Collapsing Capabilities: Sen's Capacity for Co-optation

    In Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, he uses a cyclical argument to examine how the enhancement of human freedom is both the "main object and primary means of development" (Sen, 53). Here, Sen sees freedom as both a means and an end. While he examines financial markets to focus on how the means of freedom can bring about ends of higher economic welfare, in a similar way to utilitarian arguments, he also focuses on the inherent worth of freedom as a human right. By focusing on freedom both as a means and an end, Sen is able to cater to many audiences using "common sense" and "optimistic" logic; a review on the the back of the book even describes his book as "no-nonsense."

    My concern, however, is that in developing cyclical reasons for action and cyclical solutions, Sen runs the risk of his argument being collapsable in the same way our class previously discussed how Frank's economic model collapses into the engineering based approach to economics. Sen seeks to bridge together both the engineering and ethical models of economics by focusing on freedom as the object (engineering) and as the means (ethical). However, my concern is that in attempting to measure something like freedom, Sen's vision runs the risk of collapsing into the engineering approach once again. In the introduction specifically, Sen's conclusion focuses not on the inherent good of freedom, but how "political freedoms...promote economic security. Social opportunities... facilitate economic participation" (Sen, 11) The "end" isn't actually freedom, but how freedom can promote economic ends which THEN Sen says will promote freedom. If Sen's vision is a cycle, then where does it start, and where does it end? 

    A microcosm of this concern can be seen in Sen's analysis of capabilities and public policy. Sen states: 

"Attention is thus paid particularly to the expansion of the 'capabilities' of persons to live the kinds of lives they value... these capabilities can be enhanced by public policy, but also, on the other side, the direction of public policy can be influenced by the effective use of participatory capabilities by the public. The two-way relationship is central to the analysis presented here" (Sen, 18).  

The question then becomes, when actors seek to promote freedom, what side of the argument should they tackle first, and which side runs the most risk of becoming co-opted by engineering models of economics? 

Comments

  1. Andy CheungApril 9, 2026 at 10:06 AM

    Interesting post Ellie. I think Sen sort of addresses this throughout. The cyclical structure is actually what Sen is trying to do. He explicitly mentions that his argument isn't a linear chain with a starting and ending point, but that instrumental freedoms "tend to contribute to the general capability of a person to live more freely, but they also serve to complement one another" (38). You write that when Sen says "political freedoms...promote economic security. Social opportunities... facilitate economic participation" the "end" collapses back into economic outcomes, but I think that's why Sen distinguishes between constitutive and instrumental roles of freedom. In fact, he writes that "political particpation and dissent are constitutive parts of development itself," meaning freedom is intrinsically part of development. And in terms of the engineering model, I don't think that will happen in the sense that Sen's capability approach doesn't reduce to utility or income, but the whole point in Chapter 3 where he critiques util is to show that freedom and capability are entirely different than other income-based theories in an evaluative standpoint. For him, the where the cycle starts doesn't really matter in so far as the freedom view he posits recogniies that agency, social opportunity, political participation, etc. are intertwined, and insisting on a starting point is a engineering model-eque question.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're all separate but equal

During my tutorial with Dylan yesterday, he brought up the SCOTUS case Brown vs. Board of Education in our discussion of a minimal state. Whilst reading Marx, I realized that both the legal implication (state according rights to individuals) and the societal implication (abolishment of the 'separate but equal' doctrine) of the case are relevant to the claims Marx is making.  Marx delineates between two societies -- political and civil -- and further between the two lives one leads in each -- public and private. In a political society, man is entitled to the liberties given to him by the state, and considers himself a member of a functional community. Marx hints at the mirage of political society, writing that man is “the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality” (34). In such a society, he leads a public life, one in which the state can establish political equality by abolishing “the distinctio...
Read more

What Brettschneider Ought to Admit: Democracy Is Substantive

Although Corey Brettschneider presents his value theory of democracy as a third way between pure proceduralism and outcome-based accounts, his framework collapses into substantivism. Despite insisting that democracy cannot be reduced to “procedure-independent evaluations of outcomes,”(2) he explicitly grounds democratic legitimacy in substantive rights that “limit those policy outcomes that would fail to respect citizens as rulers.” (20). Legitimacy therefore hinges not merely on fair participation but on conformity to three independently specified values—equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity. These values operate as external normative standards against which democratic decisions are judged. Brettschneider treats policies such as ex post facto laws or vote buying as democratically illegitimate regardless of procedural authorization, making clear that outcomes remain subject to direct moral assessment. This is not procedural democracy supplemented by rights; it is ...
Read more

'Enough and as Good' for Whom?

 Both Hobbes and Locke describe a state of nature grounded in equality and natural law. Yet, they reach sharply different conclusions about property. Hobbes denies any possibility of owning property in the state of nature. Locke, by contrast, argues that individuals may aquire private property prior to any government by mixing their labor with common resources. By allowing pre-political appropriation, Locke commits himself to moral constraints on ownership.  Locke introduces these limits through two provisos. The Spoiling proviso requires that an individual only claim ownership over land/natural resources to what one can use before it spoils, critizicing waste as a violation of natural law: "Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy" (21). To me, this limit is relatively clear and intuitive.  More demanding, however, is Locke's second proviso, claiming that appropriation is only legitimate if "enough, and as good" is left in common for others. At first...
Read more