DEVELOPMENT AS CAPABILITY EXPANSION

Amartya Sen*

CONTENTS

Page
Introduction ........................................................................................................................41
The capability approach: conceptual roots .........................................................................43
Commodities, functionings and capability..........................................................................43
Utilitarian calculus versus objective deprivation ................................................................44
Ambiguities, precision and relevance .................................................................................45
Quality of life, Basic needs and capability .........................................................................46
Rawls, primary goods and freedoms...................................................................................47
Freedom, capability and data limitations ............................................................................48
Inequality, class and gender................................................................................................51
Conclusion ..........................................................................................................................54

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Introduction

In his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik de Sitten, ImmanueI Kant argues for the
necessity of seeing human beings as ends in themselves, rather than as means to other
ends: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other,
in every case as an end withal, never as means only.”1 This principle has importance
in many contexts–even in analysing poverty, progress and planning. Human beings
are the agents, beneficiaries and adjudicators of progress, but they also happen to be–
directly or indirectly–the primary means of all production. This dual role of human
beings provides a rich ground for confusion of ends and means in planning and
policy-making. Indeed, it can–and frequently does–take the form of focusing on
production and prosperity as the essence of progress, treating people as the means
through which that productive progress is brought about (rather than seeing the lives
of people as the ultimate concern and treating production and prosperity merely as
means to those lives).
Indeed, the widely prevalent concentration on the expansion of real income and on
economic growth as the characteristics of successful development can be precisely an
aspect of the mistake against which Kant had warned. This problem is particularly
pivotal in the assessment and planning of economic development. The

*
Lamont University Professor, Harvard University.

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problem does not, of course, lie in the fact that the pursuit of economic prosperity is
typically taken to be a major goal of planning and policy-making. This need not be, in
itself, unreasonable. The problem relates to the level at which this aim should be taken
as a goal. Is it just an intermediate goal, the importance of which is contingent on
what it ultimately contributes to human lives? Or is it the object of the entire exercise?
It is in the acceptance–usually implicitly–of the latter view that the ends–means
confusion becomes significant–indeed blatant.
The problem might have been of no great practical interest if the achievement of
economic prosperity were tightly linked–in something like a one-to-one
correspondence–with that of enriching the lives of the people. If that were the case,
then the pursuit of economic prosperity as an end in itself, while wrong in principle,
might have been, in effect, indistinguishable from pursuing it only as a means to the
end of enriching human lives. But that tight relation does not obtain. Countries with
high GNP per capita can nevertheless have astonishingly low achievements in the
quality of life, with the bulk of the population being subject to premature mortality,
escapable morbidity, overwhelming illiteracy and so on.
Just to illustrate an aspect of the problem, the GNP per capita of six countries is
given in table 1, along with each country’s respective level of life expectancy at birth.

TABLE 1. ECONOMIC PROSPERITY AND LIFE EXPECTANCY, 1985

Country GNP per capita Life expectancy at birth
China ..................................................... 310 69
Sri Lanka ................................................ 380 70
Brazil ..................................................... 1 640 65
South Africa ............................................ 2 010 55
Mexico ................................................... 2 080 67
Oman ..................................................... 6 730 54
Source: World Development Report 1987 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988), table 1.
Obviously these numbers are somewhat dated, but
hopefully you get the underlying point Sen is making [TW]
A country can be very rich in conventional economic terms (i.e., in terms of the
value of commodities produced per capita) and still be very poor in the achieved
quality of human fife. South Africa, with five or six times the GNP per capita of Sri
Lanka or China, has a much lower longevity rate, and the same applies in different
ways to Brazil, Mexico, Oman, and indeed to many other countries not included in
this table.
There are, therefore, really two distinct issues here. First, economic prosperity is no
more than one of the means to enriching lives of people. It is a foundational
conclusion to give it the status of an end. Secondly, even as a means, merely
enhancing average economic opulence can be quite inefficient in the pursuit of the
really valuable ends. In making sure that development planning and general policy-
making do not suffer from costly confusions of ends and

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means, we have to face the issue of identification of ends, in terms of which the
effectiveness of the means can be systematically assessed.
This paper is concerned with discussing the nature and implications of that general
task.

