INTRODUCTION

In his masterwork, The Great Transformation, written in 1944, Karl

Polanyi made this amazingly prophetic and modern statement: “To

allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human

beings and their natural environment…would result in the demolition

of society”(p.73). However, Polanyi was convinced that such a

demolition could no longer happen in the post-World War era because,

as he said (p.251) “ Within nations we are witnessing a development

under which the economic system ceases to lay down the law to

society and the primacy of society over that system is secured”.

It seems today that Polanyi’s optimism was misplaced. The

market is directing the fate of human beings. The economy is

dictating its rule to society, not the other way around. And just as

Polanyi foresaw, this doctrine is leading us directly towards the

“demolition of society”.

So what has happened? Why have we reached this point fifty

years after the Second World War?

Philosophers, political theorists, political economists and

others have long coped with the matter of the normative assessment

of social and economic outcomes. Some years ago, political

philosophy was a conceptual analysis of the meaning of power, or

sovereignty, or the nature of law. Recent emphasis has been on the

ideals of justice, freedom, or rights, which are evoked when

1

evaluating political institutions and policies (Kymlicka 1990).

Contemporary theories of justice have aimed at finding coherent and

comprehensive principles for deciding between conflicting values.

Scholars in this area have generated approaches to social evaluation

that differ markedly from the welfarism that has been predominant

within the neo-classical tradition. One important branch of thought

emphasizes the concept of egalitarianism. To the question “What

makes for a just social arrangement?” Loosely related theories have

each answered with a particular kind of egalitarianism. According to

Amartya Sen every plausible political theory has an ultimate value,

which is equality. As such, they are all “egalitarian” theories. But

what is an egalitarian theory? Is it only a theory which favours

equal distribution of income, wealth, resources, rights or

liberties?

A deeper and abstract idea of equality in political theory is

the idea of “treating people as equals”. A theory is egalitarian in

the sense that it accepts that “the interests of each member of the

community matter, and matters equally” (Kymlicka 1990: 4). The basis

of equality is that each citizen of a country is entitled to equal

concern and respect. “The common feature of being egalitarian

relates to the need to have equal concern, at some level, for all

the persons involved – the absence of which would tend to make a

proposal lack social plausibility”(Sen 1992:ix). But, once again,

2

what are the preconditions for treating people as equals? Are these

equality of wealth or income, equality of rights or liberties, or

equality of resources?

This paper’s project is to discuss the kind of equality

required by the more abstract idea of “treating people as equals”.

If all egalitarian theories share the same ground ‘that is’,

attempting to define the social, economic, and political conditions

under which citizens of a country are treated as equals, then one

might be able to show that one of the theories does a better job in

leading to the kind of “life each has reason to value”. So, the

fundamental argument of this paper is about how equality is to be

interpreted in order to match in the best possible way the ideal of

“treating people as equals”. In other words, the central question

will indeed be “equality of what?” (Sen 1992: 21). For Sen,

egalitarianism in the distribution of social wealth is among the

central normative criteria within the field of political philosophy

and political economy.

Method

This research is to be situated at the crossroads between

contemporary political philosophy and contemporary political

economy.

3

Political philosophy is a matter of moral arguments, which

justify the use of public institutions. On the other hand, any

account of personal obligation must also take into consideration

what Rawls called “the great values applying to political

institutions”, such as democracy, equality and tolerance (Kymlicka

1990: 6). It defines what people may do to one another through the

apparatus of a state, or what persons do to establish such an

apparatus (Kymlicka 1990: 6). But any account of public

responsibilities must fit into a broader moral framework that makes

room for private responsibilities. The aim of political philosophy

is then to evaluate competing theories of justice to assess the

strength and coherence of their arguments or the rightness of their

views.

By contemporary political economy, we understand the search for

normative foundations of contemporary economic policies. Political

economy aims to evaluate the normative commitments of contemporary

theories, and demonstrate that these different commitments have

powerful effects on one another. Indeed, these very commitments

influence the judgements economists make regarding what will result

in a good social and economic outcome. Normative economic

commitments also guide economists’ judgements regarding what the

field of economics is to concern itself with, and the purposes it is

to serve. In other words, economists are guided in their choice

4

among contending theoretical paradigms by a set of prior normative

commitments. Political economy underlines the fact that moral

commitments underlying economic policy debates matter, and that they

must be interrogated for their legitimacy and effect.

This essay is part of both political philosophy and political

economy in the sense that it is about understanding and evaluating

the moral commitments to equality upon which theories of justice, as

well as economic policy claims are founded. This paper will focus on

one of the recent and influential contributions to the debate over

egalitarianism, the work of Amartya Sen. The momentous and central

question is indeed “equality of what?” The substantive importance

of this question relates to the empirical fact of pervasive human

diversity (Sen 1992: xi). Although deeply influenced by Rawls, Sen

sees that Rawls’ approach to justice as fairness fails to account

satisfactorily for interpersonal differences, both within and across

society. While Rawls gives a kind of aggregative view of

egalitarianism, Sen highlights the range of physical and mental

capabilities that exist among individuals, and also structures that

make up their respective societies. He argues that these important

differences affect people’s abilities to transform Rawls’ primary

goods into the actual achievements that they have reason to value.

Sen emphasizes actual potential achievement, and reaches the

conclusion that goods must be distributed according to need –

5

determined by each person’s capabilities – so that all are equally

able to live valued lives. Moreover, Sen rejects the claim that

there is some essential human nature to which social and economic

institutions must correspond. Instead, he understands human

subjectivity to be heterogeneous, socially constructed and variable.

As Sen puts it, “the conversion possibilities can, in fact, be very

diverse for different people, and this does weaken the rationale of

the derivative importance of equality of holding of primary goods or

resources”(1992:19).

Plan

The paper will draw a comparison between theories of equality

developed by Sen, Rawls and Dworkin. The two first chapters will

consist in the presentation of John Rawls’ justice as fairness in

relation to the question of equality. Since understanding Rawls

requires understanding utilitarianism, the theory to which he is

responding, this theory will comprise the first chapter. The third

chapter will be devoted to Dworkin’s contribution to the debate on

equality. Dworkin’s equality of resources will be thoroughly

scrutinised in order to highlight its possibilities and its limits.

In the fourth Chapter we will explore the notion of equality in Sen’

work. Capability-based equality will be explained. This chapter will

also show how and why equal distribution of capabilities is

6

preferable to both equal distribution of resources and equal

distribution of primary goods. The fifth chapter will consist in an

attempt to theorize a kind of “internationalist equalitarian” in the

spirit of Sen’s harmonization of capabilities in an increasingly

globalized world for a “just society of people”. Globalization will

also be analysed from the African perspective. The conclusion will

show that the principle of capability equality promotes extensive

social experimentation. It entails no necessary assumptions about

existence of one ideal set of institutional arrangements (such as

neoliberalism, communism, or any other). Instead it encourages us to

interrogate the actual performance of the existing economic systems

and social arrangements that arise. It adamantly refuses an “end of

history” narrative that anticipates the achievement of some final

state of social organization and it takes an open-ended view of how

societies must best enhance the capabilities of their inhabitants,

understanding that different types of institutions and practices

will be necessary at different moments in time, owing to changes in

the circumstances and values of society’s members.

CHAPTER I: UTILITARIANISM

7

1. Introduction

Confronted with the plurality of values - equality, liberty,

contractual agreement, common good, utility, rights, or capability -

the only sensible response is to give up the idea of developing a

‘monistic’ theory of justice. Subordinating all other values to a

single overriding one is almost fanatical. A successful theory of

justice will have to accept bits and pieces from most of the

existing theories.

Traditionally, a theory of justice consisted in the search for

coherent and comprehensive rules for deciding between conflicting

values. But how can we have such a comprehensive criteria unless

there is some deeper value in terms of which the conflicting values

are judged? One has to accept the inevitable compromises that are

required between theories, rather than hope for any one theory to

provide comprehensive guidance for all. This has become the way

contemporary theories deal with justice. The present work does not

have the ambition of establishing and rationally defending a

comprehensive theory of justice. However, the aim of this first

chapter is to provide particular arguments for a particular theory,

namely, utilitarianism.

8

2. Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is a theory of justice that claims that the morally

right act or policy is that which produces the greatest happiness

for the members of society (Kymlicka 1990: 8). For utilitarianism as

for morality in general, human welfare is the ultimate good. It

implies, therefore, that the morally best action is the one which

maximizes human welfare, giving equal weight to each person’s

welfare. It is for this reason that utilitarianism is sometimes

called consequentialism. In fact, consequentialism stipulates that

something is morally good only if it improves one’s life. This seems

to provide a direct criterion for finding the morally right answer.

Morality here is a matter of measuring changes in human welfare, and

not “consulting spiritual leaders, or relying on obscure tradition”

(Kymlicka 1990: 11). A morally wrong action is one that affects

one’s life for the worse.

Utilitarianism seems attractive in two aspects. First, it

conforms to our intuition that human well being matters. And second,

it also conforms to our intuition that moral rules must be tested

for their consequences on the well being of humanity. Two principles

can therefore be distinguished on the utilitarian landscape: an

account of human welfare, or ‘utility’, and an instruction to

maximize utility, meaning the giving of equal weight to each

person’s utility.

9

Consequentialism is concerned with promoting people’s utility,

and ideally, all informed preferences should be satisfied.

Unfortunately, that is impossible because there are limited

resources available to satisfy people’s preferences. For

utilitarianism, the right action should then aim to satisfy as many

informed preference as possible, and thus some people’s preferences

will go unsatisfied if their preferences conflict with what

maximizes utility overall. It is unfortunate, but “since the winners

necessarily outnumber the losers, there is no reason the preferences

of the losers should take precedence over the more numerous or more

intense preferences of the winners” (Kymlicka 1990: 19).

This view of utilitarianism stipulates that maximizing the good

is primary, not derivative, and we do count the individual, because

that is the way to maximize the overall value. Our primary duty is

not to treat people as equals, but to bring about valuable states of

affairs. People are viewed here as locations of utilities, or as

causal levels for the ‘utility network’. As Williams puts it, “the

basic bearer of value for utilitarianism is the state of affairs”

(Williams 1981: 4). Rawls calls this interpretation a ‘teleological

theory’ because the right act is defined in terms of maximizing the

good rather than in terms of equal considerations for individuals

(Rawls 1971: 24).

10

The problem at this level is to find out how to qualify an

obligation to maximize the good with the obligation to treat people

as equals. It means that the maximization standard is to be used if

and only if that is the best account of treating people as equals.

To be treated as a plausible political morality, utilitarianism

must be interpreted as a theory of equal consideration. While

utilitarianism may have unequal effects on people, it can

nonetheless claim to be motivated by a concern for treating people

as equals. Indeed, as Hare asks, “if we believe that people’s

essential interest is the satisfaction of their informed

preferences, and that everyone is to be given equal consideration,

then what else can we do except give equal weight to each person’s

preferences, everyone counting for one. Utilitarianism has the merit

of paying attention to the well being of people involved when

judging social arrangement. There are however, two big flaws in

utilitarianism theory. Firstly, it has misinterpreted the ideal of

equal consideration for each person’s interests, and, as a result,

it allows some people to be treated as less than equals, as a means

to the other people’s end. In other words, utilitarian calculus

tends to ignore inequalities in the distribution of happiness (only

the sum total matter – no matter how unequally distributed). What

are important are the ‘aggregate’ magnitudes, and not the extents of

inequalities in happiness. Secondly, any community that actually

11

attempted to make people equal in well-being would need a collective

identification of what well-being is – of what makes one life better

or more successful than another. Since different people have very

different ambitions and ideals for their lives, a community that

based its entire system of production and distribution on a single,

collective answer – for example, that a successful life is one with

as much pleasure as possible – would hardly treat everyone with

equal concern.

In other words, utilitarianism could justify sacrificing the

weak and unpopular members of the community for the benefit of the

majority. And it would, in any case, violate the principle of equal

responsibility, which reserved the decision on one sense of well

being to individuals and to the community.

John Rawls’ notion of ‘justice as fairness’ will take into account

weaker members of the society who were excluded by utilitarianism.

For moral utilitarianism, each of us has a responsibility always to

act so as to bring about as much food for human being as possible,

that is always to raise the average level of happiness of

flourishing. Rawls argues that we must always act so as to improve

the well being of the worst off people, even when we could produce

more overall good by acting differently. Utilitarianism argues that

a community’s resources should be distributed not equally, but so as

to maximize the welfare or well being of citizens on average (Barker

12

1996). For Rawls, what is to be maximized is not the average

resources of the community as a whole, but the resources of the

poorest section of the community (Rawls 1971).

CHAPTER II: RAWLS’ JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS AND ITS CRITIQUES

1. Rawls

In ‘A Theory of Justice”, Rawls advanced a thorough critique of

utilitarianism and a compelling alternative normative principle

rooted in the tradition of “contractualism” entailing a notion of

justice as fairness. Rawls’ approach is complex and nuanced, yet

several of his chief insights may be rendered more simply without

extreme violence to the deeper analysis from which they flow.

Rawls sets out to discover a normative principle that would be

suitable for designing the constitutional foundations of democratic

society. His work explores the question:

“What is the most appropriate conception of justice for specifying the fair terms of

social co-operation between citizens regarded as free and equal, and as fully co-

operating members of society over a complete life, from one generation to the next?”

