Abstract: Abstract I argue that the rapidly growing happiness literature raises an important challenge for the capability approach. Its results suggest that it has become possible to measure subjective well‐being and to compare its value for different persons. Moreover, if one accepts that the opinions of the people concerned should play some role in the evaluation of the trade‐offs between different dimensions of well‐being, the information about what makes people feel ‘more satisfied with their life as a whole’ seems relevant within the capability approach. However, for a non‐welfarist, it is necessary to ‘clean’ the happiness measure to separate the ‘ethically’ relevant information from the irrelevant noise. I suggest that the introduction of some ideas and concepts from the theory of responsibility‐sensitive egalitarianism is a promising method to reinterpret the happiness results. Keywords: CapabilityHappinessLife satisfactionResponsibility‐sensitive egalitarianism Notes 1. Sen (1985 Sen, A. 1985. Commodities and capabilities, Amsterdam: North‐Holland. [Google Scholar]) distinguishes three different interpretations of utility. I neglect the ‘preference’ interpretation, which is really a non‐starter for any egalitarian approach, and the ‘desire‐fulfilment’ interpretation, which is closely related to subjective satisfaction. 2. Remember that part of the Kahneman criticism was precisely that the measures of ‘overall satisfaction with life’ are less sensitive to adaptation than his preferred measure obtained through experience sampling. 3. Robeyns (2006 Robeyns, I. 2006. ‘The capability theory in practice’. Journal of Political Philosophy, 14(3): 351–376. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) gives an overview of the literature. 4. In many empirical applications at the country level (such as the Human Development Index), one first aggregates dimension by dimension over all the individuals and then aggregates over the different dimensions. It has been shown by Dutta et al. (2003 Dutta, I., Pattanaik, P. and Xu, Y. 2003. ‘On measuring deprivation and the standard of living in a multidimensional framework on the basis of aggregate data’. Economica, 70: 197–221. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) that this procedure is only equivalent to the one described in the text under very restrictive assumptions on the aggregator functions, basically boiling down to simple linear averaging procedures. 5. A notable exception is the fairness approach, advocated by Fleurbaey (2005 Fleurbaey, M. 2005. Social choice and the indexing dilemma, Paris: mimeo, CERSES. [Google Scholar]). 6. In Schokkaert and Van de Voorde (2004 Schokkaert, E. and Van de Voorde, C. 2004. ‘Risk selection and the specification of the conventional risk adjustment formula’. Journal of Health Economics, 23: 1237–1259. [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), a distinction is made between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ reasons for differences in healthcare expenditures; Devooght (2007 Devooght, K. forthcoming 2007. ‘To each the same and to each his own. A proposal to measure responsibility‐sensitive income inequality’. Economica, [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) implements a distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ sources of income inequality. 7. To simplify matters, I neglect in equation (1) (and in the following equations) the obvious possibility that there are also causal links in the other direction. 8. To give some examples: Schokkaert and Van Ootegem (1990 Schokkaert, E. and Van Ootegem, L. 1990. ‘Sen's concept of the living standard applied to the Belgian unemployed’. Recherches Economiques de Louvain, 56(3–4): 429–450. [Google Scholar]), Brandolini and d'Alessio (1998 Brandolini, A. and D'Alessio, G. 1998. Measuring well‐being in the functioning space, Roma: mimeo, Research Department Banca d'Italia. [Google Scholar]), Klasen (2000 Klasen, S. 2000. ‘Measuring poverty and deprivation in South Africa’. Review of Income and Wealth, 46(1): 33–58. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Anand et al. (2005 Anand, P., Hunter, G. and Smith, R. 2005. ‘Capabilities and well‐being: evidence based on the Sen‐Nussbaum approach to welfare’. Social Indicators Research, 74: 9–55. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Kuklys (2005 Kuklys, W. 2005. Amartya Sen's capability approach: theoretical insights and empirical applications, Berlin: Springer Verlag. [Google Scholar]), Lelli (forthcoming). 9. This linearity assumption is crucial. As soon as the life‐satisfaction function is no longer additively separable in the legitimate and illegitimate factors, difficult dilemmas arise (Fleurbaey and Maniquet, forthcoming). Different solutions have been proposed. The best known are the so‐called egalitarian equivalent and conditional egalitarian mechanisms. The former go far in the direction of compensation while undermining the idea of individual responsibility. The latter keep strictly to responsibility but can perform poorly with respect to compensation. 10. The numbers in the table should be seen as the values for α(health) i , β(religious) i and v i for the three individuals. 11. Note, however, that popular measures such as the Human Development Index have a similar primitive functional form. 12. The importance of social comparison processes in the case of unemployment is convincingly illustrated, for example, in Clark (2003 Clark, A. 2003. ‘Unemployment as a social norm: psychological evidence from panel data’. Journal of Labor Economics, 21(2): 323–351. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-08-04
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 104
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