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

76 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
yet do not endorse all propositions in the A-module. Let me stress that
categorizing these theories as ‘hybrid’ entails no value judgement,
whether positive or negative; rather, it is only a matter of clarifying the
possibilities of having capability theories but in addition also hybrid
theories which use part of the A-module yet also insert elements from
other ethical frameworks that go against some propositions in the
A-module. Thus, appreciating the possibility of hybrid views enlarges
the diversity of theories that are possible.
Can we give an example of such a hybrid theory? Perhaps surprisingly,
an example may be Amartya Sen’s theorising about justice. According to
the interpretation by Antoinette Baujard and Muriel Gilardone (2017),
Sen’s (2006, 2009c) recent work on justice does not endorse functionings
and/or capabilities as the metric of justice, but should rather be seen
as a procedural or democratic account of justice, in which the idea of
having functionings and capabilities as the evaluative space is merely
a suggestion, which should be put to the public who eventually, in a
process of public reasoning, have to decide what justice is about. If that
interpretation is correct, then Sen is unwilling to commit to proposition
A5 (‘functionings and capabilities form the evaluative space’) when
theorising about justice, since that is something to be decided by a
process of public reasoning. 39 Clearly, when Sen theorises about justice,
he has certain meta-theoretical commitments (module B7) that make
it inconsistent for him to endorse A5, namely the meta-theoretical
commitment that the nature of justice will be decided by a democratic
process. Whether that is a plausible meta-theoretical position, has been
subject of debate in the capability literature (e.g. Claassen 2011; Byskov
2017) but need not concern us here. The point that is relevant for us is
that Sen’s theorizing about justice could be seen as a public reasoningcapability
theory of justice.
39 Note that for other capability applications or capability theories, such as making quality
of life assessment studies, Sen has no problem endorsing proposition A5. Moreover,
one could also ask whether regarding his earlier publications on justice it would be
implausible to interpret Sen’s writings as an endorsement of A5. In my view (and
pace Baujard and Gilardone’s interpretation), Sen has made several statements in
earlier work that could be seen as an endorsement of all propositions of module A
for the case of theorizing about justice (e.g. Sen 1980, 1990a, 2000).