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

3. Clarifications
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the happiness approach. 14 Amartya Sen has pointed out repeatedly that
people living at the very bottom of the social ladder (such as ‘exploited
labourers’ or ‘oppressed housewives’) adapt to their situation and come
to suffer less intensely. Another example is the effect of racism. If a
society becomes gradually less tolerant towards cultural minorities and
increasingly accepts racist practices, then cultural minorities might get
used to a racist social climate. Perhaps they will change their behaviour,
in order to avoid contact with openly racist people. By changing their
behaviour and mentally preparing for racist practices, it is possible
that after a while the negative wellbeing effect of racism on minority
groups will be partially wiped out. However, a policy that anticipates
such adaptation processes is morally and politically problematic: racism
should not be tolerated in society, even if it were not to have a significant
impact on the subjective wellbeing of its victims. In order to judge that
racism is not morally permissible and hence that policies should try
to minimize racism, we don’t first need to investigate whether racism
makes its victims less happy: that’s simply beside the point. Even if
the victims of racism acted stoically and didn’t let racism affect their
happiness levels, that wouldn’t make racism any less undesirable.
Another form of mental adaptation which is relevant for the
government is the adjustment response to income changes. Subjective
wellbeing judgements about income have been shown to adapt
asymmetrically to income changes. Income increases go together with
higher aspirations for the future, with only one third of the increase
being reflected by improvements of subjective wellbeing (Frey and
Stutzer 2002). Panel-analysis over a period of ten years shows that we
adapt strongly to an increase in income, but much less so to a drop
in income (Burchardt 2005). Thus, if people change positions in an
income distribution which itself remains unchanged, then aggregate
satisfaction of the population will decrease. The people who move up
the ladder will be more satisfied for a short time, but quickly adapt to
the new situation, whereas people who move downwards experience a
larger drop in satisfaction — and this effect lasts longer as well. Tania
Burchardt (2006) argues that due to similar phenomena of adaptation,
people’s positions in the distribution of income, health and marital
14 Yet the phenomenon of ‘adaptive preferences’ can also potentially create problems
for some capability theories, as we will analyse in section 3.9.