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Measuring Justice

Article in Social Theory and Practice · January 2012

DOI: 10.5840/soctheorpract201238110

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 Book Reviews 21

Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns (eds.), Measuring Justice: Primary

Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
ix + 257 pp.

Karl Marx thought it was a damning feature of egalitarianism (or “bour-

geois right”) that the very same people will seem equal or unequal de-
pending on what aspect of their situation we focus on.1 He observed:
Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but
unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not un-
equal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an
equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only.2

In his famous paper “Equality of What?” delivered as a Tanner lecture in

1979, Amartya Sen turned Marx’s undeniable observation into the basis
of a lively and constructive debate among egalitarians. To favor equality
without specifying what aspect of people’s situation is salient would be
to uphold an indeterminate view; and in fact, all egalitarian views have
assumed an answer to the “equality of what” question. (Indeed, any so-
cial evaluation, egalitarian or otherwise, must select as salient some as-
pect of people’s circumstances. A poverty index is a case in point: the
poor could be defined as those who have the least income, or those
whose urgent needs are unmet. Although these things often go together,
they need not.)
As Sen also noticed in that path-breaking paper, there are a number of
competing answers to the question at hand (which has since been dubbed
the question of the “currency,” or “metric,” of justice), one of which was
the then recent one offered by John Rawls, which Sen criticized and to
which he sketched his alternative proposal. Rawls proposed that, for pur-
poses of justice, we should seek equality, roughly speaking, in the “pri-
mary social goods” that people have at their disposal. These include a
number of resources and social conditions, such as income and wealth,
certain educational and employment opportunities, and central liberties
and civil and political rights. Sen noted that Rawls’s focus on primary
social goods was an improvement on its main competitor, welfarism,
which judges how well off people are in terms of their subjective states,
understood either in terms of people’s preferences or as their mental
states such as experienced pleasure or pain. Still, Sen thought the Rawl-
sian metric of justice failed in its own way, primarily because of its indif-
ference to variations among individuals, in virtue of which the same pri-

1
Some contemporary philosophers follow Marx’s lead. See Raymond Geuss, Philos-
ophy and Real Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 76-77.
2
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1890-91), www.Marxists.org, p. 11.
22 Book Reviews

mary social goods are of very different value to different individuals.

Contrary to Rawls, what we should be concerned with, Sen suggested,
is what resources can do for people, or, in other words, to what extent
they put people in a position in which they are able to do and be various
things (such as avoiding morbidity, being well-nourished, being healthy,
being happy). In Sen’s terms, we should be concerned with people’s ef-
fective freedom, or “capability,” to achieve valuable “functionings.” A
paraplegic person who has the same primary social goods as normally
able-bodied others will, on Sen’s view, count as worse off, in that she
lacks certain capabilities (most obviously, the capability of moving
around in her environment without much difficulty and without too many
costs).
Measuring Justice is a collection of essays dedicated to that old and
still salient dispute between Sen and Rawls. Sen’s and Rawls’s views
have firmly established themselves as two of four central answers to
Sen’s original question,3 and anybody interested in theories of justice
should find this close and sustained encounter between them very illumi-
nating. The editors, Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns, open the col-
lection with a brisk and helpful general introduction that sets up the de-
bate and provides a summary of the nine central chapters of the book.
These are neatly divided into two parts: the first four chapters, by Thomas
Pogge, Erin Kelly, Elizabeth Anderson, and Richard Arneson, all ex-
amine the respective merits of the capability and the primary social
goods metrics in the abstract and in general, whereas the remaining five
chapters, by Norman Daniels, Lorella Terzi, Colin McLeod, Harry Brig-
house and Elaine Unterhalter, and Ingrid Robeyns, test the two views by
asking about their implications for particular aspects of a theory of jus-
tice and policy concerns: health (Daniels), disability (Terzi), children’s
claims (McLeod), education (Brighouse and Unterhalter), and gender
(Robeyns).
The two perspectives—the more theoretical and the more applied—
that the papers take combine well to give an exhaustive picture of what is
at stake in this debate, and in my view two main general and very salient
sets of observations emerge from the focused discussion that unfolds in
this collection. The first set of observations helpfully brings to light the
various respects in which the two views may be seen to differ. The
second set of observations puts pressure on the received wisdom, inhe-
rited from Sen’s original discussion of Rawls’s view, that the two views

