Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
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3. Clarifications<br />
139<br />
work. She underst<strong>and</strong>s adaptive preferences as the preferences of<br />
people who do not want to have items of her list of capabilities, whereby<br />
these preferences are deformed due to injustices, oppression, ignorance<br />
<strong>and</strong> unreflective habit (Nussbaum 2000, 114).<br />
What questions do adaptive preferences raise for the capability<br />
approach? At the very minimum, they raise the following questions:<br />
first, why would adaptive preferences pose a problem for capability<br />
theories? Second, do we have any evidence about the prevalence of<br />
adaptive preferences? And third, how can capability scholars deal with<br />
adaptive preferences in their capability theories <strong>and</strong> applications?<br />
Let us start with the first of these questions: why would adaptive<br />
preferences pose a problem for capability theories? <strong>The</strong>re are at least<br />
two reasons. <strong>The</strong> first lies in module B2, the selection of dimensions. If<br />
that selection is done in a participatory or democratic way, then it may<br />
be vulnerable to adaptive preferences. A group that is systematically<br />
socialised to have low aspirations <strong>and</strong> ambitions will perhaps not put<br />
certain capabilities on its list, thereby telling themselves that they are<br />
unachievable, whereas objectively speaking they are achievable, albeit<br />
perhaps only after some social changes have taken place. <strong>The</strong> second<br />
reason is that a person with adaptive preferences may objectively have<br />
access to a certain capability, but may believe that either this capability<br />
is not available to her, or else that she should not choose it, <strong>and</strong> hence<br />
she may pick from her capabilities set a suboptimal combination of<br />
functionings. If we then assume that this person (or group) has nonadaptive<br />
preferences, then we will wrongly interpret the choice not<br />
to exercise certain capabilities as a matter of personal agency, which a<br />
capability theory that focusses on capabilities rather than functionings,<br />
should respect. <strong>The</strong> capability approach by default regards adults as<br />
agents rather than patients, but this may be problematic in the case of<br />
adaptive preferences.<br />
So we can conclude that adaptive preferences can pose a problem for<br />
capability theories in which the choice of dimensions is made democratic,<br />
or in which we focus on capabilities rather than functionings. But a critic<br />
may raise the question: do we have any evidence about the prevalence<br />
of adaptive preferences? Is this not a theoretical problem invented by<br />
philosophers who like complex puzzles, or by western scholars who<br />
pity the lives of poor people in the Global South?