Conceptualising Capabilities and Dimensions of Advantage as Needs

Abstract

Amartya Sen’s critique of the concept of need and his case for the superiority of capability as a measure of advantage have been highly influential. However, Sen perpetuates a caricature. Needs are not necessarily mere instrumental resource requirements achieving ends; the valuable ends of people’s lives can themselves constitute needs, as can freedoms. Indeed, these ideas are already present in basic needs theory. Moreover, official disavowals notwithstanding, expansive notions of need are implicitly present in certain important theories of capabilities and other advantages. Objections to need can be undermined in part by showing how this is the case. Aversion to need is unfortunate, because the concept offers powerful theoretical resources that could be better exploited if negative preconceptions were overcome and need were explicitly embraced. However, this proposal is friendly. It is not that need should replace, but that it can augment, other concepts. Drawing on need may assist with: selecting important capabilities or dimensions of advantage; marking a distinction of seriousness between these and relatively trivial advantages (and buttressing claims to the ethical or political priority of the former); explaining the incommensurability/non-substitutability of certain capabilities and dimensions of advantage, and; defining notions of sufficiency.

Keywords:

• Needs
• basic needs approach
• capability approach
• Amartya Sen
• well-being
• selecting capabilities
• value incommensurability
• sufficiency

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank James Wilson and Ingrid Robeyns for their comments on and discussion of earlier versions of ideas developed in this paper, as well as an anonymous reviewer and associate editor for their helpful recommendations.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

About the Author

Benjamin Fardell teaches philosophy at University College London. On his own time, his research currently focuses on well-being theory (both the concept and its ethical and political roles), value incommensurability, and rational choice with incommensurable values. Future research will concentrate on applying these foundations to ethical and political topics more directly.

Notes

1 Compare Sabina Alkire’s conclusion that ‘[i]t would seem that the basic needs approach, while perhaps lacking an adequate philosophical framework, did have all of the elements of the capabilities approach in view (this is not to say that all so-called “basic needs” programmes exemplified these elements)’ (Alkire 2002, 173).

2 Ingrid Robeyns notes that in Sen’s earlier work the term ‘capability’ designates the entire set of functionings which are open to a person to choose, some actual, the others possible. The notion of a ‘capability’ as a particular freedom to function in one particular way or narrow set of ways (and of a person hence having a range of ‘capabilities’) comes from other authors, and Sen only later partly adopted it (Robeyns 2017, 91–92). I follow the later, now-standard usage, not the original sense, allowing for plural ‘capabilities’.

3 In that text Sen uses the term ‘basic capability”. As Robeyns explains, at that point basic capability referred to what he later simply called ‘capability”, reserving basic capability for something different, roughly capability corresponding to a threshold level of deprivation (Robeyns 2017, 94; cf. Sen 1995, 45n).

4 Note, however, Rawls’ emphasis that primary goods are a device used purely in the description of the basic structure of a just society, not a metric of well-being or advantage in any other application.

5 Some philosophers argue that (non-instrumental) needs are exclusively minimal, universal (at least within some society), and essentially connected to political obligation (Braybrooke 1987; Miller 1999; Thomson 1987; Wiggins 1998). Others argue that, in private-morality contexts alternatively, needs may be particular to individuals, although still relatively minimal (Brock and Reader 2002; Reader and Brock 2004). Anscombe (1958) and Grix and McKibbin (2015) notably allow that a person’s needs may be more expansive—connected with human flourishing—and not necessarily moralised. My proposal that needs can be both expansive and personal is relatively uncommon, but compare Miller (1979) and Raz (1986). I discuss the philosophical literature on needs elsewhere, as doing so here would take this paper too far afield.

6 I thank an associate editor for recommending I reemphasise this, and for pressing me to explain more precisely why need supplements capability without replacing it.

7 In Sen’s framework, again, the relevant notion of ‘good life’ in some context may be either well-being or quality of life.