(Rawls, Political liberalism, 1996,3)

This question would not be so daunting were we to assume that all

reasonable members of society shared the same conceptions of how we

13

should live, but Rawls emphasizes the fact that in a democratic

society we may not make this presumption. Instead, democratic

citizens are empowered to develop and advocate fundamentally

distinct “comprehensive doctrines”- philosophies, religious

commitments and other deep conceptions about what is right. Many of

this may be reasonable in the liberal sense of accepting the value

of democratic governance, but these comprehensive doctrines may be

largely incompatible in the way they define the social good,

appropriate personal behaviour, social practices, and so forth.

Where such diversity exists, Rawls asks, how might we fashion a

normative principle that can provide the basis for social co-

operation among the members of this society? What normative

principle is apt to secure the willing assent of those with such

deep disagreements?

In response to these questions, Rawls proposes what he calls a

‘political conception of justice’. As the term suggests, this

conception is limited in terms of its field of application. Rawls

seeks a conception of justice that does not compete with or displace

the various comprehensive doctrines that people hold, but that

instead allows them to find a way to live peacefully with each other

in the same democratic space. The political conception must be one

that we may reasonably expect adherents of reasonable (though

distinct) comprehensive doctrine to endorse - not as temporary

14

strategic means of furthering their own comprehensive doctrines, but

as the basis for an enduring democratic society predicated on social

co-operation and fairness.

Rawls’ mission is to discover and defend a normative principle

that can achieve this purpose. His novel approach entails the

construction of a procedure by which rational human actors

themselves discover the principles by which they can achieve social

co-operation, regardless of the substantive disagreements among

their respective comprehensive doctrines. Much of Rawls’ argument

entails specifying precisely the condition that must be met in order

for such actors to reach the right conclusions.

Rawls also specifies the background conditions under which

individuals deliberate in their pursuit of normative principles. He

asks us to presume the existence of a committee of rational

deliberators, each of whom is taken to represent one of the groups

of which society is composed. This committee is assigned the task of

devising a political conception of justice, which all reasonable

groups in society might be expected to accept as basis for social

co-operation. Now Rawls asks us to assume, finally, that the

committee’s deliberations over this principle take place behind the

‘veil of ignorance’. This means that the participants must devise

the principle of justice that would apply to their society and all

groups within it prior to their knowing to which group they will

15

themselves be assigned. The veil of ignorance therefore separates

the interests of each committee member from that of any particular

group. Under these circumstances, Rawls reasons, the committee would

devise the best political account of justice that would be

ultimately acceptable in principle to all (reasonable) groups.

Rawls maintains that the committee would endorse a simple set of

principles, which he captures as follows:

(a) Each person has an equal claim to a full scheme of equal basic

rights and liberties, where each scheme is compatible with the

same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political

liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their

fair value.

(b) Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:

first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to

all under conditions of fair equality and opportunity; second,

they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged

members of society. (Rawls, 1996, 5-6).

Principle (a) requires the equal distribution of what Rawls calls

“primary goods” defined as ‘basic rights, liberties, and

opportunities, and…all purpose means such as income and wealth”, but

also a basis of self-respect (1996, 180-81). These goods are things

citizens need as free and equal persons. Justice as fairness

requires that they be equally provided to all society members, so

16

that each individual has equal substantive ability to pursue their

conception of good and right, but in thus case the opportunities

that people enjoy remain empty promises. The deprived are unable to

secure the “fair value” of these rights and opportunities (1996, 6)

Principle (b), called the “difference principle”, modifies the

first, but Rawls allows for the case in which the equal distribution

of primary goods may harm all of society members. Justice as

fairness permits inequality in the distribution of primary goods

provided those who are the worst off benefit the most thereby.

The difference principle has strong intuitive appeal, especially

in simple cases. Consider a group of people cast adrift in a

lifeboat with limited food and water. Justice as fairness would

warrant an unequal distribution of resources, with those who are

most capable of rowing the boat receiving a disproportionate share,

because this distribution would serve the interest of those least

provisioned (by increasing their chance of survival) far better than

would a strictly equal distribution.

Read in full, justice as fairness requires equal distribution of

some primary goods, including social and economic goods, except to

the degree that inequality will most help those worst off. It

therefore incorporates into the distributive principle consideration

for the practical or instrumental effects of distributive patterns.

This consideration plays an important part in other contemporary

17

approaches to distributive justice. But the test required under the

difference principle, though straightforward in trivial cases, can

be troublesome when applied to more complex situations. At best, a

determination that inequality helps those worst off is difficult to

make; at worst, the difference principle invites self-serving

justifications for inequality from those who gain thereby.

Concerns have been raised by philosophers about the sufficiency of

strict equality of distribution. Michael Walzer (1983), for

instance, has emphasized the differential aspects of distinct goods

as grounds for asserting a distributive principle that seeks justice

through their unequal provision. Walzer sets out to establish a

criterion for distribution of goods that is just by virtue of its

inherent fairness. Like Rawls, the domain with which he is concerned

includes objects of the sort which we usually classify as goods,

such as food, housing and so forth, but also extends beyond these to

include other kinds of valuable possession. Walzer uses the term

‘social good’ to include the entire range of valued, distributed

entities.

2. Walzer and the “complex equality”

Walzer’s chief claim is that the particular character of each social

good should determine its own criterion of distribution. An obvious

example is health care: for Walzer, this vitally important social

18

good should be distributed according to need. Simply put, those who

are in poorest health (rather than those who are wealthiest) should

receive the most care. Need should not however condition every

distribution. Political office, for example should be allocated not

according to the relative personal needs of those who seek it, but

according to the persuasiveness and leadership ability of the

candidates. Artistic and other awards should be allocated according

to merit judged against some set of criteria deemed appropriate by

the relevant community and then equally applied to all those who

compete. In contrast, careers should be open to talents, where those

best able to serve are given chance to do so. To be just,

competition for such positions must occur in the context of just

distribution of education and training (and other vital social goods

like income), in which all are guaranteed the level of education

necessary to participate as full members of society. This is not to

say that education should be distributed equally, either: those with

special needs must have access to sufficient assistance to develop

their talents, while those with special gifts must be allowed to

refine their intellects through advanced training.

Walzer offers this “complex equality” in which the character of

each social good determines its distributive principle, as a

corrective to univocalizing accounts that select but one criterion

for determining the allocation of all social goods (simple

19

equality). According to Walzer, income has served as the principal

focus in many univocalizing accounts of justice, especially among

egalitarians with socialist sensibilities. These egalitarians have

objected to the means by which unequal income has been put. With

respect to the former, Walzer argues that income should be tied to

work performed, not to power, heritage, or other illicit factors

that today shape the distribution of market rewards. With respect to

the latter, unequal income has rightly attracted the concern of

these egalitarians, because it often provides the means for laying

illegitimate claims to other social goods. In Walzer’s terminology,

money has often been a “dominant” good that corrupts the

distribution of other goods, like political office. In Walzer’s

view, those socialists who have called for the equal distribution of

income really intend that money should not hold power outside its

sphere: “what socialists want is a society in which wealth is no

longer convertible into social goods with which it has no intrinsic

connection” (Walzer, 1973, 404).

Money should not be the basis for the allocation of most other

social goods, because the justice claims of complex equality demand

that they be distributed according to their own inherent qualities.

Instead, money should serve merely as the means of acquiring

(distributing) those goods that people may desire, but which are not

essential for life itself, the achievement of self-respect,

20

political efficacy, or personal flourishing. Hence money should not

acquire health care, political office, careers, education, etc.

Distribution according to merits can also be questioned. The

role played by the community is, most of the time, neglected.

Actually, community is the first agent of production, as W. Dugger

(1989) would say. In fact, the community, past and present, is a

repository of the knowledge and skills, language, norms, and customs

that dictate a society’s level of productivity and ability to

generate wealth. The schoolteacher, the health care provider, the

parent and the coach all leave a trace on society’s ability to

produce – they enter the factory in the form of the skills,

temperament, and aptitude of workers whom they help to mold.

These respective net contributions cannot be parsed and added

to yield a total output. Consequently, distribution according to

the direct net contribution of individual factor suppliers makes no

sense: while those who provide the actual labour, capital and land

to produce are taken to be the proximate agents of production, the

community at large is understood to be its ultimate source.

If production is to reflect contribution, then it is the

deeper, ultimate source of output that should count. In Dugger’s

constitutionalist view, the community at large has the rightful

claim to the total social output. The distribution of the total

product should be largely egalitarian. As we will see with Amartya

21

Sen, egalitarianism is intrinsically right because it provides each

individual fair opportunity to develop their capacities, to live a

fully human life. It is also instrumentally right because it best

serves the interests and needs of the broader community.

In short, Walzer’s complex equality entails a system in which

the distribution of any one social good must not become the basis

for the distribution of other social goods; that is, no one social

good should be dominant. Each criterion of distribution must reign

in its own domain, and not be allowed to spill over to others. This

argument therefore undermines Rawls’ univocal distributive

principles, because distinct social goods call forth distinct

distributive criteria. The univocal egalitarian principle of need is

alien to the sphere of medical care and not to the sphere of the

market, for example. In a market economy for instance, relations

between labour and capital are pivotal in connection to the

distribution of social product. As John Commons (1924) has shown,

criteria of distribution in the market economy are biased against

workers. For Commons, in the market transactions, parties entering

into contract do not have equal bargaining power.

22

3.Commons and the distribution of the social product in the market

economy

Commons’ chief normative concern was to secure fairness in the

capital-labor nexus. In his view, the so-called “free” labor market

of the early twentieth century was neither free nor fair.

Commons’ career spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. This was a time of tremendous economic upheaval in the

US. Large oligopolies established control over the most important

industries, huge manufacturing facilities emerged which drew

together hundreds of thousands of workers in industrial cities, and

episodic labor strife broke out across the country. Commons sought

to discover and implement workable reforms, which would deliver the

promise of economic development to all members of society while

alleviating the causes of social turmoil. Only government

intervention could repair the skewed balance of power that capital

wielded over labor.

Unlike neoclassical economists, Commons refuses the notion that

a bargain struck by nominally free parties in a market is by

definition fair. The neoclassical view stems from the simple

intuition that in the free market, in which every contracting party

has the formal freedom to refrain from concluding any agreement that

it views as deficient, any agreement reached must be deemed

beneficial in the eyes of the concerned parties. An unfair agreement

23

will simply not be completed, or at least, must be the result of a

mistake by one of the parties, and so will not be repeated. Hence,

the orthodox view, the default position in assessing market

transactions, must be to take them as essentially fair.

Commons’ chief insight for our present purposes is to see that

a contract is fair only if the two parties entering into it have

equal bargaining power in the formation of its terms. He designates

the fair price achieved through contracting among genuinely equal

parties ‘reasonable value’.

Commons focuses on the parties ‘ability to wait’ as the chief

operational and visible component of market power. When one party in

a market is more desperate to reach agreement quickly than is its

counterpart, perhaps because what one has to sell is perishable or

because one faces a relative absence of alternative parties with

which to contract, for example, the resulting contract reached will

be unfair to that party. The greater the asymmetry in ability to

wait is, the greater will be the ultimate unfairness.

Through the concepts of genuine equality, the power to wait and

reasonable value, Commons provides a normative basis for evaluating

market outcomes. Moreover, these concepts provide direction for

intervening in those markets, which are marred by unfairness in

order to bring about reasonable value. And in this regard, Commons

identifies the labor market as a critical site in need of reform.

24

He first claims that the orthodox view of the labour market, in

which supply plus demand comprise free and equal individual actors

with no market power, is an illusion. In this market, each

individual worker confronts combinations of investors who are joined

together in the corporation. This asymmetry is obscured by the

fiction of treating the corporation as a singular entity, analogous

to the single worker, even though it is itself an organization

joining the resource and defending the interests of many individual

investors.

Second, he claims that workers’ corporations do not have equal

ability to wait. While the firm can refrain from reaching agreement

with any particular worker (given that it represent the short side

of the market), each worker needs to secure and retain employment in

order to survive and to provide for their dependents. Individual

workers are therefore unable to achieve reasonable value. As

consequence, the free labour market yields an inherently unjust

distribution of the social product.

For Commons, this asymmetry can be overcome through two chief

institutional reform: first, the legally sanctioned combination of

workers in labour unions, and the creation of regulatory commissions

to oversee and intervene in the labour market. The labour union

parallels the combination represented by the corporation, and allow

workers to achieve together something they are unable to achieve

25

individually. It enhances workers’ ability to wait by pooling

resources that can be distributed to union members during work

stoppages, while reducing the corporation’ ability to wait by

removing substitutes from the market. Second the regulatory

commission supplements the efforts of unions to ensure that genuine

equality in the labour market is indeed achieved.

The neoclassical inference of ‘fairness’ from ‘willingness’

fails to give adequate attention to the possible injustice

surrounding the circumstances that attend the contracting process.

For Commons, a fair agreement requires fair opportunity. An

agreement, in which a slave “chooses” to work under onerous

conditions rather than risk punishment of injury or death, is not at

all fair. Commons refuses the designation of ‘fairness’ to any

agreement reached under coercive force of unequal power. The

‘unfairness’ lies on the unjust appropriation of the ‘surplus’ by

one class of individuals to use a Marxian concept. In fact, for any

society to survive and flourish over time, those who perform the

labour necessary for provisioning must produce not only enough to

meet their own needs (called ‘necessary labour’), but also a

‘surplus’. This is because, at any given moment, many members of

society will not be able to perform the labour necessary to meet

their own needs: or they (society) will have decided that though

26

they have this ability, they ought not apply themselves to this task

(infants, infirmed, writers, etc…).

