Amartya Sen's Capability Analysis

Amartya Sen’s capability approach

The Capability Approach is defined by its choice of focus upon the moral significance of individuals capability of achieving the kind of lives they have reason to value.

This distinguishes it from more established approaches to ethical evaluation, such as utilitarianism or resourcism, which focus exclusively on subjective well-being or the availability of means to the good life.

The Capability Approach focuses directly on the quality of life that individuals are actually able to achieve. This quality of life is analyzed in terms of the core concepts of functionings and capability.

Functionings are states of being and doing such as being well-nourished, having shelter. They should be distinguished from

These two together make up effective freedom or capability. Simple freedom to choose may be vulnerable to the objection that it is compatible with invidious freedoms, but the Capability Approach is concerned with people’s ability to live a life they have reason to value, which incorporates an ethical evaluation of the content of their options. It is not concerned only with increasing people’s freedom-as-power. Finally, Sen’s Capability Approach is particularly concerned with grasping the dimensions of human well-being and advantage missing from standard approaches. This relates to its concern with tracing the causal pathways of specific deprivations, with how exactly different people are able or unable to convert resources into valuable functionings.

Sen’s Capability Approach is founded on the idea that much more information about the quality of human lives can and should be taken into account in evaluating

Thus the HDI does not fully reflect the scope or methodology of the Capability Approach. Nevertheless it has succeeded in demonstrating that capability related information can be used systematically as a credible supplement to economic metrics. Sen accepts that some information about capabilities is easier to obtain than others. Firstly, he argues that we already have quite extensive information about some basic capabilities even for many quite poor countries, such as about health, that can and should be systematically assessed. There is therefore no need to limit our assessment to economic metrics which firstly count the wrong things and secondly also come with significant measurement error despite their apparent numerical precision. Secondly, he argues that if researchers accept the capability space as the new priority for evaluation that will motivate the development of new data collection priorities and methods. As a result more information will become available about how people are faring on the currently ‘missing dimensions’ of the lives we have reason to value, for example, relating to employment or gender equality in domestic arrangements. The