Condiciones laborales particulares del sistema a turnos

Providing the philosophical and intellectual base for human development, Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach traces its conceptual foundations to the critique of traditional welfare economics typically conceptualizing well-being as utility or opulence. Sen’s (1985a) main contention was that formal economics remained uninterested in the plurality of focus with which a person’s states and interests may be judged, whereas when assessing any moral system, it was imperative to examine both what information it regarded appropriate and what information it filtered out as irrelevant and unusable. In his famous paper titled Equality of

What?, Sen (1979) demonstrated the limitations of conceptualizing equality under utilitarian,

total utility and Rawlsian frameworks as they embodied advantage as either possession of goods or satisfaction of a mental state rather than the relation between goods and people, that is, what goods actually enabled people to be and do. The myopic view of well-being as utility, for instance, ignored several other aspects of an individual’s well-being. Similarly, any index of opulence or primary goods for individuals ignored the command they had over their characteristics, that is, what they were actually able to be and do with them. In critiquing conventional approaches, then, he proposed an alternative interpretation of human well-being in terms of capabilities and functionings (Sen, 1985a). Functionings or achieved states of individuals differ from mere possession of goods or opulence as they take into account interpersonal variability in determining the relation between people’s possessions and what they achieve with them. In other words, they are a function of the capability or freedom that individuals have to achieve well-being, to ‘do this or be that’ (Sen, 1985a). Capabilities are simply the range of lives an individual may choose from. By highlighting these categories of additional information, Sen’s Capability Approach leads us to look at the set of life options a person has and the actual things the person does and achieves – not just the state of

satisfaction affiliated to income (Gasper, 2004). Sen’s Capability Approach, then, defines the

21_{In Reflections on Human Development, Mahbub ul Haq (1995a) termed such themes - equity, sustainability, productivity}

and empowerment – essential components of human development as the lack of these potentially restricts people’s choices or their ability to exercise choices of their own free will. However, it may be noted here that a full historical account of the evolution of (such themes in) the human development paradigm is beyond the scope and objective of this chapter.

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goal of human development as capability expansion so that people may achieve valued doings and beings. The emphasis on valuation is important for two reasons: one, it recognizes that the focus of any political debate ought to be the achievements individuals and

communities consider meaningful to possess and pursue; two, it acknowledges the natural heterogeneity of human beings, that they differ in the achievements they consider central and the positive freedoms they possess to achieve them. As stated earlier, a primary concept in the Approach is that of human agency or autonomy, that is, people’s ability to act on behalf of goals that matter to them. In this sense, the Approach also pays heed to capability failures among marginalized or discriminated groups and deals with entrenched social injustice. Put differently, the Capability Approach broadens the informational space needed to evaluate human advantage by additionally picking on aspects of human development previously ignored or unused by other approaches. Its merit is that it considers the reality of people’s lives and the real opportunities they possess to choose and act.

The importance of the capability metric in quality of life assessments cannot be ignored or denied. However, the extent to which it can possibly be materialized in the form of pragmatic policy is often the pre-occupation of sceptics. Critics, such as Sugden (1993) and Ysander (1993), have argued that the Approach lacks practical significance since it provides no definite guidance on issues of measurement and operationalization or on balancing the many relevant capabilities and functionings people value at the same time. While sometimes inviting criticism concerning under-specificity in identification, Sen (2005, p.157) does not subscribe to a particular list of capabilities arguing that their selection for any practical purpose requires a context-specific valuing, ranking and weighing exercise as well as public reason:

My own reluctance to join the search for such a canonical list arises partly from my difficulty in seeing how the exact lists and weights would be chosen without

appropriate specification of the context of their use (which could vary), but also from a disinclination to accept any substantive diminution of the domain of public

reasoning.

In other words, listing capabilities runs the risk of over-specificity and also ignores the positive value in the inherent incompleteness of the approach, which allows it to remain “consistent and combinable with several different substantive theories” (Alkire, 2002, p. 29).

