Articles by Daniel Weinstock

Chapter 11, the first chapter in a part of the book entitled « The Materials of Justice”, presents us with Sen’s well-known theory of capabilities. The main focus of the chapter is to emphasize that the capability approach is essentially a theory about human freedom, or more precisely, a theory about how freedom should be factored into the assessment of advantage and disadvantage. As against welfarist construals, Sen points out that we care not just that we achieve what we want, but also how we achieve what we want. Whether what we achieve results from our own agency, and whether we were able to exercise our agency on a range of valuable “functionings”, matters to an assessment of how well we do just as much, if not more, as does the result of our activity. We should be interested in “comprehensive outcomes”, not just “culmination outcomes”.

Two aspects of the capability approach are emphasized by Sen. First, the theory has an “informational focus”. As opposed to the approach developed by Martha Nussbaum, Sen’s just tells us what we should be concerned with in the measurement of advantage and disadvantage. He does not tell us what we should do with that information once we achieve it. Nor does he fill in the detail about what, precisely, we have reason to care about. The theory is thus neutral, at least on its face, as between different approaches to distributive justice – egalitarian, sufficientarian, prioritarian, and so on, as it is between various ways of filling out the detail of what we have reason to care about.

Second, the theory is pluralistic. There are a range of things that we have reason to value, that cannot be reduced to one metric. Bundles of desirable functionings will reflect this.

Sen deflects two worries about the capability approach. The first comes from welfarists like Arneson and Cohen who argue, on Sen’s way of putting their arguments, that we should be concerned with what people actually achieve, rather than with what they can achieve. Sen’s response to this is that the capability approach includes the welfarist approach because the functionings realized by an individual are part of the set of functionings that he could achieve. Making this broader set the index of his advantage provides us with better information about advantage because it includes freedom to achieve a range of bundles as an ingredient.

The other worry has to do with commensurability. How can we evaluate options given the irreducible pluralism of reasons to value that Sen affirms? Sen responds by stating, in line with much of the recent literature on evaluation, that incommensurability makes evaluation harder, but not impossible.

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This chapter, as I read it, has four main articulations. First, Estlund sums up the basis case for epistemic proceduralism, on the basis of the arguments of the foregoing chapters. Second, he considers and rejects a final form of procedural theory, termed rational deliberative proceduralism, which views the value of procedures as residing in their being reason-generating. Third, Estlund spells out the kind of normative authority that epistemic proceduralism does, and does not possess. Fourth, he elaborates on what it might mean for a procedure to be accurate with respect to the justice of a policy proposal.I will focus on the first three articulations. I will raise some questions, but also highlight what I take to be some philosophical IOUs that Estlund takes out in this chapter.

I take this to be a pivotal chapter in the book in the following sense: it is here that he moves from the critical case against correctness theories and pure procedural ones, and towards the statement of his positive cas for epistemic proceduralism. This chapter provides us with the main structural features of the view, and provides us with a sense of the burden of argument that it must take up to be vindicated. Some of my questions will attempt to show just how demanding that burden is. Read the rest of this entry »