3
The other two are Ronald Dworkin’s equality of resources view (Ronald Dworkin,
Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2000) and welfarism. Dworkin himself thinks that Sen’s view collapses into
his view or becomes a form of welfarism.
 Book Reviews 23

are as different as they have been made out to be.4

With regard to the first issue, Sen himself had noticed that the capa-
bility approach is sensitive to variations between individuals that affect
what resources may do for them, while the focus on primary social goods
ignores these variations. (There was, Sen charged, an element of “fetish-
ism” in Rawls’s view, in bestowing final value on primary social goods
when these should be valued merely as means to further ends.) This re-
mains one of the key distinctive features of the capability approach, to-
gether with a related point, which is the sensitivity of that approach to the
influence of informal, extra-institutional, factors such as unjust social
norms, on people’s real opportunities, in contrast with the Rawlsian fo-
cus on the main social and economic institutions of society as the subject
of justice. Various papers in this volume reaffirm the importance of these
two differences between the capability approach and the primary social
goods view. Elizabeth Anderson sees them as two of four reasons to fa-
vor the capability approach, together with its understanding of justice in
terms of the outcomes we want to achieve rather than the means neces-
sary to attain them, and the fact that it lends itself naturally to citizens’
own articulation of their claims. Richard Arneson, who offers a qualified
defense of the capability approach, thinks that, when asking what matters
from the point of view of justice, we need to focus on opportunity for
well-being, understood in objective terms. How much well-being (and
opportunity for well-being) one has is affected by personal traits that in-
teract with primary social goods in crucial ways, and Arneson remarks
that “[i]t would be perverse to regard those with lots of money and free
time but poor personal traits as well off” (112). Lorella Terzi argues that
the capability approach is better placed to capture the claims of justice of
disabled people because the primary social goods metric can only be sen-
sitive to the impairment resulting from disability if that impairment is the
result of faulty institutions, and even then it ignores the powerful influ-
ence of cultural and social factors on disabled persons’ capabilities. Harry
Brighouse and Elaine Unterhalter—who argue for the need to draw on
both the capability view and the primary social goods metric when for-
mulating a theory of education—highlight that equal resources can mean
unequal educational opportunities, as is the case with girls in some South
African schools whose educational opportunities are hindered by the fact
that they face a risk of rape at school. Ingrid Robeyns makes a case for
4
My choice to discuss the contributions to the volume by reference to these two sa-
lient themes, which I think are the most important overall conclusions that emerge from
the volume, precludes me from discussing in the text below Colin McLeod’s lucid and
enlightening chapter, “Primary Goods, Capabilities, and Children.” McLeod argues that
neither approach, at least as they have been developed to date, lends itself well to captur-
ing the distinctive claims of justice of children.
24 Book Reviews

focusing on capabilities when thinking about gender justice partly on the

basis of the importance of noninstitutional factors such as social norms
and gender stereotypes in determining women’s and men’s prospects.
These contributions are right, in my view, to stress these aspects of
the capability view as its central, distinctive features: although there are
other respects in which some versions of the capability view differ from
resourcist views like Rawls’s, these do not characterize the focus on ca-
pability as such. Capability theorists, for example, have sometimes in-
sisted on the importance of securing certain capabilities equally, in con-
trast with Rawls’s allowance of inequalities that benefit the worst-off
members of society (as Norman Daniels points out in his piece) and with
Rawls’s permission of those inequalities in capabilities that are compati-
ble with the possession of equal basic liberties (as Erin Kelly argues in
this volume). Another respect in which some capability views distinguish
themselves from resourcist ones lies in their reliance on an objective ac-
count of well-being. Justice requires securing people’s effective freedom
to achieve well-being, which is what (objectively) valuable functionings
identify. But not all versions of the capability view subscribe to both or
either of these claims. Anderson, for example, in her paper in this vo-
lume and elsewhere,5 argues for a version of the capability view that
views as valuable those functionings that are necessary for people to
function as democratic citizens. She agrees with Rawls that claims of
justice are fundamentally about “what citizens need to satisfy their objec-
tive interests as citizens” (86), but thinks that those interests are best de-
fined in terms of certain functionings rather than in terms of primary so-
cial goods. She also thinks that citizens should only be guaranteed a cer-
tain threshold level of the capability to achieve these functionings, rather
than insisting on equality of capability.
Both partisans and critics of the capability approach have taken issue
with views like Anderson’s, however, on the grounds that they cease to
be sufficiently distinctive. Kelly’s and Arneson’s contributions in this
volume raise this worry. Arneson supports the capability view but regrets
that not all its exponents, including Sen himself, adopt whole-heartedly
the commitment to an objective standard of well-being, which is what, he
argues, makes the capability view fundamentally attractive. Kelly, by
contrast, thinks that the moves away from equality and an objective
theory of well-being are a welcome development, but judges that they
bring the capability view too close to the primary goods view for it to be
its rival.
This brings us to the second set of observations that are central in this
volume: just how different are these two approaches, really? Even when

