Symposium on capabilities capabilities and freedom

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 289-300

  Kaufman, Alexander ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33746885061     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: 14679760     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2006.00239.x     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Recent criticisms of Sen's approach are developed in: G. A. Cohen, "Review: Amartya Sen's Unequal World," New Left Review (January 1994), 117-29;
2. Joshua Cohen, "Review of Sen's Inequality Reexamined," Journal of Philosophy, 92 (1995), 275-88;
3. Robert Sugden, "Opportunity as a space for individuality: its value and the impossibility of measuring it," Ethics, 113 (2003), 783-809.
4. See also Susan Moller Okin, "Poverty, well-being and gender: what counts, who's heard?" Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31 (2003), 280-316.
5. Susan Okin, for example, argues that " [i]t is hard to conceive of ... the fulfillment of some needs and wants, such as good health and nourishment, as freedoms without stretching the term [capabilities] until it seems to refer to everything that is of central value to human beings." Okin, "Poverty, well-being and gender," p. 292.
6. G. A. Cohen, "Equality of What?" The Quality of Life, ed. M. C. Nussbaum and A. Sen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 9-29 at p. 28.
7. Amartya Sen, Commodities and Capabilities (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985), p. 10, emphasis mine.
8. Amartya Sen, "Capability and well being," The Quality of Life, ed. Nussbaum and Sen, pp. 31-53 at p. 40.
9. Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 40.
10. Amartya Sen, "Well-being, agency and freedom," Journal of Philosophy, 82 (1985), 169-221 at p. 201.
11. Sen, "Well-being, agency and freedom," p. 201. In supporting Sen's claim, Pettit asserts that "[i]t does not require much thought to see why power [over one's life] ... should [be taken] into account in estimating the quality of lives and societies."
12. Philip Pettit, "Capability and freedom: a defense of Sen," Economics and Philosophy, 17 (2001), 1-20 at p. 16.
13. Cohen, "Equality of What?", p. 25.
14. Cohen, "Equality of What?", p. 28.
15. Cohen, "Equality of What?" ibid.
16. Sen, Inequality Reexamined, pp. 64-5.
17. Sen, "Welfare, agency and freedom," p. 208;
18. see Philip Pettit, "Capability and freedom," pp. 13-17.
19. As Pettit argues, Sen's account of freedom views a person as experiencing freedom if her preferences, rather than her choices, are decisive. Pettit, "Capability and freedom," pp. 12-13.
20. "A person's capability set can be defined as the set of functioning vectors within his or her reach." Sen, "Well-being, agency and freedom," pp. 200-201.
21. Cohen, "Amartya Sen's unequal world," p. 121.
22. Cohen, "Amartya Sen's unequal world," ibid.
23. Cohen, "Amartya Sen's unequal world," pp. 121-2.
24. Sen, "Well-being, agency and freedom," pp. 208-10.
25. Pettit argues that effective freedom requires that "my preference is satisfied because it is my preference, and not for any other reason. It must be that my preference is in control, so that what I get is robustly connected ... with what I prefer." Pettit, "Capability and freedom," p. 4.
26. Sen, Inequality Reexamined, p. 65. In the case of such national policies, Sen and Pettit both suggest that a person's preferences may still be viewed as decisive if the policy has been enacted by a representative legislature: "[g]iven the interdependencies of social living, many liberties are not separately exercisable, and effective power may have to be seen in terms of what all, or nearly all, members of the group would have chosen."
27. Sen, "Well-being, agency and freedom," p. 211;
28. see Pettit, "Capability and freedom," p. 16. But suppose that many persons whose freedom is enhanced by the policy are opposed to the policy (on the grounds, for example, that research required under the policy involves the mistreatment of laboratory animals). The freedom of dissenting beneficiaries will be enhanced despite the fact that their preferences were not decisive. Thus, the fact that a policy was enacted by a representative government does not ensure that the preferences of beneficiaries were decisive.
29. Sen, "Well-being, agency and freedom," p. 210.
30. Cohen, "Amartya Sen's unequal world," p. 124. Cohen argues both that: (i) "[f]reedom ... obtains only when it is the agent who secures conformity of the world to its will;" and (ii) "There are two values associated with successful exercises of freedom. One is that the world conforms to my will and the other is that it is I who achieve that result." In Cohen's account then, freedom is experienced only when a person successfully exercises her power to determine results in the world.
31. "[E]verything that makes my life better is something I would have chosen if I had the choice. But not all the good things in life make me more free." Joshua Cohen, "Review of Sen's Inequality Reexamined," p. 279. Robert Sugden argues, similarly, that unless the person's choices are decisive in realizing a preferred state of the world, Sen's account of effective freedom will remove the notions of 'ability' and 'systematically' from his definition of effective freedom as "a person's ability to get systematically what he would choose."
32. Sugden, "Opportunity as a Space for Individuality," p. 791.
33. Charles Taylor, "What's wrong with negative liberty," The Idea of Freedom, ed. A. Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 175-94.
34. See Chandran Kukathas, "Liberty," A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. R. E. Goodin and P. Pettit (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), pp. 534-48 at pp. 536-37 for a helpful account of the distinction between opportunity and exercise accounts of freedom.
35. Cohen, "Sen's unequal world," p. 123.
36. Gerald MacCallum, "Negative and positive freedom," in Liberty, ed. D. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 100-22.
37. One controversial interpretation of MacCallum's concept of freedom would provide that freedom requires, not merely the absence of constraints, but effective power over them. See H. W. Schneider, "The liberties of man," Freedom, Its Meaning, ed. R. N. Anshen (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940);
38. C. Sherover, "The temporality of the common good: futurity and freedom," Review of Metaphysics, 37 (1984), 475-98. Such a view would represent the exercise view as a particular conception of MacCallum's concept. This argument has not been generally accepted, however, since effective power appears to constitute, not an interpretation of the MacCallum's concept of freedom, but "a condition for its more effective utilization."
39. Tim Gray, Freedom (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1991), p. 46;
40. see W. A. Parent, "Some recent work on the concept of liberty," American Philosophical Quarterly, 11 (1974), 149-53;
41. I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 125-26.
42. MacCallum, "Negative and positive freedom," p. 102.
43. MacCallum, "Negative and positive freedom," ibid., p. 106.
44. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. J. R. Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), pp. 52-6.
45. Taylor, "What's wrong with negative liberty," p. 147.
46. "Well-being, agency and freedom," pp. 209-210.
47. See David A. Crocker, "Functioning and capability: the foundations of Sen's and Nussbaum's development ethics, part 2," Women, Development and Culture, ed. M. Nussbaum and J. Glover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 153-98 at p. 162.
48. The person also possesses the freedom to sacrifice the more opulent life realizable in country A in order to realize his conception of the good by improving quality of life in country B. Sen's insistence that such freedom of choice is itself constitutive of well-being distinguishes his position from Cohen's apparently similar view that an adequate measure of well-being will focus on what goods have done for the person, rather than the share of goods possessed by the person.