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

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3. Clarifications 137 brings to their lives. The capability approach can capture this — taking on a difficult and challenging project such as writing a PhD dissertation can plausibly be conceptualised as a general functioning (consisting of a set of more specific functionings) that we may want to include in our capability analyses, including in our capabilitarian theories of wellbeing for public policies. I would thus defend the position that various roles for happiness are potentially possible within capability theories, and that it depends on the exact purpose and scope of the capability theory or application, as well as the aim that wellbeing plays in that capability theory, what the best role (if any) for both the affective and cognitive aspects of happiness would be. preferences As we saw in the previous section, a widely-voiced reason offered for rejecting the happiness approach as an account of wellbeing is the phenomenon of adaptive preferences, which has been widely discussed in the literature (e.g. Elster 1983; Sen 1985c, 3, 1992a; Nussbaum 2000; Teschl and Comim 2005; Burchardt 2009; Khader 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013; Conradie and Robeyns 2013). Phenomena of mental adaption are a problem if we take happiness or desire-satisfaction to be our account of wellbeing. Yet we also concluded in section 3.7.3 that the capability approach sometimes boils down to a desire-fulfilment account of wellbeing. Hence we need to ask: how do processes of adaptation affect the desire-fulfilment view of wellbeing, and what are the implications for the capability approach? In the most general terms, preferences formation or adaptation is the phenomenon whereby the subjective assessment of one’s wellbeing is out of line with the objective situation. Two persons who find themselves in the same objective situation will have a very different subjective assessment, because one is happy with small amounts of ‘objective goods’, whereas the other is much more demanding. In the capability literature, the general concern is with deprived persons who, over time, adapt to their objectively poor circumstances, and report a level of subjective wellbeing which is higher than the objective circumstances warrant.
138 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The idea of adaptation can take different forms. Jon Elster (1983) referred to one particular type of adaptation, in which being unable to fulfil a preference or realise an aspiration leads one to reject that preference or aspiration. This phenomenon is known as ‘sour grapes’: the fox who cannot pick the grapes, because they are hanging too high for him, starts telling himself that they are sour anyway, and no longer desires to eat them. On Elster’s account, adaptation occurs at a non-conscious level, as a reaction to the painful process of cognitive dissonance that a person who can’t fulfil her unreachable desires or aspirations feels. Elster’s notion of adaptive preferences only refers to a process, and makes no reference to an objective notion of wellbeing. These psychological aspects of adaptation are echoed in Sen’s reference to this phenomenon, when he writes that “considerations of ‘feasibility’ and of ‘practical possibility’ enter into what we dare to desire and what we are pained not to get” (Sen 1985a, 15). Adaptive preferences are a reason for Sen to reject a focus on mental metrics, such as utility or happiness, as the metric of wellbeing. After all, someone who is in an objectively dire situation may have adapted to that situation and learnt to be pleased with little. As Sen (1985c, 21) puts it, “A person who is ill-fed, undernourished, unsheltered and ill can still be high up in the scale of happiness or desire-fulfilment if he or she has learned to have ‘realistic’ desires and to take pleasure in small mercies”. Serene Khader (2011) has argued that not all cases that we tend to consider as cases of adaptive preferences fit Elster’s conceptualisation. Khader believes that an account of adaptive preferences must make reference to an objective notion of flourishing, even if that notion remains vague and only focusses on basic flourishing (since there is more intercultural agreement on what basic flourishing entails). She develops the following definition: An adaptive preference is a preference that (1) is inconsistent with a person’s basic flourishing, (2) was formed under conditions nonconducive to her basic flourishing, and (3) that we do not think a person would have formed under conditions conductive to basic flourishing. (Khader 2011, 51) A similarly perfectionist, but much less systematically developed account of adaptive preferences can be found in Martha Nussbaum’s
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Contents Acknowledgements 3 1. Intr
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3. Clarifications 89 3.1 Introducti
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4.7 What about power and political
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Acknowledgements In 1998, when I st
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Acknowledgements 5 the capability a
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1. Introduction Many people who en
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1. Introduction 9 capability approa
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1. Introduction 11 Moreover, it bri
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1. Introduction 13 Countries Outsi
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