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Abstract
This paper aims at developing the Capability Approach's (CA) underlying philosophical anthropology and ethics by focusing on the work of its major exponents, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. I first discuss CA's critique of happiness as subjective well-being and defend the idea of ‘flourishing’ which ultimately refers to the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia. I then focus on the notions of ‘good’ and ‘well-being’ and address the problem of the compatibility between a substantive notion of the Good (expressed through universal moral values) and individual preferences. I thus tackle the issue of adaptive preferences (which is investigated both from a methodological and an ethical perspective) and suggest that the process of adaptation should be thought in the dynamic frame of the constitution of the self. Therefore, in the second half of the paper I investigate the CA's idea of personhood and focus on some important assumptions behind its underlying anthropological model – above all the notion of ‘human richness’. As a result, I first point out the dynamic dimension of personhood, according to which individuals are ‘becoming themselves’ in search of self-realisation and construction of their identities. Second, I highlight its relational dimension, according to which every one is the expression of the anthropological richness and at the same time represents the highest possibility of richness for every other one.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Capability and Happiness, Cambridge, March 18 – 19, 2004. I would like to thank all the participants and especially Flavio Comim, Mozaffar Qizilbash, and Gianluca Busilacchi for their helpful comments. Special thanks to Francesco Totaro, Paul van Tongeren, Antoon Vandevelde, Jos Philips and the anonymous referee for their important comments on an earlier version. Thanks also to Sheila Beatty for her linguistic revision of the text.
Notes
1 According to Sen and Williams this is the twofold role that utilitarianism claims for itself (see Sen/Williams Citation1982, ‘Introduction’).
2 The problem of ‘informational constraints’ consists in ‘demanding that certain types of information should not be allowed to influence the moral judgement to be made’ (Sen Citation1985a: 169).
3 Sen's criticism is not only addressed to utilitarian approaches, but also to Rawlsian justice and libertarianism, which also fail to focus directly on the ‘substantive freedoms’ of the individuals involved, and which underestimate the importance of such freedoms (see Sen/Williams Citation1982: 4; and Sen Citation1999: 66). For the purpose of this paper, the focus will be on Sen's critique of utilitarianism.
4 By ‘autonomy’ Sen means a value which concerns the ‘ability of people to choose as important in itself’ and the evaluation of ‘the capability to choose rather than [the evaluation of] the thing chosen’ (see Sen/Williams Citation1982: 13).
5 Here Nussbaum explicitly refers to Aristotle, arguing that if one thinks of desire in a more Aristotelian way (i.e. involving a high degree of selective intentionality and responsiveness), one will realize that desire is a part of our humanity, worthy of respect and voice (Nussbaum Citation2000: 147).
6 Nussbaum's understanding of welfarism seems to be very different from Sen's, and this is why she treats Sen as an example of the ‘welfarist dissatisfaction with welfarism’. According to Sen, welfarism is one of the three main features of utilitarianism and is characterized by requiring that ‘a state of affairs must be judged by the individual utilities in the state’ (Sen Citation1993: 33, footnote 8). On the contrary, Nussbaum seems to interpret as ‘welfarist’ every conception that ultimately focuses on welfare, be it conceived in terms of utility or in broader terms.
7 Notice that Nussbaum borrows the terms ‘substantive good’ and ‘informed desire’ from Scanlon (Citation1993).
8 Marx uses the following terms: ‘Reichtum’, ‘der reiche Mensch’, ‘eine menschliche und daher gesellschäftliche Bedeutung’ (See Marx Citation1844, Drittes Manuskript, Privateigentum und Kommunismus, pp. 111–126, here p. 123/4).
9 This recalls Nussbaum's emphasis on ‘relational goods’ (Nussbaum Citation1986), as well as the recognition of the cooperative nature of human needs, but at the same time seems to go beyond all this.
10 Notice that Sen refers to Marx, and to his multidimensional human perspective, in order to show his view of a good life as a life of freedom (Sen Citation1985: 202, footnote 39, with quotation from: K. Marx and F. Engels (Citation1845/46), The German Ideology, New York: International Publishers 1947, p. 22).
11 The importance of the dynamical dimension (and of the ‘capability to become’) has been developed by Comim 2003. Notice that the importance of the dynamic dimension is another feature that the concept of ‘well-being’ does not seem to adequately express.