5
Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337.
 Book Reviews 25

we leave the two aspects of some capability views just discussed (the
commitment to equality and to an objective standard of well-being) to
one side, it appears that the contrast between the capability view and the
primary social goods approach has been overstated. In his paper in the
volume, Thomas Pogge makes a relentless case for rejecting the received
wisdom according to which a focus on resources is fetishist. According
to Pogge, a duly extended resourcist view can be sensitive to the impact
of variations in social climate, environmental conditions, and personal
attributes on people’s situations, especially once we take into account the
fact that many such variations are the result of social factors—that is, of
institutionally created and sustained inequalities. Many persons’ disabili-
ties, for example, are the result of childhood deprivation, when their nu-
tritional and other basic care needs have gone unmet. The real difference
between the capability and the primary social goods views, Pogge re-
marks, lies in whether inequalities due to natural factors are seen to give
rise to claims of justice. Norman Daniels’s paper strengthens Pogge’s
conclusions. Daniels has made the most systematic and well-worked case
to date for an extension of Rawls’s approach to deal with the case of
health,6 and in his contribution to this volume he helpfully summarizes
that case with an eye to comparing it to the capability approach. Daniels
argues for the importance of securing for everyone fair equality of oppor-
tunity, understood, broadly, as an exercisable opportunity to pursue a
reasonable range of life-plans, and people’s health claims are those
claims to having health-related impediments to one’s fair opportunity
share removed. This extension of Rawls’s theory, Daniels points out,
leads to “convergence, if not identity, between the space of capabilities
and the space of exercisable opportunities” (137).
The contention that the two approaches (or at least certain versions of
them) are less different than they have been assumed to be seems plausi-
ble. Whether this is a point in favor of the primary goods view, as Pogge
claims and as Daniels implies, is not clear, however. Pogge himself notes
that a “list of capabilities is a useful heuristic device in the development
of a resourcist criterion of social justice. It can help us think of all the
personal and public goods and supports that human beings need to flou-
rish fully,” and that “an account of human capabilities can also play an
important evidentiary role. The observed fact that many persons are lack-
ing certain vital functionings may be good reason to revise our resourcist
criterion of social justice” (50). These points bring to view the need, for
any resourcist conception, to adopt, if only implicitly, an account of what
valuable functionings we should secure an opportunity to achieve. Re-
sourcist views and capability views may in the end be closer than we

6
Norman Daniels, Just Health Care (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
26 Book Reviews

think, but that is both because (some) capability views accept some typi-
cally resourcist claims, like those concerning the importance of eschew-
ing appeal to controversial conceptions of well-being, and because
(some) resourcist views accept the typically capabilitist contentions that
what fundamentally matters is securing people with the opportunity to
function well, and that what counts as a fair share of resources depends
on the degree to which their possession and use enable this fundamental
goal.
An interesting question that calls for close attention at this point in the
debate is whether the resourcist approach that comes closest to incorpo-
rating the concerns voiced by capability theorists is, rather than a Rawl-
sian one, the one formulated by Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin’s view is
more hospitable than Rawls’s (or at least than an unreconstructed version
of the latter) both to variations between individuals, when assessing what
counts as a fair share of resources, and to a putatively neutral (if highly
abstract) account of well-being as the background for the resourcist view.
The editors of this volume explicitly set aside Dworkin’s view, which
may well be justified by reasons of space, but it is more controversial to
justify this exclusion on the grounds the editors themselves adduce,
namely, that primary social goods and the capability view are “the most
influential two proposals present” (6).
Even when the focus is on Rawls and Sen only, there are two aspects
of the debate between their answers to the “equality of what?” question
that in my view may have deserved more sustained attention than they
receive here. The first concerns a long-standing challenge for capability
theorists, namely, how to weight and rank different capability sets. The
challenge is voiced again in this volume by Pogge, and some responses
to it are briefly formulated by Anderson’s, Arneson’s, and Robeyns’ con-
tributions. Given the centrality of this challenge to the defensibility of the
capability view, it would have been helpful to find in this volume a more
systematic examination of these and other various possible responses that
capability theorists may make. The second aspect of the debate at hand
that the contributions to this volume do not tackle, yet which seems high-
ly important, concerns the emphasis on capabilities, or freedom, and the
related issue of the role of responsibility in a theory of justice. The bulk
of the discussions in this volume assess the merits of looking at what
functionings people are able to achieve, rather than what primary social
goods they have at their disposal. They do not say much about the other
central commitment of the capability view, which is that, in the name of
the value of freedom, people should be guaranteed capabilities to achieve
functionings, which includes not only the freedom to achieve those func-
tionings, but also, controversially, the freedom to forgo the achievement
of those functionings. Nor do contributors to this volume (or contributors
 Book Reviews 27

elsewhere, I should add) say much about the merits of the capability ap-
proach’s stance about the importance of holding people responsible for
certain costs of their choices.
As Amartya Sen notes in the chapter that concludes this collection,
there is more to “measuring justice” than the choice of the metric of jus-
tice, and he helpfully offers a discussion of differences between his and
Rawls’s view of justice on matters other than the choice between capa-
bility and primary social goods, also articulated in his most recent work
on justice. Nonetheless, it is a virtue of this collection that it accomplish-
es its focused aim in a rigorous and sustained fashion, and it is a very
valuable contribution of this volume as a whole that it should make both
camps in this debate more reflective about what their distinctive claims
are.

Serena Olsaretti
ICREA, Pompeu Fabra University
and
University of Cambridge
Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 38, No. 1 (January 2012)

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