Reality of Human Diversity

Rawls argues that if individuals have the same basket of primary goods, resulting inequality is not unjust because individuals must take responsibility for their own preferences. For Rawls, justice should be measured by the resources people have ( means) rather than the happiness or satisfaction they achieve (ends).

Sen counters that this ignores the fundamental diversity of being human. Even if two people have the exact same resources, their divergent physical or social circumstances mean they will achieve very different levels of actual freedom. A person with a parasitic stomach ailment requiring a specific diet is not equivalent to a person choosing to eat only organic food. A bike is a resource, but it's useless to someone who cannot walk. For Sen, resources are meaningless if you lack the capability to convert them into a valued life. 


In practice though, resources are often a zero-sum game. Consider a public school budget. Let's say the average spending for students is around $18,000, and $90,000 per special education student due to specialized staff, transportation, and other individual services. 


Sen offers no ceiling - At what point does the cost of equalizing capabilities diminish the primary goods available to the rest of the community and the actual freedom of a community? If the funding gap is filled by cutting the music teacher or increasing class sizes for 500 students, the actual freedom of the majority has been jeopardized to subsidize conversion needs for the few. And while monetary costs are more measurable, how can one measure the relative impacts, or more abstract capabilities like the “capability for social belonging”?


Further, if a community sacrifices the quality of education for the majority to grant a small minority a capability they ultimately choose not to use (intrinsic value of choice), was that distribution just? Does one have to trust that all individuals in a community will choose to cooperate, or is that an unrealistic expectation similar to the Kingdom of Ends?


Comments

  1. GeorgiaApril 9, 2026 at 10:30 AM

    Sophie, your practical critique of Sen's capabilities approach using a public goods dilemma is fascinating, and you are right that public goods could come into contact with situations that could be distinctly unfree. However, I want to push on your claim that capabilities equalization can become unjust given the unclear limits to this obligation. Yet, I would argue that Sen is creating an argument and outline for a threshold of resources and freedoms for individuals in society. Unlike Rawls, Sen is explaining that there needs to be a baseline of capabilities, especially with a social safety net of education and healthcare that can grant full expression of individuals' substantive freedoms. In your example of special education students, Sen would argue that this is not a case to equalize capabilites, but to to remove unfreedoms. If a student is not able to access education in the same way due to their capabilities, it is our job as a collective to pay for the amount that will accurately adjust this unfreedom, which is more directly the cost of entry into society. Much closer to Rawls, Sen seems to place substantive freedoms (which include Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity) as importantly related to diverse capability distribution in societies. Although he doesn't offer a clear "limit" to his concerns, he does offer us a means of creating a "baseline", albeit he doesn't give an answer as to who determines this and where the threshold stops.

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