NOV 7

21: NOV 7

Introduction to Capabilities Approach [1], Sabine Alkire [2]
View video on the "Capabilities Approach" to development and justice. Anna Horodecka, Warsaw School of Economics [3]
Today's class has no other assign reading or viewing. We will be working with ideas and theories that help with PP1.

"How cultures commit impersonal or structural injustice." Afterthoughts about "informal injustice"

One way to promote altruism is Dillion’s strategy - give your money and maybe a kidney. But another way to assess altruism is at critical junctures in your life, such as between generations.

Imagine three futures for yourself. In all of them, you grow up to have a successful career, a family with two kids, and a medium size extended family. You are approaching retirement and your retirement and estate planning recalls a distant memory of an ethics class which talked about "justified partiality." You and your partner are wondering if you should leave all of your estate to your children or not. Remember, you will have access to this money until you die, so you could cover end of life care for yourself and your partner. Consider these three scenarios:

A. You and your partner retire with about 1 million dollars, a paid off house, and good health insurance.
B. You have all of the conditions in A, but 2 million dollars in net worth.
C. Same as B, but 8 million dollars.

For all three scenarios, assume that all indications suggest continued growth of your assets. You are also "aging well"!

In your group discussion, pretend you are actually making this estate planning decision. Would you give 100% of your estate to your kids and relatives in each scenario? What considerations come into the discussion? (Note: you could continue the options by imagining an estate with larger value - 16 million -- 16 billion.)

Our discussion of PPNs (personal preference networks) like the Alumni Association might help us think about another category of injustice, one supported by cultural processes.
Main Claim: Cultures allow humans to "normalize" claims that legitimate conduct not perceived as unjust, but later determined to be unjust.

Think of examples of cultural ideas related to justice that were considered normal, but have since been shown to be incorrect:

What's interesting about "cultural impersonal injustice" is that it involves a "normalization" a set of beliefs that support practices that, from hindsight, we don't just say that we have different beliefs, but that our predecessors were mistaken. (Something we wouldn't say, for example, about other cultural beliefs, like attractive clothing styles or art.)

An obvious example for US culture would be structural injustice against ethnic minorities that experience discrimination. If you are a formal rights theorist about justice, you might overlook or minimize the impacts on opportunity and success that come from “impersonal injustice”. Maybe an easier example to see this comes from Italian culture and the “problem of the south”. Overview of Italian attitudes toward the south, which still experiences lower socio-economic success. Northern Italians still normalize attitudes toward southerners that we now explain through culture and history. This allows them to explain lower SES in Sicily as a condition that contemporary Sicilians are responsible for. Likewise, we may underestimate the effect of disruptions of culture that come from slavery and discrimination in US history.

Now we have better ways of understanding different outcomes for culturally distinct groups. Compare for example Sicilian cultural experience and the cultural disruption that comes from slavery and discrimination.

From video, with Anna Horodecka -- Warsaw School of Economics.
Capabilities - possibility to choose and achieve something which helps you to reach well-being.

Capabilities are a form of freedom -- freedom to be able to make important choices that should be provided by the social and political culture. Think of this as a competitor to libertarian freedom.

Functionings - states and activities related to wellbeing: health, being treated equally, a place to live, educated, having a supportive social network, a good job, travel. Functionings are more like "achieved capactities for an individual". Crucially, they are not things you can get by yourself. You need your society to support them.

Analysis of Happiness: Just being happy with your condition doesn't necessarily mean you are really happy. Normalized gender discrimination might be an example. Not extending freedom to choose functionings to women is denying an objective possibility for well-being. Sen wrote on this. (In our earlier discussion, a cultural "impersonal injustice".)
Capabilities might be more important than income. Example of the bike -- Conversion factors - things that limit capabilities -- not being able to ride a bike or having bike lanes in your community. Anna's bike adventures in Chicago!
Environmental conversion factors could include problem of heating in housing.
Instrumental freedoms - wealth of the country matters, but there are problems with GDP as a measure of collective well-being. It doesn't measure:

Political (freedom to participate),
Access to financial institutions (access to investment and markets),
Access to social goods central to well-being (education, equity, childcare),
Transparency guarantees (open instiutions, absence of corruption, mechanisms for promoting justice, police protection)
Protective (Social) Security (unemployment, emergency services, protections against homelessness).