The capability approach: conceptual roots

The particular line of reasoning that will be pursued here is based on evaluating
social change in terms of the richness of human life resulting from it. But the quality
of human life is itself a matter of great complexity. The approach that will be used
here, which is sometimes called the “capability approach”, sees human life as a set of
“doings and beings”–we may call them “functionings”–and it relates the evaluation of
the quality of life to the assessment of the capability to function. It is an approach that
I have tried to explore in some detail, both conceptually and in terms of its empirical
implications.2 The roots of the approach go back at least to Adam Smith and Karl
Marx, and indeed to Aristotle.
In investigating the problem of “political distribution”, Aristotle made extensive
use of his analysis of “the good of human beings”, and this he linked with his
examination of “the functions of man” and his exploration of “life in the sense of
activity”.3 The Aristotelian theory is, of course, highly ambitious and involves
elements that go well beyond this particular issue (e.g., it takes a specific view of
human nature and relates a notion of objective goodness to it). But the argument for
seeing the quality of life in terms of valued activities and the capability to achieve
these activities has much broader relevance and application.
Among the classical political economists, both Adam Smith and Karl Marx
explicitly discussed the importance of functionings and the capability to function as
determinants of well-being.4 Marx’s approach to the question was closely related to
the Aristotelian analysis (and indeed was apparently directly influenced by it).5
Indeed, an important part of Marx’s programme of reformulation of the foundations of
political economy is clearly related to seeing the success of human life in terms of
fulfilling the needed human activities. Marx put it thus: “It will be seen how in place
of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and rich
human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a
totality of human life-activities–the man in whom his own realization exists as an
inner necessity, as need.”6

Commodities, functionings and capability

If life is seen as a set of “doings and beings” that are valuable, the exercise of
assessing the quality of life takes the form of

43
evaluating these functionings and the capability to function. This valuational exercise
cannot be done by focusing simply on commodities or incomes that help those doings
and beings, as in commodity-based accounting of the quality of life (involving a
confusion of means and ends). “The life of money-making”, as Aristotle put it, “is one
undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking;
for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”7 The task is that of
evaluating the importance of the various functionings in human life, going beyond
what Marx called, in a different but related context, “commodity fetishism”.8 The
functionings themselves have to be examined, and the capability of the person to
achieve them has to be appropriately valued.
In the view that is being pursued here, the constituent elements of life are seen as a
combination of various different functionings (a “functioning n-tuple”). This amounts
to seeing a person in as it were, an “active” rather than a “passive” form (but neither
the various states of being nor even the “doings” need necessarily be “athletic” ones).
The included items may vary from such elementary functionings as escaping
morbidity and mortality, being adequately nourished, undertaking usual movements
etc., to many complex functionings such as achieving self–respect, taking part in the
life of the community and appearing in public without shame (the last a functioning
that was illuminatingly discussed by Adam Smith9 as an achievement that is valued in
all societies, but the precise commodity requirement of which, he pointed out, varies
from society to society). The claim is that the functionings are constitutive of a
person’s being, and an evaluation of a person’s well-being has to take the form of an
assessment of these constituent elements.
The primitive notion in the approach is that of functionings–seen as constitutive
elements of living. A functioning is an achievement of a person: what he or she
manages to do or to be, and any such functioning reflects, as it were, a part of the state
of that person. The capability of a person is a derived notion. It reflects the various
combinations of functionings (doings and beings) he or she can achieve.10 It takes a
certain view of living as a combination of various “doings and beings”. Capability
reflects a person’s freedom to choose between different ways of living. The
underlying motivation–the focusing on freedom–is well captured by Marx’s claim that
what we need is “replacing the domination of circumstances and chance over
individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances”.11

Utilitarian calculus versus objective deprivation

The capability approach can he contrasted not merely with commodity-based

systems of evaluation, but also with the utility-based assessment. The utilitarian
notion of value, which is invoked

44
 explicitly or by implication in much of welfare economics, sees value, ultimately,
only in individual utility, which is defined in terms of some mental condition, such as
pleasure, happiness, desire-fulfilment. This subjectivist perspective has been
extensively used, but it can be very misleading, since it may fail to reflect a person’s
real deprivation.
A thoroughly deprived person leading a very reduced life, might not appear to be
badly off in terms of the mental metric of utility, if the hardship is accepted with non-
grumbling resignation. In situations of long-standing deprivation, the victims do not
go on weeping all the time, and very often make great efforts to take pleasure in small
mercies and to cut down personal desires to modest–”realistic”–proportions. The
person’s deprivation, then, may not at all show up in the metrics of pleasure, desire-
fulfilment etc., even though he or she may be quite unable to be adequately nourished,
decently clothed, minimally educated and so on.12
This issue, apart from its foundational relevance, may have some immediate
bearing on practical public policy. Smugness about continued deprivation and
vulnerability is often made to look justified on grounds of lack of strong public
demand and forcefully expressed desire for removing these impediments.13

