their subjective wellbeing,
but after a while this effect will weaken. Obviously, this adaptation to
circumstances is good, since a disabled person will not remain deeply
unhappy for the rest of her life due to her limited abilities to move around
without pain. However, the question is what this implies for policy. A
utilitarian will say that the government has to limit itself to creating
provisions such that a disabled person can return to an acceptable
level of life satisfaction, taking into account the corresponding welfare
costs for others. 13 A utilitarian would even say that there is no reason
to invest in prevention if this is more expensive than rehabilitation. But
one could also argue that a cost-sensitive policy has to try to reach an
acceptable level of functioning for a disabled person, even if this makes
little difference to her subjective judgement about her wellbeing after
adapting to the accident. Subjective indicators focus automatically on
the first goal, but this may imply that the quality aspects that relate to
the things a person still can do after the accident remain out of sight.
Secondly, people can adapt to an objective disadvantage that is not
caused by an external shock, but that shows a more stable pattern. This is
the problem of ‘adaptive preferences’, which is particularly relevant for
13 A more fine-grained analysis than that presented in this section would need to
make the distinction between act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism, and ask
whether both are vulnerable to these critiques to the same extent. I am assuming
here that the critiques apply to both types of utilitarianism to such a degree that it
leads to worrying consequences.