Thanks very much for writing this. It’s helpful to have a clear and succinct summary of the capabilities approach on the Forum and I thought the post was constructive and well-written. It provides a nice counterpoint to HLI’s post, To WELLBY or not to WELLBY?

However, the capabilities approach (as you describe it here) strikes me as deeply paternalistic. How do we decide which capabilities to prioritise without asking people how much they value them? We can’t just defer to Nussbaum.

In the post you say:

The third approach, which I personally prefer, is to not even try to make an index but instead to track various clearly important dimensions separately

and also,

If you don’t know precisely what to maximize for people, then picking staying alive and having resources is a very good start.

To me, it looks like you’ve decided what the priorities should be based on what you think is “clearly important”. But as this post shows, humans are terrible at ‘affective forecasting’ i.e. we underestimate the importance of things that are resistant to hedonic adaptation and difficult to mentally simulate.

The thing is, we don’t have to guess. We can look at subjective wellbeing data from longitudinal studies to identify which capabilities have the most impact on people’s lives. The Origins of Happiness is the best example I’ve seen of this and is packed full of surprising insights. If adversity or discrimination had no effect on your subjective wellbeing, then those terms would be meaningless.

I think the crux of our different views is that I don’t see subjective wellbeing as one of many functionings. Instead, I place high credence on the view that wellbeing is the intrinsic good. Everyone cares about lots of things (positive emotions, achievements, having kids, art, knowledge, freedom, religious belief etc.) but you need to make trade-offs between them and that requires a common unit. 

I’m nearly always a 7/10 or 8/10 on the common happiness-type questions. I guess that this means that I could “improve” this, but honestly I’m not trying to do this at all. 

Here, I think you’re confusing emotional states with evaluations of life satisfaction. Most people don’t want to feel happy at a funeral. Instead, we want to be satisfied with our current experience, free from desires for a different state of affairs. When you chose to have kids, I expect you were trading off positive emotions for greater life satisfaction and that’s a totally reasonable thing to do. There's a great clip of Daniel Kahneman discussing this here.

Using subjective measures to allocate aid means that targeting will depend in part on people’s ability to imagine a better future (and thus feel dissatisfaction with the present).

For me, dissatisfaction and suffering are synonymous so I would prioritise an unhappy billionaire over a happy rural farmer, even though this may seem counterintuitive to many. In practice, however, there are a lot of unhappy rural farmers and it’s much cheaper to help them. The reason I work at the Happier Lives Institute is that I want to understand what will really help them the most, rather than deferring to the common assumption that it must be income gains and lives saved.

(commenting in a personal capacity etc.)

One trouble I've always had with the capabilities approach is with how one figures out what counts as a capability worth having. For example, I agree it's good for people to be able to choose their career and to walk outside safely at night. But it seems to me like this is precisely because people generally have strong preferences about what career to have and about their safety. If there was a law restricting people from spinning in a circle and clapping one's hands exactly 756 times, this would be less bad than restricting people from walking outside at night, and there's a simple preference-satisfaction explanation for this. What would be the capabilities approach explanation for this?

It also seems odd to me that capabilities would matter intrinsically. That is, it doesn't seem intrinsically important to me that people are merely able to satisfy their preferences. It seems more important that their preferences  are actually satisfied.

Thanks for writing this—I really enjoyed it. 

Another similar point drawn from Sen is that an exclusive SWB focus deprioritizes providing resources to people who are better able to psychologically adapt to bad circumstances. 

I think the example he uses is a person who has been poor all of their life (and therefore used to it) vs. a person who recently became poor, who might subjectively feel worse about it. He believes that it's counterintuitive to say that we should prioritize allocating resources to the second person over the first person. 

Thanks for posting this! I do think lots of people in EA take a more measuring-happiness/preference-satisfaction approach, and it's really useful to offer alternatives that are popular elsewhere. 

