You might appreciate Ozy Brennan’s writeup on capabilitarianism. Contrasting with most flavors of utilitarianism:
Utilitarians maximize “utility,” which is pleasure or happiness or preference satisfaction or some more complicated thing. But all our ways of measuring utility are really quite bad. Some people use self-reported life satisfaction or happiness, but these metrics often fail to match up with common-sense notions about what makes people better off. GiveWell tends to use lives saved and increased consumption, which are fine as far as they go, but everyone agrees that that’s only a small fraction of what we care about. A lot of people wind up relying basically on intuition, or on heuristics like “I would not like it if I went hungry” or “probably if you give people more money they’ll be happier.”
In my experience, a lot of utilitarians tend to stuff how hard it is to measure utility up into the attic like the first wife in a gothic novel. It is rare to find a work of utilitarian philosophy that comes up with any sort of well-thought-out principled system for determining what people prefer or what brings them pleasure.
The thing I like about capabilitarianism is that it puts its arbitrariness up front. “There are the things we care about!” it says. “These are the things we’re going to be trying to measure! You can argue with us about them if you want.” Nothing is being smuggled in through the back door.
So what is it?
Capabilitarianism is based on the philosophy of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. It is consequentialist, but heavily influenced by deontology (especially Kantianism) and virtue ethics (especially Aristotleanism). (If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry about it.) Capabilitarianism is about making sure people have certain central capabilities. … Society should make sure that everyone has the central capabilities.
When I say “society should make sure,” I don’t mean “the government should make sure.” While the government has an appropriate role in making sure people can exercise the central capabilities, so do markets, civil society, charities, families, and individuals. Many central capabilities are best met by a combination: for example, the best way to make sure everyone has the “enough food” central capability is a free market in groceries, combined with a robust welfare state to take care of those who can’t afford to buy food on their own.
Finally, what matters is that you have the capability, not that you choose to exercise the capability. If you can’t leave the house, that’s bad. If you legally and socially and physically can leave your house, and freely choose to live the Emily Dickinson lifestyle, that is fine, and capabilitarians have no problem with this.
Ozy reproduces Martha Nussbaum’s first-draft list of the central capabilities in their essay; in short: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, control over one’s environment (political and material).
You might appreciate Ozy Brennan’s writeup on capabilitarianism. Contrasting with most flavors of utilitarianism:
So what is it?
Ozy reproduces Martha Nussbaum’s first-draft list of the central capabilities in their essay; in short: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, control over one’s environment (political and material).