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

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4. Critiques and Debates 185 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)
186 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice Of course, the critique is not only (and also not primarily) about Sen’s work, but about the capability approach in general, or about capability theories. But the work done by other scholars similarly doesn’t meet the criteria for being plausibly considered to be methodologically or ontologically individualistic. In general, we can say that the capability approach acknowledges some non-individual structures, and for the various more specific capability theories, the degree to which they move away from methodological or ontological individualism depends on the choices made in modules B and C. But whatever those choices are, there are already some features in module A that prevent capability theories from being methodologically or ontologically individualistic. pay sufficient attention to groups? The critique that the capability approach should focus more on groups is often related to the critique that the focus of the capability approach is too individualistic, but it is nevertheless a distinct critique. A clear example can be found in the work of Frances Stewart (2005), who argues that in order to understand processes that affect the lives of people, such as violent conflict, one has to look at group capabilities — which she defines as the average of the individual capabilities of all the individuals in the selected group. The reason we need to focus on these ‘group capabilities’ is because they are a central source of group conflict. They are thus crucial to understand processes such as violent conflict. We will return to Stewart’s specific complaint below, but first unpack the general critique that the capability approach doesn’t pay enough attention to groups. To properly judge the critique that the capability approach does not pay sufficient attention to groups, we need to distinguish between a weaker and a stronger version of that claim. A stronger version of that claim would be that the capability approach cannot pay sufficient attention to groups — that there is something in the conceptual apparatus of the capability approach that makes it impossible for the capability approach to pay attention to groups. But that claim is obviously false, because there exists a large literature of research analysing the average capabilities of one group compared to
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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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1. Introduction 15 capabilities of
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1. Introduction 17 their collaborat
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1. Introduction 19 This book has a
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2. Core Ideas and the Framework Th
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Index abortion 15, 145 advantage 25
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Index 253 Fleurbaey, Marc 154 flour
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