4. Brief Marxian Normative Commitment

In the Marxian view, societies differ with respect to the ways in

which they organize the production, appropriation and distribution

of the social surplus. ‘Production’ refers to the manner in which

the social surplus comes into existence. Who performs the vitally

important labour that is necessary to generate the surplus, and

under what social arrangement. ‘Appropriation’ refers to the process

and mechanisms by which initial claims are made on this surplus. Who

are the initial receivers of the surplus, and by what legal rights,

informal customs and other arrangements do they occupy this

privileged social position? Finally, ‘distribution’ refers to the

processes by which portions of the surplus flow from the initial

receivers (the appropriators) to other claimants in society. It

captures the mechanisms by which the appropriators are either

required or we otherwise disposed to share portions of the surplus.

For example, must they pay taxes to the state, or interest to

lenders, or rent to landlords? Do they face pressure to reinvest a

portion of the surplus?

Marxists refer to the production, appropriation and

distribution of the surplus as ‘class process’. In fact one of the

27

chief concepts of Marxian theory is ‘class’. Each class process may

occasion diverse tensions and conflicts, or what Marxists call

‘class struggle’. Those who produce surplus may resist its

appropriation by others, while the ultimate claimants of the surplus

may mobilize to increase their respective shares. Absent here is any

notion of equilibrium or social harmony.

Marxian tradition distinguishes between class arrangements that

are ‘exploitative’ and those that are “non-exploitative”. The former

refers to those class processes in which the producers of the

surplus do not themselves lay initial claim to the surplus that they

produce. Instead, the surplus is taken from them without

compensation.

In the Marxian view, capitalism represents a particularly

insidious class arrangement because the form of exploitation

associated with it is obscured by an appearance of equality and

personal freedom in the market. The producers are legally free -

free to enter the labour market and to form and terminate contracts

with employers as they see fit. But, for Marx, they are free in an

ironic sense: “freed” from ownership of the means of production –

the tools and materials needed to produce – they are free only to be

exploited by the employer of their choice, or to fall into poverty.

Formal equality before the law therefore obscures the substantive

inequality between producers and appropriators of the surplus, an

28

inequality that herds workers into the ranks of the exploited (Marx

1977).

A non-exploitative class process is one in which those who

produce the surplus serve also as the first claimants on the

surplus, one in which the producers are also appropriators. Just as

people as citizens should have political rights to self-governance,

so should they as workers have economic rights to appropriate the

surplus their labour generates.

Marx worries that the constellation of the laws, institutions

and customs that tend to arise in societies where exploitative class

processes pre-dominate, generally obstruct fair distributions. It is

the Marxian hope then that a society in which the producers of

surplus also serve as appropriators will be more apt to generate

laws, institutions and costumes that yield distributive justice.

Having displaced the tyranny of rule by non-producing appropriators,

a society in which non-exploitative class processes predominate

might be expected to devise fairer systems of final distribution,

not just of the social surplus, but of substantive opportunities and

freedoms as well.

There is no guarantee, however that this will be the case. Each of

the three moments of the class process (production, appropriation

and distribution of the surplus) is potential sites of conflict

among diverse social groups and sites of injustice. Hence, it would

29

be mistaken to essentialize appropriation as the fundamental

determinant of economic outcomes - as if the distribution of the

surplus were a simple consequence of appropriation. The Marxian view

therefore might better be thought of as coupling three distinct

spheres of class justice: justice in the production, appropriation,

and distribution of the surplus. Marxian notion of justice encompass

all three aspects of the class process. These Marxian notions will

entail what DeMartino (2000) calls “productive justice”,

“appropriative justice”, and “distributive justice”. The Marxian

project is to establish societies that approach all three forms of

justice.

Although there is broad support for egalitarianism in some form

or another among political theorists, philosophers, and others,

concerns have been raised about the sufficiency of strict equality

of distribution. Rawls and others dismissed utilitarianism and

equality of well being. Rawlsian distribution of primary goods will

also be challenged, as we will see, by Sen when he highlights the

complications that result from differences between individuals that

affect their respective needs and abilities. For now, let us examine

another major philosopher of equality who thinks that “any

conception of equality that respects ethical individualism must aim

to make people equal, not in well being judged from some collective

point of view, but in the resources each controls” (Dworkin

30

1996:45). Dworkin argues that in a society that is egalitarian in

this sense, people are free to decide how to use their equal share

of resources to achieve well being or a better life as they judge

it, each for himself or herself.

CHAPTER III: RONALD DWORKIN AND EQUALITY OF RESOURCES

1. Introduction

Dworkin proposes the concept of equality of resources as a valid

interpretation of the fundamental principle of treating everyone

with equal concern. He answers the question ‘what is equality?’ in

terms of equality of resources. Dworkin’s equality of resources does

not mean that everyone must have the same wealth no matter how much

or little he has worked or spent. “ A distribution is equal, when

the resources different people control are equal in the opportunity

costs of those resources, that is, the value they would have in the

hands of other people” (Dworkin 1999: 99).

Dworkin sees the best means of realizing equality of resources

to be through an auction governed by the condition of equality

between participants, the criterion of which is the ‘envy test’.

However, he adds to this auction an insurance system, which has the

function of redistributing a portion of some people’s personal

resources, namely, talent and endowments, to those less blessed in

talent and luck.

31

Before going any further, it is important to notice that

Dworkin distinguishes two types of resources, personal and

impersonal resources. Impersonal resources comprises property, i.e.,

‘land, raw materials, buildings, television sets, computers as well

as various legal rights. Personal resources on the other hand,

comprise ‘intellectual and physical qualities which influence the

success of individuals while realizing their plans and projects,

physical and mental health, strength and talent’. (Dworkin 1999:

100). Dworkin suggests that both personal and impersonal resources

should be morally subject to the principle of equality. Impersonal

resources are submitted to an auction as distributive procedure

while personal resources are submitted to a sort of insurance system

(Merle 1999: 439). For Dworkin, however, no distribution is fully

equal distribution unless it passes the ‘envy test’ (Dworkin 1999:

99).

2. Hypothetical Auction and the ‘Envy Test’

In Dworkin’s paradigm, envy is an economic and not a psychological

phenomenon. The aim of this ‘envy test’ is to make sure that no

member of the community envies the total set of resources under the

control of any other member. This, include the choices about

employments and consumption that have produced those resources.

‘Envy test’ may be met even when the welfare or well being that

32

people achieve with the resources under their control is not equal.

In fact, if one person’s goals or ambitions are more easily

satisfied than mine, or if her personality is otherwise different in

some pertinent way, she will have much greater welfare than I do

from the same resources. The ‘envy test’ is a pre-condition for

equality of distribution.

However, the ‘envy test’ could be met, and perfect equality of

resources secured only by a kind of original position where

resources are auctioned among people who begin with equal bidding

resources. If such an auction were repeated until no one wishes it

to be run again, and it did finally stop, the ‘envy test’ would be

met according to Dworkin (1999: 46). It means that no one would

prefer the bundle of resources anyone else secured in the auction.

If he had preferred another’s bundle, he would have acquired that

bundle in place of his own. Everyone takes part in the auction on an

equal footing; each participant in the auction has the same amount

of ‘clamshells’, a sort of money which allows each to purchase in

the auction whatever she likes (Merle 1999).

This hypothetical auction is an auction of impersonal

resources. After the auction has stopped, the envy test will not yet

be satisfied because personal resources will remain unequal. Despite

an equality of impersonal resource, one could still envy someone

else’ s set of resources which includes his talent and health as

33

well. Once the auction has stopped and people each begin to produce

and trade from the initial resources, someone with advantage in

talent and health will produce more and soon destroy the initial

equality in impersonal resources as well. Difference in luck may

also have the same effect. One’s life may prosper and another’s’

decline because of their brute bad lack with respect to risks they

could not have anticipated and did not choose to run.

Dworkin suggests some means of compensation to repair

inequality brought by difference in personal resources and bad luck.

“Equality of resources consists on compensatory strategies to

repair, so far as this can be done, inequalities in personal

resources and in brute bad luck” (Dworkin 1999: 100). Personal

resources and brute bad luck are submitted to different procedure

than impersonal resources. It consists in an insurance each

participant in the auction is supposed to contract after buying her

equal share of resources with the ‘clamshells’, but before knowing

which personal resources she will have at her disposal. There is a

kind of ‘veil of ignorance’ in regard to the resources one will

dispose. Rational actors will feel the obligation of adopting this

compensatory strategy after the auction and once they have entered

into economic life in the real world. So, the difference between the

auction and the insurance system lies in the time they take place.

The auction is a sort of original position in which resources were

34

distributed for the fist time. The insurance involves redistribution

of what the worst-off would have had, if the original distribution

in the auction had been fair, i.e., if it had given them an equal

share of endowments and good luck (Merle 1999). The auction assigns

original resources while the insurance redistributes produced

resources. So the resources distributed in the insurance system are

of different nature from those distributed by the auction. Dworkin’s

insurance system is in fact a system of income tax. If the insured

person happens to have poor endowments or bad lack, she will be paid

a minimum income.

3. Hypothetical Insurance

Even though it is impossible to compensate perfectly inequalities

caused by difference in personal resources and brute bad luck, it is

nonetheless important to justify why some form of redistribution of

wealth is required from fairness up to a particular point.

“Methods of compensation can be devised that use a system of taxation and

redistribution, either in funds or in opportunities for employment or in resources like

medical care, which modelled on a hypothetical insurance market that mimics an

actual insurance market under circumstances of initial equality” (Dworkin 1999:

101).

To design his system of income tax, Dworkin starts by asking the

following question: “if all people had equal funds and could all

35

purchase insurance on the same terms at premiums reflecting actual

risks in an ordinary commercial insurance market, how much insurance

would the average person buy, at what premium, against accidents,

handicaps, and unemployment and low income?” (Dworkin 1999: 101).

The answer to this question is used to design a tax system where the

taxes paid equal the premiums that would have been paid in an

insurance market, so that the redistribution would equal the total

insurance coverage.

For Dworkin, a system of redistributive taxation of this kind

could provide opportunities and resources that would have been

available to people had initial equality been greater. As we can

see, equality of resources prefers provision of opportunities,

particularly of jobs, to provision of funds.

“Providing jobs, though perhaps equally expensive as providing money transfers,

better ensures that people will have only income they are prepared to work to

produce, which is what equality of resources, structured on the opportunity cost

model, aims to guarantee” (Dworkin 1999: 102).

What is at stake in Dworkin’s model is the will to make resources

available and to make them equally available for all. It is not that

easy because what is an equal distribution is sensitive to price,

which is in turn dependent on what people think best for themselves

to have, and mostly because some resources are personal.

36

4. Merle’s critique

Jean-Christophe Merle has rightly observed that Dworkin ignored the

difference between original or natural resources, and produced

resources, which are either used as producer resources, if they are

employed to produce other goods, or as consumer resources, if they

are not (Merle 1999: 440). For Merle, this lack of distinction is

fatal to Dworkin’s theory. Produced resources result from the

combination of at least two factors, namely, the original and other

resources and the labour needed to produce them. Merle’s chief

objection is that Dworkin does not question the rightness of

distributing both that part of produced resources for which labour

is responsible, and that part for which original resources are

responsible.

In Dworkin’s design, the insurance system was intended to be a

surrogate for a second auction - that of produced resources. It is

because physical circumstances made this second auction morally

unacceptable that Dworkin will recourse to his insurance scheme.

Since the auction itself was designed for no other purpose than

realizing equality of resources, the same ethical principle – of

equality of resources – should guide the choice of an amount for the

insurance.

Merle’s alternative is to have only one auction starting when

everyone’s endowments are already known. In order to realise

37

equality in resources (impersonal and personal considered together),

the inequality observed in the natural distribution of personal

resources should be compensated by the distribution of impersonal

resources during the auction. For Merle, in order to compensate the

natural attribution of talents, the more talented for example,

should be given less impersonal resources, while the less talented

should in turn receive more impersonal resources. The more the

number of natural endowments possessed by any one individual exceeds

that of the community average, the greater is the number of

‘clamshells’ must be deduced from the sum which this individual

would otherwise received, and the deducted ‘clamshells’ are then

given to the people possessing fewer endowments than average (Merle

1999: 440-1). Realised this way, equality of resources avoid

enslaving the hard workers of the community. This would also lead to

equality of income, for the inequality of resources due to the

inequality of talents would be compensated by an extra income given

to the less talented. But, there is still the factor of the

unforeseeable bad luck, which cannot be included in the auction. For

Merle, if the aim were to consider bad luck as belonging to the

resources which are morally to be distributed equally, it would have

to be equalised by an insurance scheme.

The difference between Dworkin’s model and Merle’s is that in

the Dworkin design redistribution of natural endowments is operated

38

by an insurance system, while in Merle’s alternative the

redistribution occurs through a singular auction. For Dworkin,

equality of resources is the valid interpretation of treating

everyone’s interest with equal concern. Indeed, the insurance system

does not provide the poor in talent and luck with the job they would

have got had they average endowment and average luck. Instead, it

gives them some resources. But, if someone consumes her resources

directly, instead of using them as a means of production, Dworkin’s

insurance system is clearly not meant to compensate her for talents

and abilities, which she might not lack. However, the insurance

system cannot prevent this from happening.

The biggest flaw in Dworkin’s model is that after the insurance

system has performed its redistribution, talented and hardworking

people may even possess less income than talented and lazy people.

The former may have re-invested a part of their resources, whereas

the latter will not. The re-invested part would be a part the

talented and hardworking do not consume. Yet the product of their

investment and of their work will once again be shared with the

talented but lazy people. People in dire straits from their own

faults – for instance, choosing not to work at all or overspending –

will receive an unfair high share of resources. They would for the

first time receive something in the original auction of resources

39

and for the second time because they get a part of the resources

other people have produced.

