Overview

Sen and Nussbaum have two different projects. Sen is interested in development while Nussbaum wants a standard of social justice. They each use what they call the “capabilities approach” to address the questions that interest them (Sen 1993; Nussbaum 2011).

For Sen, a society’s level of development should be measured in terms of its members’ capabilities. The advantage of this when compared with measuring development in terms of GDP are pretty obvious. What we care about is the people who live in a society and GDP only tells you one thing about them: how much buying and selling they are doing in aggregate.

For Nussbaum, a society is just only if all of its members meet a threshold of ten critical capabilities. That is her interpretation of what it means for a society to treat its members with equal respect (Nussbaum 2011, 24).

Abstraction

The abstract nature of Sen’s point makes his article extraordinarily hard to read. He is saying that a society’s development should be measured in terms of the capabilities of its members. He is not saying which capabilities should be included in measurements of development.

I am not sure why he did that. Perhaps he thinks it should be left open to accommodate different cultures and their values. (Though if that is so I do not know what would become of the idea of development.) Maybe he meant to leave it open for others to fill in the details. Or maybe he just wanted to say that capabilities and functionings are more relevant measures of development than GDP.

Nussbaum, by contrast, puts a concrete proposal on the table with her list of ten Central Capabilities (Nussbaum 2011, 33–34). She maintains that list represents the central elements of living a good human life.

Of course, the cost of proposing a list like that is she can seem to be proclaiming from an ivory tower, as Etelle put it. More specifically, it can seem to be dogmatic and insensitive to other points of view.

Is that criticism fair? I’ll tell you how she thinks of her project and you can decide for yourself. She regards her list as a proposal that is open for debate. Her attitude is, roughly, “here’s a starting point, let’s talk about how to revise it.” I know this because she visited Pomona several years ago and wanted to discuss this chapter with a student group. I sat in and that is the way she described what she was doing. (I should also add that she spends a lot of time in India talking about these ideas and listening to what others have to say about them. I don’t know any other philosophers at her level who do anything like that. She’s in the ivory tower a lot, but she gets out too.)

Paternalism

The big advantage of this way of thinking about well-being is that it is objective: there are some things that are good for you regardless of whether you want them or not. That means the capabilities approach is not bedeviled with problems due to malformed preferences, also known as “adaptive” preferences.

We met malformed preferences in Williams’s paper (Williams 1973). His examples had to do with class: people in the lower classes are taught to believe that the upper classes are simply better than they are. When this distortion on their understanding of the world is removed, they are less likely to accept hierarchies.

Feminists took this point about class and applied it to their studies of the relations between men and women. Their idea is that women are taught to believe they aren’t worth as much as men and so don’t demand as much as men do; removing the false beliefs, in turn, should lead to different behavior both in private and public. Here is an example of the phenomenon they have in mind.

in 1944, the year after the Great Bengal Famine, the All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health did a survey in an area near Calcutta, including in the survey many widows and widowers. Among the widowers, 45.6 percent ranked their health as either ‘ill’ or ‘indifferent.’ Only 2.5% of widows made that judgement, and none at all ranked their health as ‘indifferent’ …. This was in striking contrast to their real situation, since widows tend to be a particularly deprived group in basic health and nutrition. (Nussbaum 2001, 79–80; originally from Sen 1984, 309)

The thrust of the capabilities approach is paternalistic in the following sense. It says that there are some things that are good for you whether you want them or not and it recommends policies based on its view of what is good. So it can handle malformed preferences. You might think that you don’t need as much food as men do, but you’re wrong. (You might even be wrong if you simply think of yourself as less important than men.)

Of course, we are reluctant to treat adults as children. To accommodate this, Sen and Nussbaum emphasize the connection between capabilities and choices. Someone with a capability to do something does not have to exercise that capability. They just maintain it is good to have the capability in the first place.

So the capabilities approach is not paternalistic in the sense that it restricts people’s liberty for their own good. People remain free to choose whether to exercise their capabilities or not.

However, there is a price to pay for avoiding paternalistic interference with liberty. If you leave people at liberty to decide whether to exercise their capabilities but their preferences are malformed, they will decide based on their malformed preferences. Needless to say, that will not solve any problems that arise from the existence of malformed preferences. The only way to do that is to correct the malformations.

Perhaps the idea is that malformed preferences are usually corrected through education. Since that happens to children and children are legitimate targets of paternalistic treatment, that is OK.

There will, needless to say, be sticky questions about who should be in charge of children’s education and what happens when children are educated in ways that do not reflect the traditional values of their communities. If you have an objective view that is heavily influenced by feminism, you can only do so much to accommodate traditional societies.