Ingrid Robeyns
University of Amsterdam
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Journal of Human Development | 2005
Ingrid Robeyns
This paper aims to present a theoretical survey of the capability approach in an interdisciplinary and accessible way. It focuses on the main conceptual and theoretical aspects of the capability approach, as developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. The capability approach is a broad normative framework for the evaluation and assessment of individual well‐being and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about social change in society. Its main characteristics are its highly interdisciplinary character, and the focus on the plural or multidimensional aspects of well‐being. The approach highlights the difference between means and ends, and between substantive freedoms (capabilities) and outcomes (achieved functionings).
Feminist Economics | 2003
Ingrid Robeyns
This paper investigates how Amartya Sens capability approach can be applied to conceptualize and assess gender inequality in Western societies. I first argue against the endorsement of a definitive list of capabilities and instead defend a procedural approach to the selection of capabilities by proposing five criteria. This procedural account is then used to generate a list of capabilities for conceptualizing gender inequality in Western societies. A survey of empirical studies shows that women are worse off than men on some dimensions, better off on a few others, and similarly placed on yet others, while for some dimensions the evaluation is unclear. I then outline why, for group inequalities, inequalities in achieved functionings can be taken to reflect inequalities in capabilities, and how an overall evaluation could be arrived at by weighting the different capabilities.
Archive | 2010
Harry Brighouse; Ingrid Robeyns
1. Social primary goods and capabilities as metrics of justice Ingrid Robeyns and Harry Brighouse Part I. Theory: 2. A critique on the capability approach Thomas Pogge 3. Equal opportunity, unequal capability Erin Kelly 4. Justifying the capabilities approach to justice Elizabeth Anderson 5. Two cheers for capabilities Richard Arneson Part II. Applications: 6. Capabilities, opportunity, and health Norman Daniel 7. What metric for justice for disabled people? Capability and disability Lorella Terzi 8. Primary goods, capabilities, and children Colin MacLeod 9. Education for primary goods or for capabilities? Harry Brighouse and Elaine Unterhalter 10. Gender and the metric of justice Ingrid Robeyns Part III. Concluding Essay: 11. The place of capability in a theory of justice Amartya Sen.
International Journal of Manpower | 2008
Ingrid Robeyns
Introduction There is by now a vast feminist literature arguing that mainstream normative theories (whether they focus on inequality, poverty, well-being, social justice or policy reform) are often false gender-neutral and androcentric. Theories are false gender-neutral and androcentric when they pretend to be theories which apply equally to men and women, but upon closer scrutiny they are focusing mainly on male experiences and interests, thereby ignoring aspects of social institutions, or dimensions of well-being, that are of special importance to women and children. Often these theories have a poor underlying notion of gender, or implicitly rely upon sexist or androcentric assumptions, or incorporate empirical claims about gender issues that are highly contested. Susan Okins (1989) seminal work in this area criticised several social justice theories, ranging from communitarian to libertarian, for failing to properly incorporate the interests of women and families. Elizabeth Anderson (1999) critiques the ‘luck egalitarian’ theories within liberal political philosophy for not being able to adequately deal with womens caring responsibilities and the dependency of children, the disabled and frail elderly. Iris Young (1990) and Nancy Fraser (1998) have argued that theories of distributive justice are structurally limited in dealing with key feminist concerns such as the gendered division of labour. Eva Kittay (1999) showed that Rawlss (1971) theory of justice cannot adequately deal with the interests and needs of dependants and caregivers, and therefore cannot adequately account for inequalities between women and men.
Feminist Economics | 2003
Amartya Sen; Bina Agarwal; Jane Humphries; Ingrid Robeyns
AS: My interest in inequality, which goes back to my school days, was initially quite fixed on class divisions. My involvement with gender inequality grew more slowly. There was much greater concentration on class in standard politics (including standard student politics), and when in the early 1950s I was studying at Presidency College in Calcutta, it was taken for granted that class divisions were incomparably more important than other social divisions. Indeed, when later on, in the late 1960s, I started working on gender inequality (I was then teaching at Delhi University), many of my close friends still saw this as quite an ‘‘unsound’’ broadening of interest, involving a ‘‘dilution’’ of one’s ‘‘focus on class.’’ But, in addition to that political issue of priority, it is also true that classbased inequalities are, in many ways, much more transparent, which no one – even a child – can miss, without closing one’s eyes altogether. Even my sense of agony and outrage at the Great Bengal famine of 1943, to which you refer (and which did strongly shake even my 9-year-old mind), was also linked to the class pattern of mortality. Aside from the anger and outrage at the fact that millions could actually die of hunger and hunger-related diseases, I was amazed by the extraordinary recognition that no one I knew personally, through family connections or social ones, had any serious economic problem during the famine, while unknown millions, men, women, and children, roamed the country in search of food and fell and perished. The class character of famines in particular and of economic deprivation in general was impossible to escape. There was, of course, evidence of inequality between men and women as well. But its severe and brutal manifestations (on which I researched much later – from the late 1960s to the 1990s) were well hidden from immediate observation. And the less extreme expressions were confounded by a prevailing attitudinal fog. For example, in comparison with Feminist Economics 9(2 – 3), 2003, 319 – 332
Papers on Strategic Interaction | 2004
Wiebke Kuklys; Ingrid Robeyns
We describe Amartya Sens Capability Approach to welfare evaluation in the language of standard welfare economics, and assess to what extent it provides a genuine alternative for individual welfare measurement and policy evaluation. We review the nascent empirical literature on the capability approach and assess whether it makes a genuine difference with standard welfare evaluation.
