3.3: Are capabilities freedoms, and if so, which ones?

Amartya Sen (1990c, 460) has described capabilities as

the freedom[s] to achieve valuable human functionings, which can vary from such elementary things as being well-nourished and avoiding escapable morbidity and mortality, to such complex achievements as having self-respect, being well-integrated in society, and so on. Capabilities thus reflect the actual freedoms that people respectively enjoy in being able to lead the kind of lives they have reason to value.

But several philosophers and social scientists have questioned the understanding (or, for philosophers: ‘conceptualisation’) of capabilities in terms of freedoms, asking whether capabilities could plausibly be understood as freedoms, whether Sen was not overextending the use of freedom, whether freedom is all there is to the capability approach, and whether it is wise to use the terminology of freedom for the goals of the capability approach (e.g. Cohen 1993; Gasper and Van Staveren 2003; Hill 2003; Okin 2003, 291–92). Let us therefore clarify and analyse the conceptualisation of capabilities as freedom by answering three questions. First, capabilities have been described as positive freedoms, but how should we understand that notion, and is that the best way to describe what kind of freedoms capabilities are? (Section 3.3.1) Secondly, is there a better conceptualisation of freedom that captures what capabilities are? (Section 3.3.2) Thirdly, if it is the case that capabilities can coherently be conceptualised as freedoms, are capabilities then best understood as freedoms, or is it better to avoid that terminology? (Section 3.3.3).

3.3.1 Capabilities as positive freedoms?

Sen has often used the distinction between positive and negative freedoms, thereby describing capabilities as positive freedoms. For example, Sen (1984b, 315) has stated that he is trying “to outline a characterization of positive freedoms in the form of capabilities of persons”.³ In some discourses, especially in the social sciences, the term ‘positive freedoms’ is used to refer to access to certain valuable goods, such as the freedom to affordable high quality health care or education. Positive freedoms are contrasted with negative freedoms, which refer to the absence of interference by others, such as the freedom to own a gun.⁴ Yet these are by no means standard understandings of positive and negative freedom.

In making the claim that capabilities are positive freedoms, Sen often approvingly refers to Isaiah Berlin’s canonical distinction between positive and negative freedom, but unfortunately doesn’t explain in detail how we should read Berlin. This is potentially confusing, since Berlin’s use of the term ‘positive freedom’ is far from crystal clear.

Let us start from the clearest concept in Berlin — his notion of negative freedom — which Berlin (1969, 122) defines as follows: “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity”. The opposite of having negative freedom is being coerced — the deliberate interference of other persons in an area of my life in which I could, without the interference, act freely. Negative freedom thus corresponds to freedom as non-interference, and Berlin speaks approvingly of this kind of freedom: “[…] non-interference, which is the opposite of coercion, is good as such, although it is not the only good. This is the ‘negative’ conception of liberty in its classical form” (1969, 128).

On positive freedom, there is much less clarity in Berlin’s work. Berlin first introduces positive freedom as the freedom to be one’s own master:

I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be a somebody, not nobody, a doer — deciding, not being decided for; self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. (Berlin 1969, 131)

Berlin argues that the metaphor of self-mastery historically developed into the idea that a person has two selves, a dominant self which is identified with reason and a ‘higher nature’, and a ‘heteronomous self’ which follows desires and passions and needs to be disciplined. Berlin continues that the first self, the ‘real self’, may become seen as wider than the individual,

as a social whole of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’ single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members’ achieves its own, and therefore their ‘higher freedom’. (Berlin 1969, 132)

Put differently, men are “coerced in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt” (132–133). Berlin acknowledges that one could, in principle, develop the same justification of tyranny starting from the definition of negative freedom, but continues to argue that this is easier with the positive conception of freedom. The reason is that the idea of positive freedom as self-mastery entails a distinction between my ‘true’ self and an ‘untrue self’. It is therefore possible that someone else other than you knows better what your true self is, which opens up a space for another person to coerce you in the name of your ‘true self’. Berlin believes that this has historically been the case with tyrannical regimes that propagated an ideology entailing a notion of positive freedom as self-mastery, whereby everything can be justified in the name of some true or higher self that needs to master other impulses and desires.

It is not difficult to see that positive freedom in Berlin’s sense is not the kind of freedom that capabilities represent, especially not when understood against the historically tyrannical shape that this ideal (according to Berlin) took. Capabilities are not about people’s internal attitudes towards what they should do with their lives. At the political level, the capability approach would advocate that we should organise our political life in such a way as to expand people’s capabilities, whereby the capability approach will judge that two persons had the same initial equal freedom if both of them had the same initial set of valuable options from which to choose. The capability approach, therefore, is not strongly perfectionist and teleological, as is the positive freedom doctrine in Berlin’s sense. In sum, capabilities are very different from Berlin’s notion of positive freedom, and Berlin’s understanding of positive freedom is not the best way to capture the kinds of freedom that capabilities are.