My notes and questions on the post:

Here's how I understand the main framework of the "capability approach," based mostly on this post, the linked Tweet, and some related resources (including SEP and ChatGPT):^[1] 

• "Freedom to achieve [well-being]" is the main thing that matters from a moral perspective.
  • (This post then implies that we should focus on increasing people's freedom to achieve well-being / we should maximize (value-weighted) capabilities.)
• "Well-being" breaks down into functionings (stuff you can be or do, like jogging or being a parent) and capabilities (the ability to realize a functioning: to take some options — choices)
  • Examples of capabilities: having the option of becoming a parent, having the option of not having children, having the option of jogging, having the option of not jogging, etc. Note: if you live in a country where you're allowed to jog, but there are no safe places to jog, you do not actually have the capability to jog.
  • Not all functionings/capabilities are equal: we shouldn't naively list options and count them. (So e.g. the ability to spin and clap 756 times is not the same as the option to have children, jog, or practice a religion.) My understanding is that the capability approach doesn't dictate a specific approach to comparing different capabilities, and the post argues that this is a complexity that is just a fact of life that we should accept and pragmatically move forward with: 
    • "Yes, it’s true that people would rank capability sets differently and that they’re very high dimensional, but that’s because life is actually like this. We should not see this and run away to the safety of clean (and surely wrong) simple indices. Instead, we should try to find ways of dealing with this chaos that are approximately right."

In particular, even if it turns out that someone is content not jogging, them having the ability to jog is still better than them not having this ability. 

My understanding of the core arguments of the post, with some questions or concerns I have (corrections or clarifications very much appreciated!): 

1. What the "capability approach" is — see above.
2. Why this approach is good
   1. It generally aligns with our intuitions about what is good. 
      1. I view this as both a genuine positive, and also as slightly iffy as an argument — I think it's good to ground an approach in intuitions like "it's good for a woman to choose whether to walk at night even if she might not want to", but when we get into things like comparing potential areas of work, I worry about us picking approaches that satisfy intuitions that might be wrong. See e.g. Don’t Balk at Animal-friendly Results, if I remember that argument correctly, or just consider various philanthropic efforts that focus on helping people locally even if they're harder to help and in better conditions than people who are farther away — I think this is generally justified with things like "it's important to help people locally," which to me seems like over-fitting on intuitions.
      2. At the same time, the point about women being happier than men in the 1970s in the US seems compelling. Similarly, I agree that I don't personally maximize anything like my own well-being — I'm also "a confused mess of priorities." 
   2. It's safer to maximize capabilities than it is to maximize well-being (directly), which both means that it's safer to use the capabilities approach and is a signal that the capabilities approach is "pointing us in the right direction." 
      1. A potentially related point that I didn't see explicitly: this approach also seems safer given our uncertainty about what people value/what matters. This is also related to 2d. 
   3. This approach is less dependent on things like people's ability to imagine a better situation for themselves. 
   4. This approach is more agnostic about what people choose to do with their capabilities, which matters because we're diverse and don't really know that much about the people we're trying to help. 
      1. This seems right, but I'm worried that once you add the value-weighting for the capabilities, you're imposing your biases and your views on what matters in a similar way to other approaches to trying to compare different states of the world. 
      2. So it seems possible that this approach is either not very useful by saying: "we need to maximize value-weighted capabilities, but we can't choose the value-weightings," (see this comment, which makes sense to me) or transforms back into a generic approach like the ones more commonly used often in EA — deciding that there are good states and trying to get beings into those states (healthy, happy,  etc.). [See 3bi for a counterpoint, though.]
3. Some downsides of the approach (as listed by the post)
   1. It uses individuals as the unit of analysis and assumes that people know best what they want, and if you dislike that, you won't like the approach. [SEE COMMENT THREAD...]
      1. I just don't really see this as a downside.
   2. "A second downside is that the number of sets of capabilities is incredibly large, and the value that we would assign to each capability set likely varies quite a bit, making it difficult to cleanly measure what we might optimize for in an EA context."
      1. The post argues that we can accept this complexity and move forward pragmatically in a better way than going with clean-but-wrong indices. It lists three examples (two indcies and one approach of tracking individual dimensions) that "start with the theory of the capability approach but then make pragmatic concessions in order to try to be approximately right." These seem to mostly track things that seem like common requirements for many other capabilities, like health/being alive, resources, education, etc. 
4. The influence of the capability approach

Three follow-up confusions/uncertainties/questions (beyond the ones embedded in the summary above): 

1. Did I miss important points, or get something wrong above? 
2. If we just claim that people value having freedoms (or freedoms that will help them achive well-being), is this structurally similar to preference satisfaction?
3. The motivation for the approach makes intuitive sense to me, but I'm confused about how this works with various things I've heard about how choices are sometimes bad. (Wiki page I found after a quick search, which seemed relevant after a skim.) (I would buy that a lot of what I've heard is stuff that's failed in replications, though.)
   1. Sometimes I actually really want to be told, "we're going jogging tonight," instead of being asked, "So, what do you want to do?"
   2. My guess is that these choices are different, and there's something like a meta-freedom to choose when my choice gets taken away? But it's all pretty muddled. 