The case of disabled people seems also to be unsolvable in

Dworkin’s model. Suppose that producer resources are equally

distributed, it seems useless for people with ‘handicaps’, or

disabilities.

Merle insists on the equality of producer good and stipulates

that nobody would be allowed to consume her share of producer goods,

for example by selling them for money to waste on drinking or women,

etc. This way, people always retain the possibility of working in

order to maintain their means of subsistence. In this regard,

equality of resources could prevent individuals from enjoying or

feeling the effects of a very large part of the results of their

choice to work hard.

To the question ‘equality of what?’ Rawls’ answer is equality

of ‘primary goods’, including basic rights, liberties, and

opportunities, and all-purpose means such as income and wealth.

Dworkin’s answer is equality if resources with an auction procedure

and the insurance to compensate inequality in personal resources and

unforeseeable bad luck. Sen, however, sees equality of primary

goods in Rawls’ analysis and equality of resources in Dworkin’s

theory as only instrumental in giving people equitable opportunity

to pursue their respective goals and objectives. Thus the importance

40

of primary goods and resources is only derivative because it depends

on the respective opportunity to convert primary goods and resources

into fulfilment of the respective goals, or into freedom to pursue

them. Sen holds that the conversion possibilities can, in fact be

very diverse for different people, and this does weaken the

rationale of the derivative importance of equality of primary goods

or resources (Sen 1992: 19). What should be equality distributed

according to Sen are capabilities to convert primary goods or

resources into achievements.

CHAPTER IV: AMARTYA SEN AND CAPABILITIES EQUALITY

1. Introduction

Influenced by the egalitarian vision of Ralws and other scholars of

distributive justice, Sen undertakes to investigate how the

existence of interpersonal differences bears upon egalitarian

project. In Sen’s view, Ralw’s approach to justice as fairness fails

to account satisfactorily for interpersonal differences, both within

and across societies. He underlines the range of physical and mental

capabilities that exist across individuals and also structures that

mark their respective societies. For Sen, these important

41

differences affect people’s ability to transform primary goods or

resources into the actual achievement that they have reason to value

(Sen 1992). So the substantive importance of the question,

‘equality of what?’ relates to the empirical facts of pervasive

human diversity. Human diversity helps to concentrate the question

of equality on people’s capability to achieve valuable functionings

that make up their lives and more generally their freedom to promote

objectives they have reason to value (Sen 1992).

As Sen notes, a person bound to a wheelchair will require more

resources to achieve the same level of personal mobility than will

others; a woman who is pregnant will require greater caloric intake

to achieve the same level of nourishment. Moreover, a community that

inhabits a malaria-infected region will require more medical

resources than a more advantageously placed community in order to

achieve the same level of health (Sen 1992).

2. Human Diversity and Equality project

Human beings differ from each other in many different ways. ¨People

have different external characteristics and circumstances. We start

life with different endowments of inherited wealth and liabilities.

We live in different natural environments – some more hostile than

others. The communities to which we belong offer very different

opportunities as to what we can or cannot do. The epistemological

42

factors in the region in which we live can profoundly affect health

and well being. People also differ in personal characteristics, such

as age, sex, physical and mental abilities (Sen 1992: 19-20).

These differences are important for assessing inequality.

Thus, inequality in terms of one variable – say income – may take us

in a very different direction from inequality in the space of

another variable (e.g. a functioning ability or well-being). A

disable person cannot function in the way an able-bodied person can,

even if both have exactly the same income. There is a plurality of

variable on which one can focus to evaluate interpersonal

inequality, e.g. respective incomes, wealth, utilities, resources,

liberties, rights, quality of life, etc It is therefore necessary to

choose an ‘evaluative space’ in order to analyse inequality. The

extensive human diversity makes the difference in focus particularly

important. Had all people been exactly similar, equality in one

space (e.g. incomes) would tend to be congruent with equality in

other (e.g. health, well-being, happiness) (Sen 1992: 20).

In sum, Sen argues that the idea of equality is confronted by

two different types of diversities: the basic heterogeneity of human

beings on the one hand and on the other hand, the multiplicity of

variables in terms of which equality can be judges. The

heterogeneity of people leads to divergences in the assessment of

equality in terms of different variable. In other words, the

43

assessment of the claims of equality has to come to terms with the

existing pervasive human diversity. Ignoring these interpersonal

variations may lead to a deeply unequal result in hiding the fact

that equal consideration for all may demand very unequal treatment

in favour of the disadvantaged. Moreover, the demands of substantive

equality can be particularly complex when there is a good deal of

antecedent inequality to counter.

So, judgement and measurement of inequality is deeply dependent

on the choice of the variable (wealth, income, resources, primary

goods, utilities, liberties, happiness, etc…) in term of which

comparisons are made. The characteristics of inequality in different

spaces tend to diverge from each other, because of the heterogeneity

of people. There is therefore a need to address the diversity of

focus in assessing equality. As Sen will put it, “ What is taken to

be a more central focus rules the roost, and inequalities in the

variables that are treated as peripheral must, then, be accepted in

order not to violate the right arrangements (including equality) at

the more central level” (1992: 3).

For Sen, interpersonal differences are salient because income,

resources or primary goods are valuable only to the degree that they

allow for the achievement of those states and conditions that people

have reason to value. As we will see, Sen refers to them as

‘functionings’. They rage from “simple states, like being well-

44

nourished or avoiding preventable morbidity and premature mortality,

to more complex states, like ‘appearing in public without shame’,

having self-respect, being able to take part in the life of

community, or achieving political efficacy, …” (Sen 1992: 5; 1999:

66). Sen designates the full set of functionings that a person can

achieve, owing to her mental and physical capacities, but also to

her social, economic, cultural, and other circumstances, and her

‘capabilities’. A person who faces a thicker and more extensive

capability set is taken to have a higher potential quality of life

than someone with a thinner and smaller capability set. Indeed

below some capability threshold (Maccabbew threshold) level, a good

life is hardly possible at all, as Martha Nussbaum has shown

(Nussbaum, 1992).

Having drawn these distinctions, Sen concludes that the ‘focal

variable’ that should be equalized to reach an ideal social

arrangement is nether primary goods or resources per se, but human

capabilities. Owing to the existence of human diversity, an equal

distribution of resources or primary goods is apt to yield very

different levels of potential achievement, but, if the end is to

enhance potentialities to achieve a valued life, then an

equalitarian approach to justice should seek equality of that

directly rather than equality of means to live a valued life.

Against Rawls and Dworkin, Sen calls for the unequal distribution of

45

primary goods or resources in pursuit of equality of capabilities to

achieve functionings. In other words, the focal variable for

assessing equality, according to Sen, is the freedom to achieve.

This means “a person’s capability to achieve functionings that he or

she has reason to value provides a general approach to the

evaluation of social arrangements” (Sen 1992: 4).

Sen’s approach of equality has three principle virtues

according to George DeMartino (2000: 108-9).

First, like Walzer, it is about a complex equality. Sen rejects

the univocal account of equality on the ground that human existence

is too rich and diverse to be adequately accounted for by any one

indicator. Even though he chooses capabilities as a singular focal

variable, capabilities include an extensive vector of distinct

functionings. Sen, like Walzer, is troubled by the problems of the

domination of one variable. For Walzer, this occurs when the

distribution of one social variable (e.g. income) illicitly

influenced the distribution of another (e.g. political office or

academic reward). For Sen, this occurs when unequal capabilities in

one domain (e.g. the ability to achieve mobility) yields unequal

capabilities in another (the ability to secure employment). As we

have seen, Walzer calls for barriers to prevent spillovers, so that

a proper inequality in the distribution of one social good does not

interfere with the distribution of another. Sen’s solution is to

46

call for the equal distribution of each and every kind of

capability.

Second, Sen’s notion of equality privileges what may be called

‘substantive freedom’. Sen’s ideal society does not entail that each

individual reaches the same achievements- that is a matter for each

of us to decide; only that each has the same substantive ability to

do so. A person might rightly choose to refuse nutrition, or may

choose to forego the degree of sheltering that is available to him.

For Sen, the act of choosing is itself a valuable functioning, one

that would be affected by any distributive system that requires

conformance in the lives we live. But, the freedom-based perspective

must also pay attention to the nature and value of the actual

achievements, and inequalities in achievement can throw light on

inequalities in the respective freedom enjoyed.

Equality of opportunities, for example, is usually used in a

restrictive way. It is defined in terms of the equal availability of

some particular means, or with reference to equal applicability (or

non-applicability) of some specific barriers or constraints.

Equality of opportunities does not amount to anything like equality

of overall freedoms. This so because of, on the one hand, the

diversity of human beings and, on the other hand, the existence and

importance of various means (such as income or wealth) that does not

fall within the parview of standardly defined ‘equality of

47

opportunities. A more adequate way of considering ‘real’ equality of

opportunities must be according to Sen, through equality of

capabilities (or through the elimination of unambiguous inequalities

in capabilities), since capability comparisons are typically

incomplete (Sen 1992: 7).

There is also a strong affinity with Dugger’s emphasis on the

obligation of society to provide each member with the means

necessary to flourish and with the freedom to live his own life.

Third, the principle of capabilities equality promotes

extensive social experimentation. It entails no necessary

presumptions about the existence of one ideal set of institutional

arrangement such as communism, capitalism or neoliberalism. The

capability approach, instead, encourages us to interrogate

vigilantly the actual performance of the existing economic systems

that arise and to press for reform to the degree that they fail to

meet the demanding standard of capabilities equality. Sen refuses

‘end of history’ narratives that anticipate the achievement of some

final state of social organization. He takes an ‘open-ended’ view of

how societies might best enhance the capabilities of their

inhabitants, understanding that different types of institutions and

practices will be necessary at different epochs due to changed

circumstances and values of society’s members. It is now time to

make explicit Sen’s key notions of functionings and capabilities.

48

3. Functionings and Capabilities in Sen’s argument

The concept of ‘functionings’, as used by Amartya Sen, reflects the

various things a person may value doing or being. “The valued

functionings may vary from elementary ones, such as being adequately

nourished and being free from avoidable disease, to very complex

activities or personal states, such as being able to take part in

the life of the community and having self-respect” (Sen 1999:75).

It follows that a person’s ‘capability’ refers to the alternative

combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve.

“Capability is a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve

alternative functioning combinations (freedom to achieve various

lifestyles)” (Sen 1999: 75). To illustrate his definition of

capability, Sen takes a comparison between an affluent person who

fasts and a destitute person who is forced to stave. They may both

have the same functioning achievement in terms of eating or

nourishment, but, the person who fasts does have a different

‘capability set’ than the second who is forced to stave. The first

can choose to eat well, and be well nourished in a way the second

cannot (Sen 1999). If we represent the extent of each functioning

enjoyed by a person by a real number, then a person’s actual

achievement can be seen as a functioning vector. The ‘capability

set’ will then consist of the alternative functioning vectors that

49

she can chose from (Sen 1999). It follows that the evaluative focus

of this ‘capability approach’ can be either on the realized

functionings (what a person is actually able to do) or on the

capability set of alternatives she has (her real opportunities). The

former gives information about the things a person does while the

latter informs us about the things a person is substantively free to

do (Sen 1999).

In other words, Sen’s claim is that functionings are

constitutive of a person’s being, and an evaluation of well being

has to take the form of an assessment of these constituent elements.

Capability is, therefore, a set of vectors of functionings,

reflecting the person’s freedom to lead the type of life he valued.

Just like the ‘budget set’ in the commodity represents a person’s

freedom to buy commodity bundles, the ‘capability set’ in the

functioning space reflects the person’s freedom to choose from

possible lives.

The link between a person’s capability and her well being can

be established in two different ways. First, if the achieved

functionings constitute a person’s well being, then the capability

to achieve functionings (i.e. all alternative combinations of

functionings a person can choose to have) will constitute the

person’s freedom – the real opportunities – to have well being. The

second connection between well being and capability takes the direct

50

form of making achieved well being itself depend on the capability

to function. Indeed, choice itself is a valuable part of living, and

a life of genuine choice with serious options may be seen to be, for

that reason, richer. The capability approach makes room for a

variety of doings and beings as important in themselves. It provides

a fuller recognition of the variety of ways in which lives can be

enriched or impoverished. Moreover, the variability in the

conversion of means into ends (or into freedom to pursue ends) is

already reflected in the extents of those achievements and freedoms

that may figure in the list of ends. As we can see, the capability

perspective is inescapably pluralist inasmuch as there are different

functionings, some are more important than others. There is also the

problem of what weight to attach to substantive freedom (capability

set) compared to the actual achievement (the chosen functioning

vector). The main theoretical difficulty in the capability approach

to interpersonal comparisons arises from the obvious fact hat not

all capabilities stand on the same footing. The capability to move

about for example has a different significance than the capability

to play basketball. More generally speaking, there is the underlying

issue of how much weight should be placed on the capabilities,

compared with any relevant consideration.

As we state above, capability is primarily a reflection of the

freedom to achieve valuable functionings. It concentrates directly

51

on freedom as such rather than on the means to achieve freedom and

it identifies the real alternatives we have. In so far as

functionings are constitutive of well being, capability is a

person’s freedom to achieve well being. Indeed, the achievement of

well being is not independent of the processes through which we

achieve various functionings and the part that our own decision

plays in those choices. As Sen would put it,

“[S]ince an important part of the force of the capability approach lies in moving us

away from the space of commodities, incomes, resources, or utilities, etc… on to the

space of constitutive elements of living, it is important to note that there is no

difference as far as the space is concerned between focusing on functionings or on

capabilities. A functioning combination is a point in such a space, whereas capability

is a set of such points” (Sen 1992: 50).