In later work, Sen acknowledged the potential for confusion that his equation of capabilities with positive freedom and his references to Berlin’s work had made, and provided a clearer description of his own understanding of positive freedom. In his Arrow lectures, Sen (2002a, 586) wrote:

positive freedom has also been variously defined, varying on one side from the general freedom to achieve in general, to the particular aspect, on the other side, of freedom to achieve insofar as it relates to influences working within oneself (a use that is close to Berlin’s conceptualization of positive freedom). In my own attempts in this field, I have found it more useful to see ‘positive freedom’ as the person’s ability to do the things in question taking everything into account (including external restraints as well as internal limitations). In this interpretation, a violation of negative freedom must also be — unless compensated by some other factor — a violation of positive freedom, but not vice versa. This way of seeing positive freedom is not the one preferred by Isaiah Berlin.

This quote also draws attention to another drawback of defining capabilities in terms of positive freedom. Violations of negative freedoms will, according to Sen, always lead to violations of positive freedoms; yet for Berlin this need not be the case. In a totalitarian state which espouses a doctrine of positive freedom, in which the state will help the citizens to ‘liberate their true selves’, a violation of a range of negative freedoms, such as the freedom of expression or of the freedom to hold property, will not violate positive freedom; on the contrary, within the parameters of that doctrine, violations of such negative freedoms may even enhance the state-aspired positive freedom.

So where does all this terminological exegesis lead us? It has often been remarked that there are many available definitions of negative and positive freedom. Berlin’s conceptualisations are canonical, but his definition of positive freedom is very different from Sen’s. Moreover, as Charles Taylor (1979, 175) rightly pointed out, the debate on negative and positive freedoms has been prone to polemical attacks that caricature the views of both sides. One therefore wonders what is to be gained by describing capabilities in terms of positive freedoms — at least, if one is aware of the philosophical background to this term. Perhaps it may be wiser to look further for an alternative conceptualisation that is less prone to creating misunderstandings?

3.3.2 Capabilities as opportunity or option freedoms?

Luckily, in other parts of Amartya Sen’s writings we can find the answer to the question of what kind of freedoms capabilities are (if any at all). Although Sen’s first descriptions of capabilities were couched exclusively in terms of positive freedoms, he soon offered an alternative description in terms of opportunities.⁵ In his 1984 Dewey Lectures, Sen (1985c, 201) defended a conceptualisation of wellbeing freedom in terms of capabilities, and defined wellbeing freedom as:

whether one person did have the opportunity of achieving the functioning vector that another actually achieved. This involves comparisons of actual opportunities that different persons have.

Similarly, in Inequality Reexamined, Sen (1992a, 31) writes:

A person’s position in a social arrangement can be judged in two different perspectives, viz. (1) the actual achievement, and (2) the freedom to achieve. Achievement is concerned with what we manage to accomplish, and freedom with the real opportunity that we have to accomplish what we value.

Given Sen’s descriptions of the freedoms that the capability approach is concerned with in terms of opportunities, it seems a natural suggestion to investigate whether the concept of ‘opportunity freedom’ better captures the nature of capabilities.

Charles Taylor, in his discussion of Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive freedom, has argued that beneath the distinction between positive and negative freedom lies another set of distinctions, namely between an exercise concept of freedom and an opportunity concept of freedom. The exercise concept of freedom refers to an agent being free “only to the extent that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one’s life”, whereas according to the opportunity concept of freedom “being free is a matter of what we can do, of what is open to us to do, whether or not we do anything to exercise these options” (Taylor 1979, 177). According to Taylor, theories of negative freedom can be grounded on either an exercise or an opportunity concept, but theories of positive freedom can never be grounded merely on an opportunity concept. Taylor’s goal is arguing in favour of the exercise concept of freedom, and shows that the crude view of negative freedom (which, he argues, Berlin is defending) is untenable. Taylor (1979, 177) describes the opportunity concept of freedom thus: “being free is a matter of what we can do, of what it is open to us to do, whether or not we do anything to exercise these options. […] Freedom consists just in there being no obstacle. It is a sufficient condition of one’s being free that nothing stand in the way”.

Is Taylor’s opportunity concept of freedom the kind of freedom we are searching for in our attempt to understand the nature of capabilities? His concept comes close, but it is narrower than the conception of freedom contained in the idea of capabilities. For Taylor, only external obstacles count in the definition of negative freedom (Taylor 1979, 176, 193; Kukathas 2007, 688). He holds that the acknowledgement of internal obstacles to action, including the action to choose between different opportunities, merges an element of the exercise concept of freedom into the opportunity concept. The notion of opportunity in Taylor’s concept of opportunity freedom thus resembles a formal notion of opportunity more closely than a substantive notion.