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Comim (2008) explains that this flexibility and degree of internal pluralism is a celebrated strength of the approach rather than a flaw, reflecting its bottom-up nature that requires participation and involvement of those people who are the agents of development change. Thus several authors have generated lists of human capabilities to apply Sen’s Approach, the methodologies of which have ‘varied in style and sophistication and ranged from ad hoc selection of capabilities by experts to more complex rules and procedures for identifying capabilities as well as participatory approaches that listen to the voices of the poor’ (Clark, 2005). Among the most influential of these is Martha Nussbaum, whose extension of the approach theorizes about social justice.

The basic tenets of Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach are the same: regarding individuals as ends in themselves, considering their real choices and opportunities in life, addressing

entrenched social injustice and inequality, and ascribing an urgent task to public policy to improve the quality of life for all people as defined by their capabilities (Nussbaum, 2011). However, the point of departure between Sen and Nussbaum is the purpose served by their respective versions of the approach. Sen’s advancement of capability emphasizes the need for broader informational spaces in quality of life assessments but does not provide a definite account of basic justice. And while he sometimes mentions certain basic capabilities in relation to issues of justice, the relevance of capabilities in his Approach is determined by context-specificity, public reason and democratic deliberation. Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach, on the other hand, embodies a universal normative character by adopting

capabilities to theorize about social justice. Her account is normative in defining elements of a good life as it responds to the question: “Among the many things human beings might develop the capacity to do, which ones are the really valuable ones, which are the ones that a minimally just society will endeavor to nurture and support?” (Nussbaum, 2011, p.28). Her list of ten Central Capabilities, therefore, introduces the concept of a minimum threshold imperative to a dignified human life. Strictly speaking, in this sense, Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach is narrower than Sen’s Capability Approach in being one of the many possible purposeful applications and exercises of the latter. As Sen (2005, p.158) describes:

There is often good sense in narrowing the coverage of capabilities for a specific purpose. Jean Dre`ze and I have tried to invoke such lists of elementary capabilities in dealing with ‘hunger and public action’, and in a different context, in dealing with India’s economic and social achievements and failures (Dre`ze and Sen, 1989, 2002).

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I see Martha Nussbaum’s powerful use of a given list of capabilities for some minimal rights against deprivation as being extremely useful, in the same practical way. For another practical purpose, we may need quite a different list.

At the same time, Nussbaum’s agenda of employing the Capabilities Approach to arrive at a universal normative account of what embodies a good human life extends beyond Sen’s advancement of the comparative use of capabilities. She (1998, p.176) states:

[It] seems to me … that Sen needs to be more radical than he has been so far in his criticism of utilitarian accounts of well-being, by introducing an objective normative account of human functioning and by describing a procedure of objective evaluation by which functionings can be assessed for their contribution to the good human life.

It is important to consider here that the two approaches may be less divergent than they appear to be as Nussbaum’s proposed list respects the importance of democratic deliberation in the area of implementation and concrete specification of capabilities (Nussbaum, 2011, p.74). As argued by Comim (2008, p.167), this idea of multiple realizability (Nussbaum, 2000, p.77) is often ignored when considering Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities:

This suggests that the measurement of central human capabilities should follow a two-step procedure: first, with the definition of a list of universal human capabilities a group of central capabilities could be set. Second, with the principle of multiple realizability these central capabilities could be further specified according to the particular historical contexts of the societies or individuals investigated.

Thus, while Sen’s and Nussbaum’s versions of the CA are different, it is possible that the underlying emphasis on context-specificity and democratic deliberation in the former may, to a certain extent, be diffused by multiple realizability in the latter when considering the

relevance of certain capabilities to a good human life. In the current study’s research context, it is natural to ask whether and to what extent education features in both Sen’s and

Nussbaum’s versions of the CA, and how the relevance of certain educational capabilities may be established for evaluative exercises, if at all. These questions are addressed by the following sections.

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2.2 Education and Capabilities