Thank you for this excellent summary! I can try to add a little extra information around some of the questions. I might miss some questions or comments, so do feel free to respond if I missed something or wrote something that was confusing.
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On alignment with intuitions as being “slightly iffy as an argument”: I basically agree, but all of these theories necessarily bottom out somewhere and I think they all basically bottom out in the same way (e.g. no one is a “pain maximizer” because of our intuitions around pain being bad). I think we want to be careful about extrapolation, which may have been your point in the comment, because I think that is where we can either be overly conservative or overly “crazy” (in the spirit of the “crazy train”). Best I can tell where one stops is mostly a matter of taste, even if we don’t like to admit that or state it bluntly. I wish it was not so.
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″...I’m worried that once you add the value-weighting for the capabilities, you’re imposing your biases and your views on what matters in a similar way to other approaches to trying to compare different states of the world. ”
I understand what you’re saying. As was noted in a comment, but not in my post, Sen in particular would advocate for a process where relatively small communities worked out for themselves which capabilities they cared most about and the ordering of the sets. This would not aggregate up into a global ordered list, but it would allow for prioritization within practical situations. If you want to depart from Sen but still try to respect the approach when doing this kind of weighting, one can draw on survey evidence (which is doable and done in practice).
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I don’t think I have too much to add to 3bi or the questions around “does this collapse into preference satisfaction?”. I agree that in many places this approach will recommend things that look like normal welfarism. However, I think it’s very useful to remember that the reason we’re doing these things is not because we’re trying to maximize happiness or utility or whatnot. For example, if you think maximizing happiness is the actual goal then it would make sense to benchmark lots of interventions on how effectively they do this per dollar (and this is done). To me, this is a mistake borne out of confusing the map for the territory. Someone inspired by the capability approach would likely track some uncontentiously important capabilities (life, health, happiness, at least basic education, poverty) and see how various interventions impact them and try to draw on evidence from the people affected about what they prioritize (this sort of thing is done).
Something I didn’t mention in the post that will also be different from normal welfarism is that the capability approach naturally builds in the idea that one’s endowments (wealth, but also social position, gender, physical fitness, etc) interact with the commodities they can access to produce capabilities. So if we care about basic mobility (e.g. the capability to get to a store or market to buy food) then someone who is paraplegic and poor and remote will need a larger transfer than someone who is able bodied but poor and remote in order to get the same capability. This idea that we care about comparisons across people “in the capability space” rather than “in the money space” or “in the happiness space” can be important (e.g. it can inform how we draw poverty lines or compare interventions) and it is another place where the capability approach differs from others.
All that said, I agree that in practice the stuff capability-inspired people do will often not look very different from what normal welfarism would recommend.
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Related: you asked “If we just claim that people value having freedoms (or freedoms that will help them achieve well-being), is this structurally similar to preference satisfaction?”
I think this idea is similar to this comment and I think it will break for similar meta-level reasons. Also, it feels a bit odd to me to put myself in a preference satisfaction mindset and then assert someone’s preferences. To me, a huge part of the value of preference satisfaction approaches is that they respect individual preferences.
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Re: paradox of choice: If more choices are bad for happiness then this would be another place where the capability approach differs from a “max happiness” approach, at least in theory. In practice, one might think that the practical results of limiting choices is likely to usually be bad (who gets to make the limits? how?, etc.) and so this won’t matter. I personally would bet against most of those empirical results mattering. I have large doubts that they would replicate in their original consumer choice context, and even if they do replicate I have doubts that they would apply to the “big” things in life that the capability approach would usually focus on. But all that said, I’m very comfortable with the idea that this approach may not max happiness (or any other single functioning).
On the particular example of: “Sometimes I actually really want to be told, “we’re going jogging tonight,” instead of being asked, “So, what do you want to do?”″
Yeah, I’m with you on being told to exercise. I’m guessing you like this because you’re being told to do it, but you know that you have the option to refuse. I think that there are lots of cases where we like this sort of thing, and they often seem to exist around base appetites or body-related drives (e.g. sex, food, exercise). To me, this really speaks to the power of capabilities. My hunch is you like being told “you have to go jogging” when you know that you can refuse but you’d hate it if you were genuinely forced to go jogging (if you genuinely lacked the option to say no).
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Again, thank you for such a careful read and for offering such a nice summary. In a lot of places you expressed these ideas better than I did. I was fun to read.
Great, thank you! I appreciate this response, it made sense and cleared some things up for me.
Re:
Yeah, I’m with you on being told to exercise. I’m guessing you like this because you’re being told to do it, but you know that you have the option to refuse.