Ambiguities, precision and relevance

There are many ambiguities in the conceptual framework of the capability

approach. Indeed, the nature of human life and the content of human freedom are
themselves far from unproblematic concepts. It is not my purpose to brush these
difficult questions under the carpet, In so far as there are genuine ambiguities in the
underlying objects of value, these will be reflected in corresponding ambiguities in the
characterization of capability. The need for this relates to a methodological point,
which I have tried to defend elsewhere, that if an underlying idea has an essential
ambiguity, a precise formulation of that idea must try to capture that ambiguity rather
than attempt to lose it.14 Even when precisely capturing an ambiguity proves to be a
difficult exercise, that is not an argument for forgetting the complex nature of the
concept and seeking a spuriously narrow exactness. In social investigation and
measurement, it is undoubtedly more important to be vaguely right than to be
precisely wrong.15
It should be noted also that there is always an element of real choice in the
description of functionings, since the format of “doings” and “beings” permits
additional “achievements” to be defined and included. Frequently, the same doings
and beings can be seen from different perspectives, with varying emphases. Also,
some functionings may be easy to describe, but of no great interest in the relevant
context (e.g., using a particular washing powder in doing the washing).16 There is no
escape from the problem of evaluation in

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selecting a class of functionings as important and others not so. The evaluative
exercise cannot be fully addressed without explicitly facing questions concerning what
are the valuable achievements and freedoms, and which are not. The chosen focus has
to be related to the underlying social concerns and values, in terms of which some
definable functionings and capabilities may be important and others quite trivial and
negligible. The need for selection and discrimination is neither an embarrassment nor
a unique difficulty for the conceptualization of functioning and capability.17
In the context of some types of welfare analysis, for example, in dealing with
extreme poverty in developing economies, we may be able to go a long distance in
terms of a relatively small number of centrally important functionings and the
corresponding capabilities, such as the ability to be well-nourished and well-sheltered,
the capability of escaping avoidable morbidity and premature mortality and so forth.18
In other contexts, including more general problems of assessing economic and social
development, the list may have to be much longer and much more diverse.19 The task
of specification must relate to the underlying motivation of the exercise as well as
dealing with the social values involved.

Quality of life, basic needs and capability

There is an extensive literature in development economics concerned with valuing

the quality of life, the fulfilment of Basic needs and related matters.20 That literature
has been quite influential in recent years in drawing attention to neglected aspects of
economic and social development. It is, however, fair to say that these writings have
been typically comprehensively ignored in the theory of welfare economics, which has
tended to treat these contributions as essentially ad hoc suggestions. This treatment is
partly the result of the concern of welfare theory that proposals should not just appeal
to intuitions but also be structured and founded. It also reflects the intellectual
standing that such traditional approaches as utilitarian evaluation enjoy in welfare
theory, and which serves as a barrier to accepting departures even when they seem
attractive. The inability of utility-based evaluations to cope with persistent
deprivations was discussed earlier, but in the welfare-economic literature the hold of
this tradition has been hard to dislodge.
The charge of “ad hoc-ness” against the development literature relates to the
different modes of arguing that are used in welfare theory and in development theory.
As far as the normative structure is concerned, the latter tends to be rather immediate,
appealing to strong intuitions that seem obvious enough. Welfare theory, on the other
hand, tends to take a more circuitous route, with greater elaboration and defence of the
foundations of the approach in question. To bridge the gap, we have to compare and
contrast the

46
choose to lead through bringing about social changes is the first step in confronting
that challenge. It is a task that we must face.

________________

NOTES
1
Grundlegung (1785), sect. II; English translation Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, in
Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, 6th edition, T. K. Abbot, ed.
(London, Longmans, 1909), p. 47.
2
Amartya Sen, “Equality of what?”, in Tanner Lectures on Human Values. S. M. McMurring, ed., vol. I
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980 reprinted in Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford,
Blackwell; and Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1982)); Resources, Values and Development (Oxford,
Blackwell; and Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard University Press, 1984); Commodities and Capabilities
(Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1985); “Well-being, agency and freedom: the Dewey lectures 1984”, Journal of
Philosophy, 82 (April 1985); and “Capability and well-being”, WIDER conference paper, 1988.
3
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, book I, sect. 7; in the translation by David Ross, World’s Classics
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 12-14. Note that Aristotle’s term “eudaimonia”, which is often
misleadingly translated simply as “happiness”, stands for fulfilment of life in a way that goes well beyond the
utilitarian perspective. Though pleasure may well result from fulfilment, that is seen as a consequence rather
than the cause of valuing that fulfilment. For an examination of the Aristotelian approach and its relation to
recent works on functionings and capabilities, see Martha Nussbaurn “Nature, function and capability: Aristotle
on political distribution”, Oxford Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy, supplementary volume 1988.
4
See Adam Smith An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), vol. I, book V
sect. II; republished, R. H Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds. (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1976), pp. 869-872; and
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844); English translation (Moscow Progressive
Publishers, 1977).
5
See G. E. M. de Sainte Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, Duckworth, 1981);
and Martha Nussbaum, “Nature, function and capability . . .”
6
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 . . .
7
Aristotle, op. cit., book I, sect. 5; in the translation by David Ross, p. 7.
8
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, English translation by S. Moore and E. Aveling (London, Sonnenschein 1887),
chap. 1, sect. 4, pp. 41-55; see also Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 . . .
9
See Adam Smith op. cit., vol. II, book V, chap. II (section entitled “Taxes upon Consumable
Commodities”); republished . . . , pp. 469-471.
10
There are several technical problems in the representation of functioning n-tuples and of capability as a set
of alternative functioning n-tuptes, any one n-tuple of which a person can choose. In this paper, I shall not be
particularly concerned with these formal matters, for which see Commodities and Capabilities . . . , especially
chaps. 2, 4 and 7.
11
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846). The quoted passage is taken from the
translation by David McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 190.
12
See Amartya Sen, “Well-being, agency and freedom . . .”; and Commodities and Capabilities . . .
13
It is sometimes presumed that to depart from a person’s own actual desires or pleasures as the measuring
rod of assessment would be to introduce paternalism into the evaluative exercise. This view overlooks the
important fact that having pleasure and desiring are not themselves valuational activities, even though the latter
(desire) can often result from valuing something, and the former (pleasure) can often result

