No Democracy without Justice: Political Freedom in Amartya Sen's Capability Approach

Abstract

Amartya Sen has critiqued theories of justice in the liberal tradition for not focusing on actual human living and failing to be truly egalitarian. However, in the absence of a theoretical approach of his own that comprehensively links capabilities and social justice, others have criticised him for not telling us exactly which capabilities should be guaranteed for all citizens in a ‘just’ society. Sen's ‘silence’ on the substantive content of an account of justice is due in large measure to his stringent emphasis on plurality, agency and choice; he turns to democratic processes that allow for public reasoning and social choice to attend to judgements about justice. Yet this critical role for democracy is undermined in Sen's elaboration in the absence of requirements of justice that would protect democracy's fair and effective functioning in a manner consistent with capability egalitarianism. There is need for a fuller account of justice concerning actual opportunities for political participation than is available so far in Sen's work, one that protects equality of substantive political freedom seen properly in the perspective of capabilities, not merely civil liberties and political rights.

Keywords:

• Amartya Sen
• Capability Approach
• Justice
• Democracy
• Political freedom
• Political equality

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a paper presented at the 2006 International Conference of the Human Development and Capability Association at Groningen University. For comments, suggestions and valuable guidance that assisted improvements on that paper, the author thanks participants in the panel session (particularly, David Crocker), two anonymous reviewers and Mozaffar Qizilbash. Thanks also to Barbara Harriss‐White for helpful comments on an initial draft, and to Sabina Alkire and Amartya Sen for the opportunity to ask the latter a question on this topic during his visit to Oxford in late 2006. Finally, thanks to Shalini Satkunanandan, for helping the author make better sense of it all.

Notes

1. Consider, for example, the inaugural address of President Bush in 2005, in which he spoke of “the force of human freedom”, adding: “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation … [as] freedom is the permanent hope of mankind” (Bush, 2005).

2. The use of the word ‘silence’ references the critique by Nussbaum of Sen's reluctance to commit to substantive requirements of social justice, quoted later in this article. Clearly, far from being ‘silent’, Sen has for many years provided considerable insight into how he would prefer to treat matters of justice, including important syntheses in recent years, such as his 2004 address to the Human Development and Capability Association (Sen, 2005). His most recent article, ‘What do we want from a theory of justice?’ (Sen, 2006), was published after this paper was first written. However, this article draws upon some of Sen's arguments in the last section.

3. The Central Human Capabilities required for individuals to be “fully human” (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 87) and to flourish are offered as: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; control over one's environment. For Nussbaum, the list protects pluralism because it is open, revisable, intentionally abstract and a freestanding “partial moral conception” independent of specific metaphysical ideas (Nussbaum, 2003, p. 42).

4. Deneulin (2003), conversely, argues that Nussbaum puts too much emphasis on freedom and suggests a more substantive content of the ‘good life’ that a political community ought to be advancing, adjudged in the procedural space of decision‐making. However, this plethora of lists of defended capabilities (Alkire and Black, 1997; Saith, 2001; Deneulin, 2003; Robeyns, 2003; see also the review in Clark, 2006) in some way reinforces the criticisms against Nussbaum's list as the list.

5. See Crocker (2006) for a recent comprehensive analysis of democracy's central role in Sen's thinking, and the opportunity for Sen to tie his conception more thoroughly to insights from deliberative democracy theory.

6. Deneulin argues elsewhere that Sen takes a consequentialist approach, offering little criteria for decision‐making save that they are “democratic” and help to expand valued individual freedoms (Deneulin, 2003, p. 18). Arguably, the consequences he seeks may be elusive because of a dearth of criteria, for just democratic decision‐making, but more broadly for an overriding approach to justice that ensures equality of real and meaningful individual agency and opportunity in public participation.

7. See also Knight and Johnson (1997), Crocker (2006), Bohman (1996), Richardson (2002), Peter (2004, 2005), and Deneulin (2003). Jay Drydyk's article on what is required for better ‘democratic functioning’ (Drydyk, 2005) is also salient here as an alternative approach for conceptualising ‘political capability’ and influence on democratic decision‐making.

8. Knight and Johnson (1997) are critical of Bohman's focus on a minimum threshold of political poverty, and offer suggestions as to the kinds of politically relevant capabilities to be assessed for determining legitimacy in public deliberation more generally. They emphasise three capabilities: the capacity to formulate authentic preferences, effective use of cultural resources and, most important to the authors, basic cognitive abilities and skills.

9. Rawls' restriction of the ‘fair value’ rule to only the ‘political liberties’ warrants more attention than is possible here. However, the broad understanding of political functioning defended here warrants a more expansive set of process concerns than just the right to vote and the right to stand for office. Therefore, this article prefers ‘civil liberties and political rights’, in line with those Sen includes in his reference to ‘political freedoms’.

10. The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for focusing attention on this formulation, notwithstanding that the reviewer considers it problematic.

11. Cohen's review of Sen's Inequality Reexamined argues that the informational demands of interpersonal comparisons under the capability approach are too high and he thus prefers the resourcist approach (Cohen, 1995). Knight and Johnson (1997, pp. 298–305), as well Bohman (1997, p. 348, fn 21), reject this, arguing that informational requirements of interpersonal comparisons of primary goods are similar (and this applies to the ‘fair value of the political liberties’). Pogge argues that capability egalitarianism is such that no plausible public criterion for social justice is practicably possible within its framework (Pogge, 2002). He emphasises that the more restrictive resourcist approach at least allows for clearer demands to be made on institutions for the reason that “resourcists deny, that a public criterion of social justice should take account of the individual rates at which persons … can convert resources into valuable functionings” (Pogge, 2002, p. 1f). See also Richardson (2006) for an argument on why individual‐based freedom from domination (in Pettit's formulation of republicanism) cannot be captured in interpersonal comparisons.

12. Bohman (1997) considers the difficulty with analysing in detail what constitutes effective social or political functioning, especially considering that such functioning is not readily measured in actual achievements (one's effective participation in public deliberation and decision‐making obviously gives no guarantee as to desired social arrangements). Nevertheless, he offers useful suggestions for making judgements on minimum thresholds for effective social freedom, while also acknowledging that much more work needs to be done.