One trouble I’ve always had with the capabilities approach is with how one figures out what counts as a capability worth having. For example, I agree it’s good for people to be able to choose their career and to walk outside safely at night. But it seems to me like this is precisely because people generally have strong preferences about what career to have and about their safety. If there was a law restricting people from spinning in a circle and clapping one’s hands exactly 756 times, this would be less bad than restricting people from walking outside at night, and there’s a simple preference-satisfaction explanation for this. What would be the capabilities approach explanation for this?
It also seems odd to me that capabilities would matter intrinsically. That is, it doesn’t seem intrinsically important to me that people are merely able to satisfy their preferences. It seems more important that their preferences are actually satisfied.
I tried to address the fist one in the second part of the Downsides section. It is indeed the case that while the list of capability sets available to you is objective, your personal ranking of them is subjective and the weights can vary quite a bit. I don’t think this problem is worse than the problems other theories face (turns out adding up utility is hard), but it is a problem. I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but you can respond to this by trying to make a minimal list of capabilities that we all value highly (Nussbaum), or you can try to be very contextual (within a society or subgroup of a society, the weights may not be so different), or you can try to find minimal things that unlock lots of capabilities (like income or staying alive). There may be other things one can do too. I’d say more research here could be very useful. This approach is very young.
Re: actually satisfying preferences, if my examples about the kid growing up to be a doctor or the option to walk around at night don’t speak to you, then perhaps we just have different intuitions. One thing I will say on this is that you might think that your preferences are satisfied if the set of options is small (you’ll always have a top choice, and you might even feel quite good about it), but if the set grows you might realize that the old thing you were satisfied with is no longer what you want. You’ll only realize this if we keep increasing the capability sets you can pick from, so it does seem to me that it is useful to try to maximize the number of (value-weighted) capability sets available to people.
I think the capabilities approach can be reframed as a form of multi-level utilitarianism. Capabilities matter, but why? Because they contribute to well-being. How do we prioritize among capabilities? Ask people what capabilities matter to them and prioritize the ones that matter more to more people.[1] Why do we prioritize the ones that matter more to more people? Because they have a greater impact on aggregate well-being. Here, we’re using various decision procedures that differ from the archetypal utilitarian calculus (e.g. the capabilities approach, soliciting people’s preferences), but the north star is still aggregate utility.
From the OP: “The third approach, which I personally prefer, is to not even try to make an index but instead to track various clearly important dimensions separately and to try to be open and pragmatic and get lots of feedback from the people ‘being helped.’”
I think that for consequentialists, capability-maximization would fall into the same sphere as identifying and agitating for better laws, social rules, etc. Despite not being deontologists, sophisticated consequentialists recognize the importance of deontological-type structures, and thinking in terms of capabilities (which seem similar to rights, maybe negative rights in some cases like walking at night) might be useful in the same way that human rights are useful—as a tool to clarify one’s general goals and values and interpersonally coordinate action.
One trouble I’ve always had with the capabilities approach is with how one figures out what counts as a capability worth having. For example, I agree it’s good for people to be able to choose their career and to walk outside safely at night. But it seems to me like this is precisely because people generally have strong preferences about what career to have and about their safety. If there was a law restricting people from spinning in a circle and clapping one’s hands exactly 756 times, this would be less bad than restricting people from walking outside at night, and there’s a simple preference-satisfaction explanation for this. What would be the capabilities approach explanation for this?
It also seems odd to me that capabilities would matter intrinsically. That is, it doesn’t seem intrinsically important to me that people are merely able to satisfy their preferences. It seems more important that their preferences are actually satisfied.
Good questions.
I tried to address the fist one in the second part of the Downsides section. It is indeed the case that while the list of capability sets available to you is objective, your personal ranking of them is subjective and the weights can vary quite a bit. I don’t think this problem is worse than the problems other theories face (turns out adding up utility is hard), but it is a problem. I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but you can respond to this by trying to make a minimal list of capabilities that we all value highly (Nussbaum), or you can try to be very contextual (within a society or subgroup of a society, the weights may not be so different), or you can try to find minimal things that unlock lots of capabilities (like income or staying alive). There may be other things one can do too. I’d say more research here could be very useful. This approach is very young.
Re: actually satisfying preferences, if my examples about the kid growing up to be a doctor or the option to walk around at night don’t speak to you, then perhaps we just have different intuitions. One thing I will say on this is that you might think that your preferences are satisfied if the set of options is small (you’ll always have a top choice, and you might even feel quite good about it), but if the set grows you might realize that the old thing you were satisfied with is no longer what you want. You’ll only realize this if we keep increasing the capability sets you can pick from, so it does seem to me that it is useful to try to maximize the number of (value-weighted) capability sets available to people.
I think the capabilities approach can be reframed as a form of multi-level utilitarianism. Capabilities matter, but why? Because they contribute to well-being. How do we prioritize among capabilities? Ask people what capabilities matter to them and prioritize the ones that matter more to more people.[1] Why do we prioritize the ones that matter more to more people? Because they have a greater impact on aggregate well-being. Here, we’re using various decision procedures that differ from the archetypal utilitarian calculus (e.g. the capabilities approach, soliciting people’s preferences), but the north star is still aggregate utility.
From the OP: “The third approach, which I personally prefer, is to not even try to make an index but instead to track various clearly important dimensions separately and to try to be open and pragmatic and get lots of feedback from the people ‘being helped.’”
I think that for consequentialists, capability-maximization would fall into the same sphere as identifying and agitating for better laws, social rules, etc. Despite not being deontologists, sophisticated consequentialists recognize the importance of deontological-type structures, and thinking in terms of capabilities (which seem similar to rights, maybe negative rights in some cases like walking at night) might be useful in the same way that human rights are useful—as a tool to clarify one’s general goals and values and interpersonally coordinate action.