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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5. Which Future for the <strong>Capability</strong> <strong>Approach</strong>?<br />
213<br />
willing to work — by looking at the costs <strong>and</strong> benefits of working more<br />
or fewer hours, but wouldn’t it make much more sense to also ask how<br />
the capabilities of different options compare? For example, many adults<br />
are happy to work an equal number of hours for less pay if the work is<br />
more intrinsically rewarding or if it contributes to the creation of a public<br />
good. Another example is how we explain a parent’s decision not to use<br />
formal child care, or to use it only for a very limited number of hours.<br />
If we explain this exclusively in terms of financial costs <strong>and</strong> benefits (as<br />
some policy analysts do) we don’t capture the fact that the capabilities<br />
of affiliation <strong>and</strong> social relations are very different in the two scenarios.<br />
A general model of people’s behaviour <strong>and</strong> decision-making should<br />
therefore not only look at the pecuniary costs <strong>and</strong> benefits of different<br />
options, but also at the different levels of valuable functionings, <strong>and</strong> the<br />
absence of functionings with a negative value, that the different options<br />
offer. <strong>The</strong> challenge of this approach is, of course, that capabilities are<br />
often merely qualitative variables, <strong>and</strong> this hampers the explanatory<br />
models that many social scientists use. But if our decision-making <strong>and</strong><br />
behaviour is largely influenced by the capabilities that characterize<br />
different options, then surely, we should prefer (i) a more muddy <strong>and</strong><br />
vaguer explanatory model that takes all important aspects into account<br />
above (ii) a more elegant <strong>and</strong> neat model that gives us a distorted<br />
picture of how persons act <strong>and</strong> live. 1 Some of this is already done, of<br />
course, since there is a large literature about certain functionings taken<br />
individually, e.g. in explanatory research on people’s health. <strong>The</strong><br />
suggestion I’m making here is to look at those functionings in a more<br />
systematic way, <strong>and</strong> to integrate functionings <strong>and</strong> capabilities as general<br />
categories in theories of behaviour <strong>and</strong> decision making, next to other<br />
categories such as resources <strong>and</strong> preference-satisfaction.<br />
Third, the capability approach may well have a very important role<br />
to play in the current quest for a truly interdisciplinary conceptual<br />
framework for the social sciences <strong>and</strong> humanities. Despite the fact<br />
that universities are still to a large extent organized along disciplinary<br />
lines, there is an increasing recognition that many important questions<br />
cannot be studied properly without a unified framework or conceptual<br />
language in which all the social sciences <strong>and</strong> humanities can find their<br />
1 This is a methodological point that Amartya Sen has been pressing for a very long<br />
time.