Martin van Hees

The development of capability indicators

This paper is motivated by sustained interest in the capabilities approach to welfare economics combined with the paucity of economic statistics that measure capabilities at the individual level. Specifically, it takes a much discussed account of the normatively desirable capabilities constitutive of a good life, argued to be comprehensive at a high level of abstraction, and uses it to operationalize the capabilities approach by developing a survey instrument to elicit information about capabilities at the individual level. The paper explores the extent to which these capabilities are covariates of a life satisfaction measure of utility and investigates aspects of robustness and subgroup differences using standard socio‐demographic variables as well as a relatively novel control for personality. In substantial terms, we find there is some evidence of quantitative, but no qualitative, gender and age differences in the capabilities–life satisfaction relationship. Furthermore, we find that indicators from a wide range of life domains are linked to life satisfaction, a finding that supports multi‐dimensional approaches to poverty and the non‐materialist view that people do not just value financial income per se. Our most important contribution, however, is primarily methodological and derives from the demonstration that, within the conventions of household and social surveys, human capabilities can be measured with the aid of suitably designed statistical indicators.

Logical constraints on judgement aggregation

Logical puzzles like the doctrinal paradox raise the problem of how to aggregate individual judgements into a collective judgement, or alternatively, how to merge collectively inconsistent knowledge bases. In this paper, we view judgement aggregation as a function on propositional logic valuations, and we investigate how logic constrains judgement aggregation. In particular, we show that there is no non-dictatorial decision method for aggregating sets of judgements in a logically consistent way if the decision method is local, i.e., only depends on the individual judgements on the proposition under consideration.

The limits of epistemic democracy

The so-called doctrinal paradox reveals that a jury that decides by majority on the truth of a set of propositions, may come to a conclusion that is at odds with a legal doctrine to which they all subscribe. The doctrinal paradox, and its subsequent generalization by List and Pettit (Econ Philos 18:89–110, 2002), reveal the logical difficulties of epistemic democracy. This paper presents several generalizations of the paradox that are formulated with the use of many-valued logic. The results show that allowing the individual or the collective judgements to be formulated in terms of degrees of beliefs does not ensure the possibility of collective epistemic decision making.

The Construction of Rights

This paper examines the sense in which rights can be said to exist. We examine various approaches to the definition and analysis of rights, focusing in particular on the compossibility of rights. Concentrating on three existing approaches to rights—social choice-theoretic, game-theoretic, and Steiners approach—we suggest that rights are noncompossible in any interesting sense, that is, that the rights people have are nonexistent or vanishingly small. We develop an alternative account of rights—which we claim is more in tune with moral intuitions—where compossibility is not important and rights cannot form the exclusive basis of morality or a theory of justice. Rights are constructed on the basis of more fundamental moral values. We demonstrate how they are constructed and the sense in which they exist even though they might not always be exercised, while acknowledging that rights that may never be exercised are hardly worth the name.We would like to thank Cecile Fabre, Ruth Kinna, Matt Kramer, Anna Pilatova, three anonymous referees, and participants at the Analysis of Measurement of Freedom conference in Palermo, Italy, September 2001, the 2002 meeting of the Dutch Political Science Association, and the Economic Decisions Conference in Pamplona, Spain, June 2002, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Legal Reductionism and Freedom

Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part 1: Legal Reductionism. 1. Legal Positivism and the Normativity Thesis. 2. Legal Positivism and the Separability Thesis. 3. Reductionism and the Analysis of Institutions. 4. Legal Systems, Rights and the Legal-Political Game. Part 2: Legal Reductionism Applied: The Analysis of Legal Freedom. 5. Legal Freedom: Concept and Contents. 6. Freedom of Choice. 7. Conditions of Legal Freedom. 8. The Value of Legal Freedom. Appendix: Legal-Political Games. References. Index.

On the Analysis of Negative Freedom

This paper presents a non-preference-based approach to the analysis of negative freedom. It is argued that a proper understanding of (different conceptions of) negative freedom necessitates an examination of the consequences of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. For this reason the paper does not focus on freedom rankings of opportunity sets but on freedom rankings of opportunity situations, i.e., pairs consisting of a feasible set and an opportunity set. Three different freedom rankings of opportunity situations are axiomatically characterised. Each of the three rankings forms a generalisation of the purely cardinality-based freedom ranking of opportunity sets presented by Pattanaik and Xu (1990).This paper presents a non-preference-based approach to the analysis of negative freedom. It is argued that a proper understanding of (different conceptions of) negative freedom necessitates an examination of the consequences of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. For this reason the paper does not focus on freedom rankings of opportunity sets but on freedom rankings of opportunity situations, i.e., pairs consisting of a feasible set and an opportunity set. Three different freedom rankings of opportunity situations are axiomatically characterised. Each of the three rankings forms a generalisation of the purely cardinality-based freedom ranking of opportunity sets presented by Pattanaik and Xu (1990).

Freedom of choice and diversity of options: Some difficulties

Abstract.This paper explores the possibility for a (non-preference-based) freedom ranking of opportunity sets that is sensitive to the diversity of the options. It turns out that how distances between sets and alternatives are measured is crucial to the derivation of such a ranking. Several proposals are examined, each of which is shown to lead to impossibility results.

Freedom and opportunity

The article discusses recent attempts in rational choice theory to take account of the opportunity aspect of freedom, i.e., the value of alternatives, in measuring freedom. It is argued that each of these approaches (in terms of fixed preferences, of possible future preferences and of the preferences of reasonable persons) fails to solve important conceptual problems. Furthermore, we argue that differences between measures of opportunity freedom reflect different moral standards for the quality of alternatives, not different conceptions of freedom as such. Hence, we propose to separate discussions about the meaning of the concept of freedom from the issue of determining the value of opportunity sets.

Freedom of Choice

The previous chapter explained what it means to say that a person is legally free to do something. Some questions pertaining to the nature of legal freedom were side-stepped by referring to the distinction between the things a person is legally free to do and his overall level of legal freedom. A few assumptions concerning the measurement of overall legal freedom were already made, in particular with respect to the role of ‘empty rights’, i.e., admissible but infeasible actions. In this chapter and the next the problem of how to assess aggregate levels of legal freedom will be taken up more systematically. I shall formulate some conditions under which different social situations can be compared in terms of the amount of legal freedom an individual enjoys in them.1 In the next chapter I shall turn to the question of how to base an assessment of society’s overall level of legal freedom on individual freedom judgements.

Counterfactual success and negative freedom

Recent theories of negative freedom see it as a value-neutral concept; the definition of freedom should not be in terms of specific moral values. Specifically, preferences or desires do not enter into the definition of freedom. If preferences should so enter then Berlins problem that a person may enhance their freedom by changing their preferences emerges. This paper demonstrates that such a preference-free conception brings its own counter-intuitive problems. It concludes that these problems might be avoided if the description of the constraints which specify an agents lack of freedom include the intentions of those who constrain the agents.