Capability approach has its roots in the Aristotelian tradition of

political distribution as Martha Nussbaum1 shown it.

1 Nussbaum’s work has shown the parallel between Sen’s distributive justice and Aristotelian conception of the society in Politics. In what follows, wewill comment Nussbaum’s contribution in settling the notions of capability and functionings in Aristotelian framework. See Nussbaum, C. M., “ Nature, function, and capability: Aristotle on political distribution » In Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary volume, 1988, pp 144-184

52

4. Distribution of Functionings and Capabilities in Aristotelian

set up

In Politics, Aristotle held the following view: The aim of the

political planning is the distribution between the city’s individual

people of the conditions in which a good human life can be chosen

and lived. This distributive task aims at producing capabilities.

That is, it aims not simply at allotment of commodities, but at

making people able to function in a certain human way (Aristotle

paraphrased by Nussbaum 1988: 145). “It is evident that the best

politeia is that arrangement according to which anyone whatsoever might

do best and have flourishing life” (Pol 1324a23-5). Aristotle

carried on by affirming that, “ it is the job of the excellent

lawgiver to consider, concerning a city and a class of human beings

and every other association, how they will partake in the

flourishing living that is possible for them” (Pol 1325a7-ff). A

necessary basis for being a recipient of Aristotle distribution is

that one should already possess some less developed capability to

perform the functioning in question. The task of the city is, then,

to effect the transition from one level of capability to another. It

means that the task of the city cannot be understood apart from a

substantial account of the human good and what it is to function

humanly (Nussbaum 1988).

53

For Aristotle, the end of distribution is to be understood in

terms of capability. Thus, this distributive conception forces us to

assess political arrangements by looking to the functonings of

individuals, taken one by one – as to whether they are enabled by

that arrangement to function best. In Aristotle’s view, what the

structure does is not to necessitate actual good functioning, but to

create a context in which a person might live well, i.e., might

choose a flourishing life. The structure opens a field of choice.

For Aristotle, a theory of good political arrangement requires and

rests upon a theory of good human life “for it is appropriate, if

people are governed best that they should do best, in so far as

their circumstances admit – unless something catastrophic happens”

(Pol 1323a17-19; Nussbaum 1988: 147). Otherwise put, it is a matter

of best-ness for the political arrangement involved that it should

function best in so far as circumstances permit. On the same line,

Aristotle holds that a political arrangement has as its task the

securing to its people of the necessary conditions for a full good

human life. It is to create a context in which everyone may choose

to function in the ways that are constitutive of a good human life

(Pol VII.1 and VII.1-2). This end cannot be understood apart from an

understanding of those functionings. For Aristotle, the task of

political arrangement is both broad and deep: broad, in that it is

concerned with the good lives of many people, not just a small

54

elite, deep in that it is concerned with the totality of the

functionings that constitute a good human life (Nussbaum 1998).

According to Aristotle, it is not enough for an arrangement to

concern itself with goods and resources and offices. The

distributive task must be done, when it is done, with an eye on a

full conception of the human functionings. “The aim of every

lawgiver is to make people capable of living well; and those who do

not succeed in this are failing in their aim, and this is the

difference between a good political arrangement and a bad one”

(Nicomachean Ethics II.I.1103b2-6). For Aristotle as for Sen, the

right way to look at these instrumental goods – income, wealth,

resources…- is in the context of their relationship to human

activity, asking how, in a variety of circumstances, they enhance or

impede such activity. One cannot properly estimate the worth of

distributable goods until one have an account of functionings

towards which these goods are useful. What the lawgiver has to put

in place are bases of these functionings – the capabilities of

persons out of which excellent functioning, doing well and living

well, can be selected.

For Aristotle, as well as for Sen, the distributional question

must be addressed in the context of each individual’s functional

needs. Distribution does not mean spreading something around just

for the sake of doing it, as if these things have significance in

55

themselves. The aim of a distribution is to make people capable of

choosing to live and act in a certain way. This means that we will

define our goal in terms of capabilities. Nussbaum took the example

of food distribution, which will not be well done, or whose aims

will not be well understood, unless we first ask what it is that

people do as a result of being well or not well nourished. “We must

ask what the functional requirements of the individual for food are,

relatively to the metabolic rate, the activity level, and the other

life conditions of that individual” (Nussbaum 1989: 153). This means

that the distribution will be done with a view not to wealth or

resource itself, but, for example, to mobility; not to books and

schools themselves, but to the capability to get an education, and

so on and so forth. In other words, we value distributable goods not

because they have worth in their own right, but because of what they

do for people. The goal is a certain sort of capability – the

capability to function well if one so chooses. So, “the basis of

distribution is a lower-level capability of the person, an untrained

natural capability to attain the higher functioning level, given the

addition of certain further distributable conditions” (Nussbaum

1998: 160). Aristotle distinguishes two different sorts of necessary

conditions or better to different levels of capabilities:

One is internal to each person: people are to develop traits of the

intellect and character and body such that, under appropriate

56

circumstances, they will be in position to choose well and act well.

Nusbaum calls it “I-capability” and defines it in the following way:

“A person is I-capable of function A at time t if and only if the

person is so organized at t that, should the appropriate

circumstances present themselves, the person can choose an A action

(Nussbaum 1998: 160). In Nicomachean Ethics II, Aristotle defines in

the same terms the excellence of character. I-capabilities are

developed by education. That is why for Aristotle, one of the

legislator’s first and most essential tasks is the provision of an

adequate scheme for the education of the young ( Pol VII.I 1337a8;

Nicomachean Ethics X.9.1179b33-5, 1180a14-15).

But an I-capability might be present and still lack circumstances

for its activation. In many countries, especially developing

countries we have a lot of people with PhDs or other academic

titles, but the circumstances inside these countries impede or even

totally prevent the exercise of some or all of them. External

conditions, in which people live once they have already developed

the I-capabilities, also matter. For Aristotle, the morally capable

individual has scope to exercise the functions corresponding to

various personal and social excellences. No citizen should be

prevented by poverty from taking part in the social function of the

common meal (Pol IV).

57

The presence of external conditions for the functioning in

question will be called External Capability or “E-capability” and

defined as: A person is E-capable of function A and at time t, if

and only if at t the person is I-capable of A and there are no

circumstances present that impede or prevent the exercise of A

(Nussbaum 1998: 163). The border between E and I- capabilities is

not hermetic because the same condition that block the activation of

a trained I-capability will also inhibit its development in a

immature person; and when sufficiently prolonged, they will erode

that I-capability in an adult. That is why the lawgiver’s total task

is to train I-capabilities in the young, to maintain those in the

adult, and simultaneously to create and preserve the external

circumstances in which hose developed capabilities can become active

(Nussbaum 1998). It is then clear that income, resources or property

have their place as means to I-capabilities and also as external

circumstances permitting the active exercise of those capabilities.

Aristotle considers a third level of capabilities, which is a kind

of necessary condition to be a recipient of I and E – capabilities.

It is that one should already possess by nature a less developed

capability to perform the functionings in question; a capability

such that, given the appropriate education and external resources,

one could, in time, become fully capable of the functioning.

58

Nussbaum called it basic capability or B-capability and defined it

as follow:

“A person is B-capable of function A if and only if the person has

an individual constitution organized so as to A, given the provision

of suitable training time, and other instrumental necessary

conditions” (Nussbaum 1998: 166). Some agencies like ‘Médecins sans

frontière’ for example have come across the kind of situations where

people were so destitute that it was impossible for them to perform

any functioning despite the presence of all the necessary

conditions. This is also the case of some ‘homeless people’.

For Aristotle, when what we are distributing are the necessary

material conditions for a certain function, what we should look to

is not irrelevant characteristic (like birth or wealth) but relevant

characteristics, namely, the capability to perform the function in

question. His distributional criterion must be relevant to the

functioning that is to be performed (Pol III.128a1-3). For

Aristotle, capability is the morally relevant criterion for

distribution of the conditions for a function, since capability,

unlike other features, has relevance to the performance of the

function. Aristotle thinks for example that good health care is care

that gives the sick whatever they need to make them healthy –

presumably even if this means allocating more resources to them than

to the healthy. He views capabilities as conditions that demand

59

whatever is required to make them ready for flourishing activity.

Indeed good functioning, and even good thinking and good desiring,

are not independent of the resources people have and the

institutions in which they live. It is, according to Aristotle, the

job of political thought to imagine such conditions.

5. Capabilities equality and Rawls’ analysis

As we have seen, the importance of the contrast between Rawls and

Sen turns on the fundamental diversity of human beings. Two people

holding the same bundle of primary goods can have very different

freedoms to pursue their respective conception of good (whether or

not these conceptions coincide). Evaluating equality in function of

primary goods amounts to giving priority to the means of freedom

over any assessment of the extent of freedom. Indeed, in practice,

the importance of divergence can be very great in dealing with

inequalities related to gender, location, and class, and also to

general variations in inherited characteristics.

Like Rawls, Sen is also sensitive to the possibility that

strict equality à la Toqueville may not always be normatively defensible.

Indeed, Sen argues that there may be good reasons to append a

difference principle to a system of capabilities equality. In this

context, the difference principle will assert that particular

60

functionings should be unequally distributed when those facing the

smallest capabilities sets are helped thereby.

However, the chief problem associate with the difference principle

is that it is prone to self-interest justification (DeMartino 2000:

109). People benefiting from an unequal distribution can claim that

the ultimate beneficiaries of this inequality are those who are

worst off under the distribution. The supply-side economists from

the early 1980s up to the present (and their influential political

allies, including US president Ronald Reagan and Britain’s prime

minister Margaret Thatcher) argued that the economic stagnation of

the 1970s and 1980s was the consequence of the tax policies that

punished investors, and well-meaning, though misguided, social

welfare expenditures that assisted the poor. The rationale was that

excessive capital gains taxes discouraged savings and investment,

and so retarded advances in productivity, employment and income.

Social welfare discouraged work effort and initiative by providing

excessive payments to those out of work. The resulting supply-side

policy mix was elegant and presented as entirely consistent with the

difference principle: taxes on investment income and payments to the

poor were both to be cut so as to induce greater economic dynamism.

The moral problem with this policy, which entailed cutting taxes for

the wealthy while reducing payments to the poor, was that it ensures

growing inequality. But it was defended on he ground that the chief

61

beneficiaries would be working people and the poor, to whom the

benefits of ensuing economic validity would ultimately ‘trickle

down’. Despite Ralws’ purposes, the difference principle provides

moral cover for unprecedented increases in global income inequality

over the past three decades. Ralws' approach to distributive justice

relied on the device of the veil of ignorance. Those who are

deciding on a just framework of distribution are supposed to have no

knowledge of their social positions or groups to which they will be

assigned after the distribution is undertaken. So, this device is

intended to preclude self-serving arguments of this sort.

Unfortunately, disputes over distribution (and everything else) do

not occur behind the veil of ignorance. Those debating distribution,

including when and how the difference principle is to apply, are

always already embedded in their social milieu. They are already

members of particular social groups, having already been assigned a

particular race, gender, ancestry, and degree of economic privilege.

Moreover, they have fairly good knowledge of the assignments prior

to their participation in political context over distribution. In

the world in which disputes over justice actually occur, the

motivation to devise self-serving defences of inequality will be

overly present.

62

The project of capabilities equality provides a strict and

demanding criterion for evaluating normative claims for inequality

predicated on the difference principle.

For Sen, distinct functionings (for example economic, political and

cultural functionings) are interdependent. One functioning failure

may interfere with may others. The ability to avoid preventable

morbidity, for instance, may depend on one’s access to sufficient

health care, shelter, nutrition, income and many other functionings.

A poor person in market economy may not only be deprived of

important goods, like adequate housing, but may also find it

difficult to, participate meaningfully in the political life of her

community. Indeed, her relative poverty might therefore be expected

to undermine her capabilities across the spectrum.

6. Poverty and Inequality

The theory of inequality evaluation has close links with that of

poverty and the choice of space becomes a central concern in

identifying the poor. If poverty is seen as the deprivation of some

minimum fulfilment of elementary capabilities, it becomes easier to

understand why poverty has both an absolute and a relative aspect.

It should be considered the relation between deprivations in

different spaces, especially between incomes and the capability to

lead secure and worthwhile lives. However, if attention is shifted

63

from an exclusive concentration on income poverty to the more

inclusive idea of capability deprivation, we can better understand

the poverty of human lives and freedoms in terms of different

informational bases (Sen 1999: 20).

As Sen correctly puts it,

“ [I]t is not to deny that deprivation of individual capabilities can have close links with the

lowness of income, which connects in both directions:

1. Low income can be a major reason for illiteracy and ill health as well as hunger and

under nourishment

2. Conversely, better education and health helps in the earning of higher incomes.

The role of income and wealth – important as it is along with other influences – has to be

integrated into a broader and fuller picture of success and deprivation” (Sen 1999:

20).

So, it may be far worse to endure low income in a high-income

community than in a community where everyone else is similarly poor.

The poor person in a rich community may suffer other functioning

failures associated with being relatively poor, while in a community

where everyone in similarly poor, the same person will not be so

disadvantaged.

7. Sen on poverty

As we have said above, poverty has multiple meanings or dimensions.

We could first off all distinguish absolute poverty from relative

64

poverty. Absolute poverty is the “inability to attain minimal

standards of consumption to satisfy basic physiological criteria. It

is expressed in not having enough to eat (hunger and malnutrition)”

(Bernstein 1992). Poverty here means lack of basic need, of the

absolute minimum. It is also called deprivation. Relative poverty,

on the other hand, is concerned with income beyond the satisfaction

of basic physical needs that is required to participate ‘in the

everyday life of society’ (Bernstein 1992). Relative poverty is

related to total distribution of income and to what a country can

deliver in terms of goods and services. The notion of relative

poverty moves the criterion of individual physical survival to the

ability to participate in ‘ordinary life’ of the society.