I think you might be right, and this is just something like the power of defaults (rather than choices being taken away). Having good defaults is good.
(Also, I’m curating the post; I think more people should see it. Thanks again for sharing!)
Thank you for this excellent summary! I can try to add a little extra information around some of the questions. I might miss some questions or comments, so do feel free to respond if I missed something or wrote something that was confusing.
--
On alignment with intuitions as being “slightly iffy as an argument”: I basically agree, but all of these theories necessarily bottom out somewhere and I think they all basically bottom out in the same way (e.g. no one is a “pain maximizer” because of our intuitions around pain being bad). I think we want to be careful about extrapolation, which may have been your point in the comment, because I think that is where we can either be overly conservative or overly “crazy” (in the spirit of the “crazy train”). Best I can tell where one stops is mostly a matter of taste, even if we don’t like to admit that or state it bluntly. I wish it was not so.
--
I understand what you’re saying. As was noted in a comment, but not in my post, Sen in particular would advocate for a process where relatively small communities worked out for themselves which capabilities they cared most about and the ordering of the sets. This would not aggregate up into a global ordered list, but it would allow for prioritization within practical situations. If you want to depart from Sen but still try to respect the approach when doing this kind of weighting, one can draw on survey evidence (which is doable and done in practice).
--
I don’t think I have too much to add to 3bi or the questions around “does this collapse into preference satisfaction?”. I agree that in many places this approach will recommend things that look like normal welfarism. However, I think it’s very useful to remember that the reason we’re doing these things is not because we’re trying to maximize happiness or utility or whatnot. For example, if you think maximizing happiness is the actual goal then it would make sense to benchmark lots of interventions on how effectively they do this per dollar (and this is done). To me, this is a mistake borne out of confusing the map for the territory. Someone inspired by the capability approach would likely track some uncontentiously important capabilities (life, health, happiness, at least basic education, poverty) and see how various interventions impact them and try to draw on evidence from the people affected about what they prioritize (this sort of thing is done).
Something I didn’t mention in the post that will also be different from normal welfarism is that the capability approach naturally builds in the idea that one’s endowments (wealth, but also social position, gender, physical fitness, etc) interact with the commodities they can access to produce capabilities. So if we care about basic mobility (e.g. the capability to get to a store or market to buy food) then someone who is paraplegic and poor and remote will need a larger transfer than someone who is able bodied but poor and remote in order to get the same capability. This idea that we care about comparisons across people “in the capability space” rather than “in the money space” or “in the happiness space” can be important (e.g. it can inform how we draw poverty lines or compare interventions) and it is another place where the capability approach differs from others.
All that said, I agree that in practice the stuff capability-inspired people do will often not look very different from what normal welfarism would recommend.
--
Related: you asked “If we just claim that people value having freedoms (or freedoms that will help them achieve well-being), is this structurally similar to preference satisfaction?”
I think this idea is similar to this comment and I think it will break for similar meta-level reasons. Also, it feels a bit odd to me to put myself in a preference satisfaction mindset and then assert someone’s preferences. To me, a huge part of the value of preference satisfaction approaches is that they respect individual preferences.
--
Re: paradox of choice: If more choices are bad for happiness then this would be another place where the capability approach differs from a “max happiness” approach, at least in theory. In practice, one might think that the practical results of limiting choices is likely to usually be bad (who gets to make the limits? how?, etc.) and so this won’t matter. I personally would bet against most of those empirical results mattering. I have large doubts that they would replicate in their original consumer choice context, and even if they do replicate I have doubts that they would apply to the “big” things in life that the capability approach would usually focus on. But all that said, I’m very comfortable with the idea that this approach may not max happiness (or any other single functioning).
On the particular example of: “Sometimes I actually really want to be told, “we’re going jogging tonight,” instead of being asked, “So, what do you want to do?”″
Yeah, I’m with you on being told to exercise. I’m guessing you like this because you’re being told to do it, but you know that you have the option to refuse. I think that there are lots of cases where we like this sort of thing, and they often seem to exist around base appetites or body-related drives (e.g. sex, food, exercise). To me, this really speaks to the power of capabilities. My hunch is you like being told “you have to go jogging” when you know that you can refuse but you’d hate it if you were genuinely forced to go jogging (if you genuinely lacked the option to say no).
--
Again, thank you for such a careful read and for offering such a nice summary. In a lot of places you expressed these ideas better than I did. I was fun to read.
Great, thank you! I appreciate this response, it made sense and cleared some things up for me.
Re:
I think you might be right, and this is just something like the power of defaults (rather than choices being taken away). Having good defaults is good.
(Also, I’m curating the post; I think more people should see it. Thanks again for sharing!)