Here’s an example to illustrate the difference between Taylor’s opportunity concept of freedom and the notion of ‘capabilities’. If, in a patriarchal community, men have all the power, and in a verbally aggressive manner they teach girls and remind women that their place is inside the house, then surely these women do not have the same opportunity freedom to find employment in the nearest city where women from more liberal communities are holding jobs. In formal terms, the women from both communities may be able to work outside the home since there are jobs available to women in the city, they are able-bodied and are able to commute to the city. Yet the women from the patriarchal community would face much bigger costs and would need to gather much more courage, and resist the subtle working of social norms, before they could effectively access this formal opportunity. Put in capability terms, we would say that the first group of women has a much smaller capability to work outside the home than the women living in less patriarchal communities. If the costs and burdens borne by the women from strongly patriarchal communities are excessive, we could even conclude that the capability to work in the city is virtually nonexistent.

Luckily, more recent debates in political philosophy have further developed this discussion, in a way that is helpful in answering the question of how capabilities should be understood. Philip Pettit (2003) has argued that the philosophical debate on social freedom could benefit from being clear on the distinction between option-freedom and agency-freedom. While option-freedom is a property of options, agency-freedom is a property of agents. Agency-freedom relates to the long tradition in philosophy of seeing the slave as the prime example of someone who is not free: he is subjugated to the will of others. Agency-freedom focusses on the question of how a person relates to their fellows, and is a matter of social standing or status, not of the options that they enjoy (Pettit 2003, 394–95).

Options are the alternatives that an agent is in a position to realize. Pettit argues that option freedom is a function of two aspects: the character of access to options, and the character of options themselves. First, option freedom is a function of the character of the agent’s access to the options. Some philosophers would hold that the physical possibility of carrying out an option is sufficient for access, and thus would conclude that the agent has option freedom. Alternatively, one could defend the position that access to an option does not only depend on the physical possibility of carrying out the option, but that non-physical barriers are relevant too. Pettit distinguishes two possibilities: either an agent is objectively more burdened than another agent when trying to access an option, whether by difficulty or by penalty, or an agent is subjectively burdened in the sense that he believes that access to an option is not possible. The second aspect of option freedom is the character of the options. Here a wide range of views exist, such as the number of options that are accessible, their diversity, and whether they are objectively significant or subjectively significant (Pettit 2003, 389–92).

Capabilities are precisely this kind of option freedom. What counts in the capability approach is indeed the access that a person has to a wide range of valuable alternative options. In sum, capabilities can be understood as opportunity or option freedoms, but are broader than Taylor’s rather narrow opportunity concept of freedom. We can therefore conclude that it is conceptually sound to understand capabilities as freedoms of this sort.⁶

3.3.3 Are capabilities best understood as freedoms?

The detailed analysis in the previous section doesn’t settle all questions, though. It may well be the case that it is coherent to see capabilities as freedoms, but that there is another notion, such as human rights, basic needs, or something similar, that much better captures what capabilities are.

The answer to that question has to be contextual in the following sense. The capability approach is a deeply interdisciplinary approach, yet scholars from different disciplines will have different associations with certain terms. Philosophers may well have very different associations with the word ‘freedom’ than, say, anthropologists or development sociologists. Similar remarks can be made when the capability approach is being applied for policy and political purposes, since the term ‘freedom’ has in some countries a particular historical connotation, or is being claimed by extreme right or extreme left political parties, in the sense that if they were to come to power, they would use that power to drastically curtail the capabilities of (some sections of) the population. However, one should also not forget that the word ‘capabilities’ is non-existent in many languages, and may itself also lead to mistaken connotations, for example with skills or capacities in its French translation (capacité).

When developing a particular capability theory or capability application, should we frame the capability approach in terms of freedoms? My suggestion would be to answer this question in a pragmatic fashion. If the context in which the capability approach is applied makes it likely that the use of the term freedom will lead to the application being misunderstood, then I would suggest that one defines, describes and illustrates the word ‘capabilities’ and introduces that term. Yet for moral philosophers and political theorists who are eager to further develop the capability approach into a coherent political theory, a clear understanding of capabilities as option freedoms may pave the way for work that lies ahead. Pettit’s analysis of option freedoms, and the established literature to which he is referring in his analysis, give the capability scholar a neat overview of the choices that need to be made if one wants to turn the underspecified capability approach into a well-specified moral or political capability theory. For the political philosopher, there is therefore less reason to be worried about being misunderstood when referring to capabilities as option freedoms, or as opportunity freedoms.

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3 Other statements equating capabilities with positive freedoms can be found in Sen (1982, 6, 38–39; 1984c, 78, 86; 1985c, 201; 2008, 18 among other places). In his 1979 Tanner lecture in which Sen coined the term ‘capability’, he did not refer to freedoms, but did use other terms such as ‘ability’ and ‘power’.

4 According to Sen (2009c, 282) this is the understanding of positive and negative freedom in welfare economics.

5 In fact, even this is not entirely correct, since in his earlier work and especially in his work written for economists, Sen did not speak of ‘capabilities’, but rather of ‘capability sets’ and thus also of ‘opportunity sets’ (see section 3.2.1).

6 It doesn’t follow, of course, that capability theories would not be able to pay attention to agency freedom. They do — for example by including relational capabilities in the selection of relevant dimensions, or by having some ideal of agency freedom as an additional moral principle included in module C4.