As we could see while the basic needs approach of poverty seems

relatively easy to measure, it is more difficult to measure poverty

in terms of participation.

Denouncing the ‘bias to the measurability of poverty’, Robert

Chambers (1989) distinguishes five dimensions or conditions of

poverty. For him poverty is understood as a lack of adequate income

or assets to generate income, physical weakness due to under

nutrition, sickness and disability. For Chambers, geographical and

social isolation due to peripheral location, lack of access to good

and services, ignorance and illiteracy are also forms of poverty.

Vulnerability to any kind of emergency and contingency, and the risk

65

of becoming poorer is one of the characteristics of poverty. The

poor are those who are not ready to respond adequately to shocks, or

to entitlement failures, as we will see. They are therefore

defenceless, insecure and exposed to risk, shock and stress.

The poor person, according to Chambers, is also someone who could

not decide about his own life; he is powerless to influence the

course of his history. Poverty is powerlessness within existing

social, economic, political and cultural structure (Chambers 1989).

The cause of poverty could be a very low income or the lack of

assets and entitlement. Asset or entitlement poverty, otherwise

called entitlement failure, according to Sen, is the fact that the

assets you possess are too low to hope to get out of the situation

of poverty. It enhances the vulnerability of the poor as Sen has

shown in the cases of hunger, natural resources and gender

relations.

According to Sen, entitlement is the relations established by

trade, direct production or sale of labour power through which an

individual or a household gains access to food. Sen distinguishes

three types of entitlement. Direct entitlement is the access to food

gained through one’s own production and consumption. Exchange

entitlement is that command of food which is achieved by selling

labour power in order to buy food. Trade entitlement is the sale of

product to buy food. Sen’s notion of entitlement is linked further

66

to the notion of endowment that is the owned assets and the personal

capacities, which an individual or a household can use to establish

entitlement to food. It can be labour, land, tools, etc.

Let us see now what the theory of entitlement brings to the

study of hunger.

Hunger is defined as a sustained nutritional deprivation. It is

different from famine which is an acute starvation associated with a

sharp increase in mortality.

Generally, the approach used to analyse hunger is that of

relationship between population and overall food supply. The

question is whether there will be enough food for the present number

of people. This approach concentrates only on the availability of

food, on the food output per capita, but it becomes problematic when

the availability of food does not stop people dying of hunger. The

Bangladesh famine of 1973 took place at the very moment when the

country had the highest availability of food for the decade.

Bangladesh is not the only case where people die of hunger during a

‘food boom’. People usually die of hunger in front of food shops.

The physical availability of food is not enough to stop hunger or

famine. Availability of food is one thing, but the right or the

ability to acquire this food is another. That is why the theory of

entitlement came to complete the availability approach. It is

obvious that one is entitled to something, say, food, which is, or

67

will be available. Physical availability is a necessary condition

but not sufficient to solve the problem of hunger. The mere presence

of food at the market does not make one entitled to consume it.

The understanding of hunger as entitlement failure is more

correct and likely to bring an adequate solution. For example, one

of the reasons of famine among peasants in Wollo in 1973 was the

failure of direct production for own consumption (direct

entitlement). The drought played an important role here and the

explanation of this failure of direct entitlement requires an

understanding of the organization of production and its ability to

cope with changing conditions.

The availability approach is an aggregate approach because it

reaches overall generalities. It is not concerned with particular

individuals. By stating that there is enough food for everybody,

there is no guarantee that each particular individual has food to

eat.

Entitlement approach is by nature disaggregative. It applies to

particular individuals and families. Its efficiency relies on this

disaggregative analysis, which avoid aggregate perspectives. By

concentrating on the ways in which individuals and households gain

command over food, Sen’s entitlement gives greater understanding of

what happens during a famine and why people may go hungry. In the

later stages of the crisis, the peasants of Wollo were engulfed by

68

the failure of their attempt to establish exchanges entitlements.

What they get from the market does not allow them to buy food for

their subsistence.

Famine, understood as failure in exchange entitlements, leads

to the recognition of the way that the operation of market exchange

may exacerbate or initiate famine. The vulnerability of a group can

be exacerbated by both direct and indirect entitlement. Thus, the

problem of hunger may be better solved by protecting or replacing

entitlement than by coping only with food availability. In fact,

entitlement can be protected and replaced by:

-Capacity to implement large-scale employment schemes at short

notice.

-Effective popular representation in governments that may ensure

that governments respond to famine.

These are efficient and adequately sustainable ways to solve and

prevent hunger and famine. But the problem will remain unsolved if

vulnerable groups do not have natural resources that can be used to

establish entitlement to food.

Let us see now what Sen’s theory of entitlement may bring to

the study of natural resources.

A person’s entitlements depend on their endowment, this means,

on what she owns initially, and on what she can acquire through

exchange. A wage labourer owns her labour power and will acquire

69

money through employment. It is the same for a landlord who owns

some land and can acquire money through rent. The endowment of a

person, which is given by her initial ownership, becomes very

important with entitlement theory. Natural resources, with personal

ability, constitute the endowment, or in other words, the ‘primitive

accumulation’, which gives ability to establish entitlement. The

contrast between the economic positions of the proletariat,

peasants, traders, and capitalists in Marx’s sense, will echo the

vulnerability of a group.

The logic of the entitlement approach indicates that the

analysis must concentrate also on occupation groups. It highlights

the fact that natural resources are not evenly distributed and some

disadvantaged groups are extremely vulnerable.

For instance, people who possess no means of production excepting

their own labour power, which they try to sell for a wage to earn an

adequate income to buy enough food, are particularly vulnerable to

changes in labour market conditions. The class of landless wage

labourers has recurrently produced famine victims. As we underlined

it above, famine may take place even in a boom situation. In ‘boo-

famine’, many occupation groups may improve their economic position

substantially, thereby commanding a bigger share of the available

food, which can lead to a decline – even an absolute decline – of

70

food command on the part of those less favourably placed in the

uneven expansion of money income.

Among these less favourable groups are women on whom the weight

of the uneven distribution of human resources is the most felt. The

theory of entitlement highlights the gender bias within the

household and within society in general. Entitlement approach brings

to the study of gender relation the very fact that men and women are

unequally entitled to food and other goods within a household. The

same sexual segregation exists between boys and girls. There is a

systematic deprivation of women vis-à-vis men, of girls vis-à-vis

boys, in many society and households, while economic models are

constructed on the assumption that the distribution of commodities

among different members of the family is done on the basis of

equalizing well being. Nobody for example, questions the fact that

the male head of the household receives more favourable treatment in

the division of the family’s total consumption. Entitlement theory

shows that because of unequal food distribution in the household,

the level of under nutrition among women is high. Women eat last and

least while men take a disproportional share of household food

resource. The level of female mortality is higher than what can be

expected when there is no sex bias in division of food and health.

Sen sees households as a “cooperative conflict”. The expression

is very suggestive by itself. A household contains people with

71

different interests, different strengths, different sexes, etc.

These differences are the source of conflicts. But nevertheless, the

unity of the household is prior. That is why Sen qualifies

households as a cooperative conflict.

Most of the time conflicts are well hidden in the name of

conventional norms.

Sen’s analysis shows that greater vulnerability of women is closely

connected with lesser opportunities for getting outside work and

paid employment. She cannot improve entitlement to goods and

services by gaining wages, for example. Traditional structure of

work division inside and outside the home is particularly

disfavouring women vis-à-vis men.

Poverty is much more a matter in failure of capabilities than

something else. Rather than focusing only on command over one

variable, income, Sen’s understanding of poverty highlights basic

human incapabilities to take part in society, to obtain health care,

to achieve an adequate standard of living, to realize oneself.

With a lack of capabilities, people can be trapped into

poverty. As May et al. (1995) pointed out, in the case of South

Africa, one of the causes of persistent poverty in South Africa is

the lack of access by poor households to complementary assets and

services. “The cheap labour system upon which South African

capitalism relied during the apartheid regime appears to be an

72

important factor that resulted in entrapping mechanism”(May, Woolard

and Klasen 2000).

Taken together, Sen’s arguments suggest that it is most

unlikely that inequality in any important functioning will promote

the overall capabilities of those who are far worst in this

functioning. Instead, it is far more likely that one functioning

failure will generate general incapability. Given the

interdependence of diverse functionings, any claim that relative

inequality will help those who receive least should be thoroughly

examined.

8. Capabilities equality and Dworkin’s resource equality

The chief critique of Sen against Dworkin resembles the critique

against Rawls. Dworkinian concentration on the distribution of

resources as well as Ralwsian concern for distribution of primary

goods base the political evaluation of equality on the means to

achievement and not focusing exclusively on achievement. Equalizing

ownership of resources does not mean equalize the substantive

freedoms enjoyed by different persons, since there can be

significant variations in the conversion of resources into freedom.

Equality of resources aims at making the resources that people

control as equal as possible, ignoring the fact people have

different capabilities to use those resources. People with handicaps

73

for example are less able to put resources at work in pursuing the

life they have reason to value. “The conversion problems can involve

some extremely complex social issues, especially when the

achievement in question are influenced by intricate intragroup

relations and interactions” (Sen 1992: 33). Indeed, variations in

conversion can also arise from simple physical differences. For

example, a poor person’s freedom from under nourishment would depend

not only on her resources (e.g. through the influence of income on

the ability to buy food), but also on her metabolic rate, gender,

pregnancy, climatic environment, exposure to parasitic disease, etc

(Sen 1992: 33). So, of two people with identical incomes and

resources one may be entirely free to avoid under nourishment and

the other not at all free to achieve this because of different

reasons including strong inclination to alcohol or sex consumption.

Sen understands freedom as alternative sets of accomplishments

that we have the power to achieve (1992: 34). Of course, “the

freedom of agency that we individually have is inescapably qualified

and constrained by social, political and economic opportunities that

are available to us” (Sen 1999: XII). Resources as well as primary

goods are a means which help one to achieve more freedoms. A budget

set for example represents the extent of person’s freedom to achieve

the consumption of various alternative commodity bundles. This

budget set derives from the basis of a person’s resources (in this

74

case, the level of income and opportunity to buy commodities at

given prices). So, the resources on which the budget set depends are

a means of freedom while the budget set itself is the extent of

freedom. In other words, the person’s command over resources is

distinct from the person’s achievement in the same way a means to

freedom is different from achievement itself.

Dworkin as well as Rawls concentrate on the individual’s

command over resources as a basis of interpersonal comparisons of

individual advantage. But, the gap between resources that help one

person to achieve freedom and the extent of freedom itself is

important not only in principle but also in practice. Freedom is

different from the means to freedom. Freedom is also different from

achievement. The conversion of the resources that can be used to

establish command over a set of commodity bundles into an effective

set of commodity bundles over which the person has command vary from

person to person. One person can be ahead in the resource space but

behind in terms of freedom in the commodity space (e.g. with

differential rents as a part of public-housing policy, or what is

usually called progressive tax-system: the more you earn the more

taxes you pay). When one shifts attention from commodity space to

the space of what a person can, in fact, do or be – what kind of

life she can lead – the resources of interpersonal variations in

conversion can be powerful. In other words, the resources a person

75

has may be very imperfect indicators of the freedom that a person

really enjoys to do this or that.

To sum up, Dworkin has argued for ‘equality of resources’

broadening the Rawlsian coverage of primary goods to include

insurance opportunities to protect against the vagaries of bad

‘brute luck’. However, this broadening of the informational focus is

not adequate to deal with all relevant variations in the

relationship between income and resources, on the one hand, and well

being and freedom on the other. In other words, the use of resources

to generate the ability to do valuable things is subject to

variations: personal heterogeneities, environmental diversities,

variations in social climate, differences in relational perspectives

and distribution with family. Personal health for example and the

capability to be healthy depend on a greater variety of influences

(Sen 1999).

Sen’s alternative to concentrating on the means of good living

is the focus on the actual living that people manage to achieve, on

freedom to achieve actual livings that one has reason to value.

“Interest in living condition is also an approach that much engaged Adam Smith. He

was concerned with such capability to function as ‘the ability to appear in public

without shame’ (rather than only with real income or the commodity bundle

possessed).

76

What counts as ‘necessity’ in a society is to be determined, in Smithian analysis by its

need to generate some minimally required freedoms, such as the ability to appear in

public without shame, or to take part in the life of the community. The focus has to be

on the freedoms generated by resources, rather than on the resources seen on their

own” (Sen 1999: 73).

So, the chief critique of Sen against resource-based accounts of

distributive justice, including Dworkin’s equality of resources is

that they focus exclusively on the means to well being rather than

on well-being itself.

Dworkin’s response to Sen’s critique is that equality of resources

defines “resource” to include personal, as well as impersonal,

resources, and gives prominent place to hypothetical insurance

device whose role is precisely to take into account differences in

capacity to convert resources into well-being (Dworkin 1999).

“Equality of resources defends a certain initial allocation of impersonal resources –

the allocation that would be reached through the specified auction of all such

resources. It then notices that an equal allocation of impersonal resources, so

understood, will not achieve its goals when personal resources differ, and it therefore

insists on wealth transfers modelled on a hypothetical insurance market to achieve

greater overall equality” (Dworkin 1999: 108).

