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

4. Critiques and Debates
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live their lives and about their relation to society. In this view, society is
built up from individuals only, and hence is nothing more than the sum
of individuals and their properties. Similarly, explanatory individualism
is the doctrine that all social phenomena can in principle be explained
in terms of individuals and their properties.
The crucial issue here is that a commitment to normative
individualism is not incompatible with an ontology that recognises
the connections between people, their social relations, and their social
embedment. Similarly, a social policy focussing on and targeting certain
groups or communities can be perfectly compatible with normative
individualism.
As I argued in section 2.6.8, the capability approach embraces
normative individualism — and this is, for reasons given there, a
desirable property. However, it also follows from the discussion on the
importance of structural constraints (section 2.7.5) that the capability
approach does not rely on ontological individualism.
Clearly, scholars have divergent (implicit) social theories, and
hence some attach more importance to social structures than others do.
Nevertheless, I fail to see how the capability approach can be understood
to be methodologically or ontologically individualistic, especially since
Sen himself has analysed some processes that are profoundly collective,
such as his analysis of households as sites of cooperative conflict (1990a).
In later work too, he acknowledged persons as socially embedded, as
the following quote from his joint work illustrates:
The [capability] approach used in this study is much concerned with the
opportunities that people have to improve the quality of their lives. It
is essentially a ‘people-centered’ approach, which puts human agency
(rather than organizations such as markets or governments) at the
centre of the stage. The crucial role of social opportunities is to expand
the realm of human agency and freedom, both as an end in itself and
as a means of further expansion of freedom. The word ‘social’ in the
expression ‘social opportunity’ […] is a useful reminder not to view
individuals and their opportunities in isolated terms. The options that a
person has depend greatly on relations with others and on what the state
and other institutions do. We shall be particularly concerned with those
opportunities that are strongly influenced by social circumstances and
public policy […]. (Drèze and Sen 2002: 6)