56
from getting what one values. A person’s utility must not be confused with his or her own valuations, and thus
tying the evaluative exercise to the person’s own utility is quite different from judging a person’s success in
terms of the person’s own valuation. The important distinction to note in this context is that a person may not
have the courage to desire a big social change weighed down by the circumstances in which he or she lives, and
yet given the opportunity to evaluate the situation, which is essentially a political exercise in this context, the
person may well value a change. One advantage of valuing as opposed to feeling is that a proper evaluation has
to be a reflective exercise–open to critical examination–in a way that feelings need not be (the requirement of
critical examination does not apply in the same way to feelings as it does to reflective evaluations). These and
related issues are discussed in “Well-being, agency and freedom . . .”
14
In many contexts, the formal representations will take the form of partial orderings, or of overdetermined
rankings, or of “fuzzy” relations. This is, of course, not a special problem with the capability approach, and
applies generally to conceptual frameworks in social theory; see Amartya Sen, Collective Choice and Social
Welfare (San Francisco, Holden-Day, 1970 republished, Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1979); and On Ethics and
Economics (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987); see also “Social choice theory”, in Handbook of Mathematical
Economics, K. J. Arrow and M. Intriligator, eds. (Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1985). The formal problems can
be dealt with at different levels of precision (i.e., with varying extent of precise representation of ambiguities).
The important general point to note here is that it may be, for substantive social theories, both terribly limiting
and altogether unnecessary to shun ambiguities.
15
See Amartya Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement . . . , assays 17-20.
16
Bernard Williams raises this issue in his comments on the Tanner Lectures on the standard of living; see
The Standard of Living, Tanner Lectures of Amartya Sen, with discussions by John Muellbauer, Ravi Kanbur,
Keith Hart and Bemard Williams, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1987), pp. 98-101 and 108-109.
17
I have tried to discuss some of the general methodological issues involved in description in “Description
as choice”, Oxford Economic Press, 32 (1980); reprinted in Choice, Welfare and Measurement . . .
18
See Amartya Sen, Resources, Values and Development . . . , chaps. 15, 19 and 20; and “The concept of
development”, in Handbook of Development Economics, H. Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan, eds. (Amsterdam,
North-Holland, forthcoming).
19
The range of functionings and capabilities that may be of interest for the assessment of a person’s well-
being or agency can be very wide indeed; see Amartya Sen, “Well-being, agency and freedom . . .
20
See, among other contributions, Michael Lepton, Assessing Economic Performance (London, Staples
Press, 1968); Paul Streeten, The Frontiers of Development Studies (London, Macmillan, 1972); Irma Adelman
and Cynthia Tuft Morris, Economic Growth and Social Equity in Developing Countries (Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 1973); Amartya Sen, “On the development of Basic income indicators to supplement GNP
measures”, Economic Bulletin for Asia and the Far East (United Nations publication, Sates No. E.74.II.F.4); H.
Chenery and others, Redistribution with Growth (London, Oxford University Press, 1974); Irma Adelman,
“Development economics: a reassessment of goals”, American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 66
(1975); James P. Grant, Disparity Reduction Rates In Social Indicators (Washington, D.C., Overseas
Development Council, 1978); Keith Griffin and Azizur Rahman Khan, “Poverty in the third world; ugly facts
and fancy models”, World Development, 6 (1978); Paul Streeten and S. J. Burki, “Basic needs: some issues”,
World Development, 6 (1978); Morris D. Morris, Measuring the Conditions of the World’s Poor: The Physical
Quality of Life Index (Oxford, Pergamon, 1979); Paul Streeten, Development Perspectives (London, Macmillan,
1981); Paul Streeten and others, First Things First: Meeting Basic Needs in Developing Countries (New York,
Oxford University Press, 1981); S. R. Osmani, Economic Inequality and

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