Indeed, as Merle pointed out, the insurance system does not provide

the poor in talent and luck with a job they would have had had they

average endowments and average luck. Instead, it gives them other

77

resources. These resources may be jobs, but not necessarily. And if

these resources are jobs, they are not professional jobs because

professional positions cannot be bid in the auction. They are

assigned according to merits – abilities, talents, etc… -, which are

themselves assigned by nature not by the auction. Thus professional

positions are not affected by Dworkin’s equality of resources.

According to Dworkin, however, professional positions do not

constitutes resources, whereas talents, abilities and produced

resources do. Some personal qualities do, but some external objects

do not. That leads Dworkin into self-contradiction (Merle 1999).

9. Capabilities-freedom and libertarian critique

Liberty is among the possible fields of application of equality, and

equality is among the possible patterns of distribution of liberty.

Sen is concerned with the demands of equality regarding an extensive

list of achievements and also a corresponding list of freedoms to

achieve. Equality is a substantive and substantial requirement. Once

the context is fixed, equality can be a particularly powerful and

exacting demand. When, for example, the space is fixed, demands for

equality impose some ranking of patters, even before any specific

index of equality is endorsed. Indeed, the diversity of spaces in

which equality may be demanded reflects a deeper diversity;

different diagnoses of objects of value, different views of the

78

appropriate notions of individual advantage in the context in

question. Liberties, rights, utilities, incomes, resources, primary

goods, need-fulfilment, etc, all provide different ways of seeing

the respective lives of different people, and each of the

perspectives leads to a corresponding view of equality.

As we have seen above, Rawls’ focal variable is equality of

primary goods including basic liberties and rights as well as

incomes. As we have also said, the relationship between primary

goods (including incomes) on the one hand, and well being, on the

other, may vary because of personal diversities in the possibility

of converting primary goods (including incomes) into a valued life.

Similarly, the relationship between primary goods and the freedom to

pursue one’s objectives – well being as well as other objectives –

may also vary with interpersonal variations of specific characters.

In other words, there is diversity in the ability to convert primary

goods into the fulfilment of objectives as well as a diversity of

conception of good. So, inequality in different spaces can be very

different from each other depending on interpersonal variations in

the relation between distinct – but interconnected- variables. The

result of this basic fact of human diversity is to make it

particularly important to be sure of the space in which inequality

is to be evaluated. As Sen puts it, “Some of the most central

79

issues of egalitarianism arise precisely because of the contrast

between equality in the different spaces” (1992: 28).

Libertarianism privileges personal autonomy and freedom as

focal variable to be equality distributed. Libertarianism opposes

what it takes to be artificial restrictions on personal liberty

stemming from unwarranted government intervention into personal

affairs. In this doctrine, economic outcomes are just to the degree

that they result from the voluntary interaction of free individuals,

with each pursuing his own interests as he sees fit provided his

doing so does not infringe upon equal rights of others (Nozick

1974). Libertarianism is therefore entirely consistent with even

extraordinary inequalities in income and wealth. It uses the

incentive argument to justify the precedence of efficiency on

equality. It holds that the negative effects of inequality may be

outweighted by its efficiency advantages, and attempts to eliminate

that inequality would lead to worse consequences, worsening the

position of all. The incentive argument concentrates on the need to

give people the incentive to do the right thing for the promotion of

the objectives. Inequality may, thus, play a functionally useful

role in encouraging work, enterprise, and investment. Applied to

individuals, the incentive argument deals with the need to provide

motivation ad encouragement to individuals so that their choices and

actions are conducive to the promotion of overall objectives.

80

It is clear that demands of equality cannot be clearly

interpreted or understood without taking adequate note of efficiency

considerations. Demands of equality in individual advantages have to

be supplemented by the considerations of efficiency in generating

these advantages. But, in privileging the autonomous individual as

primary and foundational, as the irreducible source of all

capabilities, preferences, rights, and interests, libertarianism

makes the community to be nothing more than an instrumental

construction instituted by such individual in order to protect their

autonomy from encroachment as each pursues his own life plan (Nozick

1974). The danger here, as Sen points out, is that,

“[T]he uncompromising priority of libertarian rights can particularly be problematic

since the actual consequences of the operation of these entitlements can, quite

possibly include rather terrible results. It can lead to the violation of the substantive

freedom of individuals to achieve those things to which they have reason to attach

great importance including escaping avoidable mortality, being well nourished and

healthy, being able to read, write and count…” (Sen 1999: 66).

Contrary to libertarians, Sen treats community and the human beings

who populate it as mutually constitutive. The community shapes the

life circumstances of its members, but also their personalities,

ways of being, desires and capacities. For Sen, it is impossible to

consider the human actor outside of the social milieu he inhabits,

hence, the specification of individual as foundational is non-sense.

81

It is a hypothesis for the laboratory, as Paul Ricoeur would say

(Ricoeur 1990). Of course, Sen does not mean that social actors are

merely dependent variables that absorb the social customs, norms and

institutions of their community. Rather, these socialised

individuals react back upon their social and cultural inheritances,

reshaping them in accord with their own judgements and interests

(DeMartino 2000). Libertarians endorse ‘negative’ freedom – not

freedom to achieve anything concrete in particular, but freedom to

devise and pursue a life plan unhindered by onerous government

actions (Berlin 1958), and those who fare poorly in pursuit of their

goals have no right to exploit the coercive force of government to

overcome their own failings. It infers that all government

initiatives against inequalities in social wealth are deemed unjust

in so far as they violate the liberties of those whose rightful

claims to property are thereby abridged.

In contrast, Sen’s commitment to equal substantive freedom

reflects the view that the community has a strong obligation to each

member, to provide her with the means she needs to flourish at a

level achievable by others. In other words, negative freedom is not

enough, and to the degree that it gives rise to inequality in

substantive freedoms, it is morally wrong. A community that refuses

to take measure to promote and equalize capabilities, at the local

82

as well as global level, can be indicted for preventing the full

flourishing of those members whose substantive freedom it neglects.

CHAPTER V: CAPABILITIES EQUALITY AND GLOBAL NEO-LIBERALISM

1. Globalization

Drawing on Sen’s proposal of the egalitarian principle of the

‘global harmonization of capabilities’, this part of the thesis will

challenge the neo-liberal claim that the market economy emerging at

present represents the highest possible stage of economic

development. Sen’s equalitarian principle provides a basis for

resisting oppression from the global market economy while respecting

cultural diversity. Let us first have an understanding of what is

nowadays called ‘globalization’.

Understood as a set of ideas and concrete policies defending

particular interests, the current process of globalization has its

beneficiaries and its victims. Involving economic competition and

expansion, this process is variously appreciated depending on

people’s access to money and power, which have become leading

factors of integration in the current world order. As Hohn (1997)

puts it, “more and more, the economy has to be regarded as a leading

system. The dominant entities are ‘money’ and ‘market’. The

universality of money shapes again the functional differentiation of

83

modern societies by the money orientation of all processes. It

dominates all social interaction”. The ‘god’, money, commanding the

relentless pursuit of profit at whatever cost, demands only

obedience from its creatures.

In fact, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2001) acknowledged

it, the most complete figure of this world is presented from the

monetary perspective. From here can be seen a horizon of values and

a machine of distribution, a mechanism of accumulation and a means

of circulation, a power and a language. “There is nothing, no ‘naked

life’, and no external standpoint that can be posed outside this

field permeated by money: Nothing escapes money. Production and

reproduction are dressed in monetary clothing. In fact, on the

global stage every biopolitical figure appears dressed in monetary

garb “. ‘ Accumulate! Accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!’

The invention of money was predicated on the intention that it

was a means to an end. Indeed, money continues to be the means to

realize multiple ends, however, economic fundamentalism has arguably

reversed this logic. Its commandment is that money shall be an end

in itself. Profitability, or the insatiable urge to make more and

more money, at whatever cost, is the apotheosis of money as an end

in itself. Money has become the ‘god’ towards which everything must

move and before whom everyone must submit. Globalization thus holds

that the only way out for humanity is to obey the deadly commandment

84

of its dogma. In fact, globalization is seductive when it is

presented as the only appropriate way to meet the challenges of

technological revolution. It advocates the claim that it offers the

key to development especially in the Third World countries by

ensuring the transfer of technology at various levels. For Mike

Morris (2000), « globalization has become pervasive. For much of the

world this process of growing integration has provided opportunities

for substantial income growth, better quality and differentiated

consumption, and broadly speaking an improvement in the overall

quality of life »

As Negri and Hart (2000) put it, global neo-liberalism claim

that extension of market based economic integration across all

local, regional and national borders will provide humankind with the

optimal means to achieve prosperity from now until eternity. With

the perfection of the global capitalist market economy – and the

consequent eradication of communism, socialism and all forms of

state planning – economic history as the contest among alternative

forms of economic systems will come to end. Far more important than

increasing interdependence and the increasing magnitude of

international economic flows in the changing qualitative nature of

economic integration. The actions of disconnected economic actors,

such as investors, firms and consumers, are rapidly displacing

85

explicit government direction in determining the flow of goods,

services and finances within and across national borders.

However, crushed by institutionalized mechanism of

impoverishment, millions of Africans, who have neither money nor

power, watch the process of globalization wondering whether they

will survive. As other forms of alienation like slavery and

colonization, it is planned without them but they are forced into it

by all means either as its victims or its beneficiaries. In other

words, globalization affects the lives of Africans, as a ‘solid and

glaring’ reality even though most of them do not know where it is

heading.

From the point of view of millions of Africans carrying their

‘cross’ in the townships and slums of urban cities, the reality is

that poverty is intensifying, unemployment is increasing and

polarization between the rich and the poor becomes even more glaring

and scandalous. In this sense, globalization is not what it claims

to be; it is not the key to development.

Indeed, globalization is not a real and deliberate process of

integration: it has no concern for equal partnership. The North is

out for its interests regardless of the continuous impoverishment of

the South. As Panikhar (1997) puts it, globalization, “might for

USA, Japan, and Germany hold forth exciting possibilities. But to

expect the same for the weak in the World like India, Bangladesh,

86

and other post-colonial countries in Africa and Latin America is to

hope for the impossible. To them globalization does not augur

freedom and progress, instead, it will ensure the necessary climate

for domination and hegemonization by the consortium of the world

capitalist countries”.

Furthermore, people being an important component of the nation-

state, it is clear that in contrast to the easy mobility of capital,

the majority of people remain territory bound. Employees are much

less mobile than the capital, which controls them (Hirt and

Thompson: 1996). They are therefore compelled to build their lives

within the territory in which they find themselves. This means also

that the global pretensions of globalization’s impact upon them at

the local territorial level, and the commonsense reaction is to seek

first at that level (Hirt and Thompson : 1996). It is therefore with

their state that they will interact. Globalization as a ‘state

without boundaries’ is somewhat inaccessible and intangible to allow

for real dialogue and interaction (Ramose 1999). In place of

powerful states making international trade, investment and aid

decisions by reference to the imperatives of state security in the

context of cold war, we see a gradual demilitarization of economic

flows amongst erstwhile friends and foes alike (Hart and Negri

2000). Obliged to afford foreign firms and investors ‘national

treatment’, governments are in the same time prohibited to promote

87

indigenous development by favoring domestic firms and investors over

foreign counterparts. In other words, the ‘invisible hand’ of the

market, as Hart and Negri would say, co-ordinates the activities of

innumerable self-oriented economic actors, who may not care one whit

for each other’s welfare, in such a way that the social good is

assured. The distributive role being assigned to the market, the

state’s role is to create the conditions for the market to flourish

and not to intervene and redress market failure. The creed of

neoclassical view is that the human actor seeks her own betterment

rather than the broader social good. Being ‘rational’, each actor

always makes those choices, which leave her best of. And we live in

a world of reasonably well-informed people acting intelligently in

pursuit of their self-interest (Stigler 1981, quoted by Sen 1897,

17). It is believed that the deepening of market integration within

and across national borders promises to provide the vast majority of

humankind the freedom to formulate and pursue life plans free from

tyrannical rule for the first time in modern history. Global

liberalism promises us prosperity and peace (Fukuyama 1989: 18).

Detractors of neo-liberalism largely share a moral commitment

to substantive equality in economic outcomes rather than to personal

liberty that neo-liberalism promises. What we see is that as

domestic and global neo-liberalism has deepened over the past

decades, inequality of income and wealth has increased dramatically

88

both within and across national borders. It seems that global neo-

liberalism rewards those who are already best off and best able to

exploit the opportunities that global economy provides, while

punishing those with less income like Third Word countries. These

economic inequalities induce substantive inequalities in life

chances. The main result of globalization in Africa, for instance,

is that “ Women have heavier workloads as males migrate to urban

areas to look for work; there is increased maternal mortality;

chronic malnutrition and poverty are rendering the implementation of

the health strategies difficult. But most of all, the danger lies in

the lack of care for future generations” (Lugalla 1998).

2. Slavery and Colonialism as premises of Globalization in Africa

The remote roots of contemporary globalization in Africa lie deeply

in the Western ‘discovery of America’ in the 15th century, which lead

to colonization, slavery and the genocide of the North American

Indians and Blacks. It is pity that Europeans opened up to others

but only to deny their right to be different. The attempt to

‘civilize’ or to ‘westernize’ Africans or Indians was already a step

towards the invention of a ‘global man’. This ideological worldview,

instrumentalized by political subjection, economic exploitation and

cultural assimilation of the Third World is still at the heart of

the current process of globalization. In other worlds, as Panikhar

89

puts it, “developing from a mercantile slave-trading stage, passing

through an industrial colonizing stage, and reaching today into a

corporate neo-capitalist stage, capitalist globalization ensures

unequal development and division of labor, centre-periphery and one

way flow of world wealth.”

