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

50 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
financial resources. Instead, a capability analysis will typically focus
on resources and other means. For example, in their evaluation of
development in India, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (2002, 3) have
stressed that working within the capability approach in no way
excludes the integration of an analysis of resources such as food. In
sum, all the means of wellbeing, like the availability of commodities,
legal entitlements to them, other social institutions, and so forth, are
important, but the capability approach presses the point that they are
not the ends of wellbeing, only their means. Food may be abundant in
the village, but a starving person may have nothing to exchange for it,
no legal claim on it, or no way of preventing intestinal parasites from
consuming it before he or she does. In all these cases, at least some
resources will be available, but that person will remain hungry and,
after a while, undernourished. 27
Nevertheless, one could wonder: wouldn’t it be better to focus
on means only, rather than making the normative analysis more
complicated and more informationally demanding by also focusing on
functionings and capabilities? Capability scholars would respond that
starting a normative analysis from the ends rather than means has at
least two advantages, in addition to the fundamental reason mentioned
earlier that a focus on ends is needed to appropriately capture interindividual
differences.
First, if we start from being explicit about our ends, the valuation
of means will retain the status of an instrumental valuation rather than
risk taking on the nature of a valuation of ends. For example, money or
economic growth will not be valued for their own sake, but only in so far
as they contribute to an expansion of people’s capabilities. For those who
have been working within the capability framework, this has become a
deeply ingrained practice — but one only needs to read the newspapers
for a few days to see how often policies are justified or discussed without
a clear distinction being made between means and ends.
Second, by starting from ends, we do not a priori assume that
there is only one overriding important means to those ends (such as
27 The relationship between means and capabilities is analysed in more depth in
section 3.12.