Analyse and Kritik | 2001
Ingrid Robeyns
Abstract This article addresses the question whether a basic income will be a just social policy for women. The implementation of a basic income will have different effects for different groups of women, some of them clearly positive, some of them negative. The real issues that concern feminist critics of a basic income are the gender-related constraints on choices and the current gender division of labour, which are arguably both playing at the disadvantage of women. It is argued that those issues are not adequately addressed by a basic income proposal alone, and therefore basic income has to be part of a larger packet of social policy measures if it wants to maximise real freedom for all.
Archive | 2010
Ingrid Robeyns; Harry Brighouse
Over the last decades, political theorists and philosophers have at length debated the question what the proper metric of justice is. In other words, they have sought to answer the question “what should we look at, when evaluating whether one state of affairs is more or less just than another?” Should we evaluate the distribution of happiness? Or wealth? Or life chances? Or some combination of these and other factors? The Rawlsian social primary goods approach and the capability approach are two prominent answers to this question. The aim of this volume is to present a systematic study of these two approaches to measuring justice. Building on the work of John Rawls, some theorists use the social primary goods approach. Social primary goods are, according to Rawls, those goods that anyone would want regardless of whatever else they wanted. They are means, or resources (broadly conceived), and this approach says that we should compare holdings of such resources, without looking closely at what individuals, possessed of heterogeneous abilities and preferences, can do with them. Rawls (2001, pp. 58–61) specifies the social primary goods in a list as follows:
Journal of Economic Methodology | 2012
Ingrid Robeyns
textabstractAmartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice is a very rich book, with many aspects worth discussing. I will limit myself here to one major claim that Sen makes, namely that transcendental theories of justice are redundant. I will argue that this ‘Redundancy Claim’ is mistaken, since for justice-enhancing actions we need both transcendental and non-transcendental theorising of justice. Nevertheless I endorse an implication of the Redundancy Claim, namely that theorists of justice should shift their focus from transcendental theorizing towards thinking about justice-enhancing change, thereby restoring the balance between transcendental and non-transcendental theorizing. I will argue that this ‘Rebalancing Claim’ not only follows from the (mistaken) Redundancy Claim, but also from another argument which Sen advances about the current practice of philosophers of justice. I will conclude that the Redundancy Claim has to be rejected, but that this is not a big loss, since what is really important is the Rebalancing Claim, which is vindicated.
Archive | 2010
Richard J. Arneson; Harry Brighouse; Ingrid Robeyns
What is the best standard of interpersonal comparison for a broadly egalitarian theory of social justice? 1 A broadly egalitarian theory is one that holds that justice requires that institutions and individual actions should be arranged to improve, to some degree, the quality of life of those who are worse off than others, or very badly off, or both. 2 I shall add the specification that to qualify as broadly egalitarian, the theory must in some circumstances require action to aid the worse off or very badly off even when such action would not maximize the aggregate sum of utility, welfare, or well-being. Any such view needs a standard of interpersonal comparison that allows us to distinguish better off from worse off persons. Recently two types of standard have attracted adherents. One is the resource-oriented approach developed by John Rawls and others, and the other is the capability approach associated with the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. 3 Rawls has affirmed that the proper measure is an index of primary social goods, flexible, multipurpose resources such that any rational person wants more rather than fewer of them. 4 Sen presents the capability approach as correcting a basic flaw in Rawlss suggestion. To see the criticism, suppose for simplicity that the resourcist ranks peoples condition by their income and wealth (the power to buy whatever goods are available for sale). Two persons may have identical income and wealth, but differ in their personal traits in ways that intuitively seem to be relevant to a full assessment of how well off or badly off they are. One is blind or legless, say, whereas the other has normal vision and two intact functioning legs. Or perhaps one is extremely physically unattractive and the other is not. Having significantly worse personal traits than another person, along with the same wealth and income, one will be far less able than the other individual to pursue effectively and fulfill almost any valuable goal or life plan one might adopt. The proposal then is that ones resource holding is not a good measure of ones condition, how well off or badly off one is in life prospects. Sens suggestion is that an appropriate measure of a persons condition for purposes of a theory of justice is the extent to which she has real freedom or capability to lead her life in ways she has good …