Resting its title to newly acquired territories on the

questionable ‘right of conquest’, colonization literally abolished

the boundaries. Colonization not only threatened but it actually

abrogated the sovereignty of the indigenous conquered people. As

Ramose (1999) puts it, “for us, social and political institutions of

other kinds, even if they were not or are not state formations but

exercise functions similar to those attributed to the modern state,

are sovereign as well” 2.

Economy for the sake of individual profit and not for collective

well being can only lead to collective suicide. That is why, "we

must combat economic imperialism in creating social values and

morals. We must remember that the economy exists to serve the common

good. It exists for us, we do not exist for it."(Clark 1998).

According to Enghelard (1996), the global human being can be

regenerated by African human values, which offer an opportunity to

reconcile culture and economy in terms of collective welfare.

Culture here involves the spiritual dimension of hope, which gives

2 See also Thompson, Janna, « Land rights and aboriginal sovereignty, Australian journal of Philosophy, vol.68, No.3, September 1990. P.317

90

people the sense of a common destiny. I do agree with Waliggo (1993)

when he states that "in contemporary society where things (like

power, wealth, or sex) have become more important than people or

life, the African's central value of life gives us new challenges to

restore the community and person-based vision of development”. In

the African perspective, economy is not an infrastructure. It is a

superstructure sustained by a search for the optimal conditions for

a collective well being.

Why go to the moon when it is still so difficult to make our common

earth a happy and peaceful dwelling place for all human beings?

The question is not to escape globalization. African countries

have to take advantage of the window of opportunity opened by the

new information and network technology. For this to happen, they

need to restructure their economies and change public policies to

accommodate the information and communications revolution. Africans

cannot afford running the risk of suffering exclusion from the

global economy and experiencing severe disadvantage in the

competitiveness of their goods and services. Non-participation is

likely to cause a new and dangerous form of information poverty that

could further widen the gap in economic status and competitiveness.

Non-participation is clearly not a policy solution to raise incomes

and wealth as Mike Morris correctly puts it.

91

The question is on the kind of integration to the world economy

that would be beneficiary for Africa. Jurgen Habermas distinguishes

two forms of social integration, the systemic one, instrumentalized

by money and power, and the communicative one, based on reasonable

dialogue. Globalization appears as a systemic form of integration

for “it is not informed by any sense of purpose or telos. In fact,

money and power can integrate social actions in even the most

unethical direction” (Jeurissen 1997). The communicative form of

integration involves a purposive orientation of social processes

according to goals and values defined together. We do not ask for

non-participation in globalization but we think that the integration

of Africa in the global order will bear fruits of happiness only if

it is built on national and regional integration where social

processes can be purposively oriented towards common goals and

values other than the blind forces of money and power.

At the national level, there is a need for each African country

to promote socio-economic and political policies based on popular

participation in order to channel local initiatives and creativity,

inhibited by global forces. Every economic system "requires a secure

moral foundation in society, and public bodies committed to

something other than the ineluctable triumph of market forces, and

who are willing to step in decisively on behalf of the general

interest."3 For this, African societies need a certain social and3 The Tablets, 24 Octobre 1998, p.1383

92

cultural cohesion and the rediscovery of the social rule as a source

of security and confidence for all. Change will be possible only if

the struggle against poverty through social and political

reconstruction is based on collective responsibility. In this

perspective, Enghelard (1998) pleads for a "popular economy". The

national economic reconstruction must be the fruit of a social

democratic revolution through which Africans regain control of their

self-production. As Dalip (1997) puts it, "The new vision must aim

at participative economic democracy and not at a greedy bourgeois

project served by corruption and injustices. No authentic global man

will be possible without an authentic local man.”

What should be globalized along with technology are values like

solidarity, justice in partnership, equal sharing, dialogue, respect

for human dignity. What must be globalized first is education,

health, food, and good living conditions for all. To remain in

Amartya Sen’ s paradigm, what is to be globalized is the

harmonization of capabilities. This approach suggests the following

internationalist ethic for assessing economic policy regimes: “a

regime will be deemed just if and to the degree that it promotes

harmonization of capacities to achieve functionings at a level that

is sufficient, universally attainable, and sustainable (DeMartino

2000: 144. As DeMartino also puts it, the foregrounding of

‘harmonization of capabilities’ signals the overriding commitment of

93

this principle to equality of substantive freedoms. We will agree

with Sen that a just world is one that aspires to provide each of

its members with equal ability to live a valued life. Of course,

levels of capabilities might not always be easy to compare across

national borders. Commitment to capabilities equality does not solve

such controversies. But, we should recognize with Sen that such

controversies are not salient when one focus on what Sen calls

‘basic functionings’. These include achievement of adequate

nutrition, the ability to avoid preventable morbidity and premature

mortality, and other condition and states that are minimally

necessary for a person to live a decent life ‘and avoid trapping

mechanism’4 (Sen 1992). To be caught in poverty trap is the worst

thing that can happen to a human being because there is no hope of

moving out of the situation. Time then become part of the hardship

instead of providing as it supposed to do an extra degree of

freedom. There is no short-term hardship. When people are stuck

behind the Miccawbee threshold, there are subjects to a perpetual

accumulation failure. The future generation from these households is

also condemned to remain among the poorest. There is a kind of

constant perpetuation of poverty.

4 Add by me.

94

CONCLUSION

What we have identified here as egalitarian theories entail a family

of loosely related views that share an aversion to welfarism.

Egalitarians tend also to reject all approaches that equate reward

with contribution insofar as this generally entails rewarding those

with greatest capabilities the most. This principle which ties an

agent’s reward to her marginal productivity runs up against the

difficult challenges of how to theorize the total social product to

which the effort of different agents give rise and to disaggregate

the social product across these agents. Egalitarianism also refuses

to grant moral cover to the neo-liberal market ideal.

To the question, ‘what makes for a just social arrangement?’

each answers with a particular kind of egalitarianism. Some, like

Rawls, emphasize equal distribution of the goods people need to

achieve a valued life, others, like Dworkin, emphasize equal

distribution of resources. In the footstep of Aristotle, Sen

emphasizes actual potential achievement, and reaches the conclusion

that goods must be unequally distributed according to need so that

all are able to live valued lives. He calls for equality of

capabilities.

We have seen that the basic difference between Rawls and

Dworkin, on the one hand, and Sen, on the order, is that the formers

95

insist on the means to freedom while the later insists on the actual

freedom enjoyed. Primary goods are not constitutive of freedom as

such but are best seen as a means to freedom. Dworkin’s case for

‘equality of resources’ can also be seen as belonging broadly in the

same general area of substantive accounting, since resources are

also means to freedom, and Dworkin has presented a specific way of

accounting resources and adjudicating ‘the equality of resources’.

Sen’s chief critique of Rawls and Dworkin is about the conversion

possibilities. For him, since the conversion of primary goods and

resources into freedom of choice over alternative combinations of

functionings and other achievements may vary from person to person,

equality of holding primary goods or resources can go hand in hand

with serious inequalities in actual freedom enjoyed by different

persons. Given interpersonal diversity related to such factors as

age, gender, inborn talents, disabilities, and illnesses, commodity

holdings can actually tell us rather little about the nature of

lives that the respective people can lead. Real incomes, for

example, can be rather poor indicators of important components of

well being, or quality of life that people have reason to value.

In Sen’s capability-based assessment of justice, individual

claims are not to be assessed in terms of resources or primary goods

the persons respectively hold, but by the freedoms they actually

enjoy to choose the lives that they have reason to value. It is this

96

actual freedom that is represented by the person’s ‘capability’ to

achieve various alternative combinations of functionings.

Sen’s freedom-based perspective seems to be more extensive than

other alternatives. It takes into account, inter alia, utilitarianism’s

interest in human well-being, libertarianism’s involvement with

processes of choices, the freedom to act and the Rawlsian theory’s

focus on individual liberty, and on resources needed for substantive

freedoms. The capability approach has a very extensive reach,

allowing evaluative attention to be paid to a variety of important

concerns, some of which are ignored in the alternative approaches.

This extensive reach is possible because the freedoms of persons can

be judged through explicit reference to outcome and processes that

they have reason to value and seek.

97

REFERENCES

1. Aristotle, Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, quoted by M. C.

Nussbaum, “Nature, Function, and Capability”, in Oxford Studies

in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume, 1988, edited by J.

Annas and R.H. Grimm, 145-184

2. Berlin I. (1958), Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford: Oxford

University Press

3. Bernstein H. (1992), Poverty and Poor, Rural livelihood: crisis

and Responses, Oxford University Press, pp13-26

4. Castells, M. (1998), The information Age, Vol. III, End of

Millenium, Oxford : Blackwell Publishers

5. Chambers R. (1989), “Vulnerability, Coping and Policy”, IDS

Bulletin 20(2), 1-7

6. Clark, C.M.A., (1998), ‘the future of Capitalism’ in Doctrine

and Life, No.48/5

7. Commons J. (1924), Legal Foundations of Capitalism, New York:

MacMillan

8. Dalip S. (1997), ‘Alternative to Globalization’, Voices of the

Third World, XX/1, pp126-136

98

9. DeMartino G. (2000), Global Economy, Global Justice:

Theoretical Objections and Policy Alternatives to

Neoliberalism, New York: Routledge

10. Dugger W. (1989), “Radical Institutionalism: Basic

Concepts”, in W. Dugger (ed) Radical Institutionalism, New

York: Greewood Press, 1-20

(1994) with H.J. Sherman, “Comparison of Maxism and

Institutionalism”, Journal of Economic Issues 28 (1): 101-27

11. Dworkin R. (1996), “Do Liberty and Equality conflict?” in

P. Barker (ed) Living as Equals, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 39-57

(1999), “The Roots of Justice”, in S. Wesche and V. Zanetti

(eds) Dworkin: Debating Dworkin, Memphis, 15-126

(2000) Sovereign Virtue: The theory and Practice of Equality,

Cambridge MA: Havard University Press

12. Enghelard, P., (1996), L’homme mondial, Les sociétés

humaines peuvent-elles survivre ? , Paris : Arlea

(1998), L’Afrique, miroir du monde. Plaidoyer pour une

nouvelle économie, Paris : Arlea

13. Fukuyama F. (1989); “The End of History”, The National

Interest 18, Summer: 3-18

99

14. Habermas, J., (1984), Theory of Communicative Action,

translated by Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon (1987).

15. Hardt M. and Negri A. (2001), Empire, Harvard University

Press

16. Hirt, P. and Thompson, G  (1996), Globalization in

Question, Cambridge: Polity Press

17.  Hohn, H.J., (1997), ‘A test of rupture – willit hold?

European Christianity in tension of the social process of

modernization’, Yearbook of contextual theology

18. Jeurissen, R. (1997), ‘Integrating micro, meso, and macro

levels in business ethics’, Ethical perspectives, 4

19. Marx K. (1938), Critique of the Gotha Program, New York:

International Publishes

(1977), Capital, Volume I, New York: Vintage Books.

(1978) With Engels “ The communist Manifesto”, Robert Tucker,

ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, second ed., New York: W.W. Norton

20. May J., Woolard I., Klasen S., (2000), The nature and

Measurement of Poverty and inequality, in May J. (ed.), Poverty

and Inequality in South Africa: Meeting the Challenge. David

Phillip and Zed Press, Cape Town and London, pp. 20-48

21. Morris, M., (2000), ‘Changing Patters of Global

Competition: Implications for African Enterprises’, Working

paper presented to IDRC workshop on its Small,

100

Medium, Micro Enterprise Program, Cape Town, April 23-24th

22. Merle J.C. (1999), “Realizing Equality of Resources: A

Critical Assessment of Dworkin’s Distributive Model, in S.

Wesche and V. Zanetti (eds) Dworkin: Debating Dworkin, Memphis,

437-462

23. Nozick R. (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia, New York:

Basic Books

24. Nussbaum M., “Nature, Function, and Capability”, in

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume,

1988, edited by J. Annas and R.H. Grimm, 145-184

25. Panikhar, K.N. (1997), ‘Globalization and Culture’,

Voices from the Third world, XX/1

26. Polanyi K. (1944), The Great Transformation, New York:

Pinchart and Co.

27. Rawls J. (1971), A theory of Justice, Cambridge MA:

Havard University Press

(1985), “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical”,

Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (3): 223-51

(1996), Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University

Press

28. Ramose M.B. (1999), African Philosophy Through Ubuntu,

Harare: Mond Books

29. Ricoeur P. (1990), Soi-même comme un Autre, Paris : Seuil

101

30. Sen A. (1977), “Rational Fools: a Critique of Behavioral

Foundations of Economic Theory”, Philosophy and Public

Affairs 6 (6): 317-44

(1980), Levels of Poverty; Policy and Change, WP401, World

Bank, Washington DC.

(1982), with B. Williams, Utilitarianism and Beyond, Cambridge

University Press

(1987), On Ethics and Economics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell

(1990), “Gender and Co-operative Conflicts”, in I. Tinker (ed)

Persistent Inequalities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 123-

49

(1992), Inequality Re-examined, Cambridge MA: Harvard

University Press

(1996), “Social Commitment and Democracy”, in P. Barker (ed)

Living as Equals: The Demands of Equity and Financial

Conservatism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 9-38

(1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press

31. Waliggo, J.M. (1993), ‘Culture and Religion in authentic

development of Africa’, Bulletin of oecumenic theology, 5

32. Walzer M. (1973) “In Defence of Equality”, Dissent 20

(4): 399-408

(1983), Spheres of Justice, New York: Basic Books

102

(1993), “Objectivity and Social Meaning”, in M. Nussbaum and A.

Sen (eds) The Quality of life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 165-77

(1994), Thick and Thin, Notre Dame: IN: University of Notre

Dame Press

103