1. ^{^}

   I don't have a philosophy background, or much knowledge of philosophy! 

I really liked this post. I think that the author raises a good point at the end, saying that for practical purposes, all these different paradigms basically lead to wanting to keep people alive and getting the ones who have less money more money.

But I found this to be a much more intuitive framework for me personally: from a systemic change standpoint it's probably easier/cheaper to increase the mental health of rich people who have poor mental health, but more difficult to increase the wellbeing of poor people who are suffering a similar amount. Maybe not based on the number of dollars you give out to two individuals in these separate situations, but based on the amount of effort it would take to systemically prevent or reduce the prevalence of the type of suffering. I like that the capabilities approach takes a strong stand that systemic change to reduce poverty is worth doing even if it's really hard, and worth prioritizing over e.g. rich people with poor mental health.

Great post, thank you for writing it! I had never heard of this approach before and I think it's very interesting. Strong upvote. While I don't agree it's better than maximizing happiness or preference satisfaction, I do think it's a valuable way of looking at things and could perhaps be used instrumentally in some cases.

My biggest disagreement is that I don't see how capabilities can be an intrinsic value. When I talk about maximizing utility or happiness, I mean maximizing mental states people prefer to be in (this is not the same as preference satisfaction). I got this from Derek Parfit, though I might have misunderstood him. Under this definition, watching a sad movie can be great as it's a mental state you want to be in. I do think "women being happier despite having less options" is an interesting case, but women would still likely prefer to be in a mental state where they have more options.

In both the case of the children and the walking safe at night: Imagine we lived in a world where every child coincidentally liked to follow the path their parents push them to or imagine we live in a world where women don't mind staying at home at all rather than walk at night. Would it really matter then if the options aren't there? It's because most people want to have those options in our world that it's important to have them.

Imagine two cities. In one, it is safe for women to walk around at night and in the second it is not. I think the former city is better even if women don’t want to walk around at night, because I think that option is valuable to people even if they do not take it. Preference-satisfaction approaches miss this.

Don't people also have preferences for having more options?

I found this an interesting framing, thank you! I hadn't heard of the multidimensional poverty index before. 

(1) Do you know how widely this measure is currently being used in e.g. development research, charity evaluation? I was kind of surprised at how specific some of the components of the index are (e.g. I imagine the below is kind of hard to straight forwardly calculate based on past surveys -- not sure if all of these questions are standard to ask?).

Deprived if the household does not own more than one of these assets: radio, TV, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorbike or refrigerator and does not own a car or truck.

(2) Minor point: I wonder if you will reach more of your intended audience by changing the title of this post to "The Capability Approach (to Improving Human Welfare)" or something. I initially pattern matched the word "capability" in this title onto something about AI, since I think on the EA forum folks talk more about capability in terms of AI systems than anything else.

Thanks for writing this post :) 

If anyone wants to read more (but finds SEP too dense) IEP has a page on Sen's capability approach as well.

Thanks for writing this! It's a well-written introduction and it's an approach that should be more widely known + highly rated in EA. 

Another useful application of the capability approach I've encountered is in health. While saving lives is simple to value via lots of approaches, it's more difficult to know how to weigh disability and disease. The QALY/DALY approach is a useful measurement tool, but I find it helpful to have a theory for why we should care about disability/disease beyond just the lens of QALY/DALYs. Venkatapuram (2011) defends a notion of health as a cluster of basic capabilities - and I find that a really useful foundation to think from.

While the capability approach definitely has some upsides; such as that it measures wellbeing in terms of people’s positive freedom (rather than simply being not infringed upon by others, people are only “free” if they have meaningful opportunities available to them), one downside of this approach is that it still has similar problems to other utilitarian metrics if the goal is to maximise wellbeing. For example, even with regards to discrimination, if the people doing the discriminating gained more capabilities than were lost by those being discriminated against, then the discrimination would be justified. One would still need to have a harm cap that states that when any one person or group of people lose enough capabilities, then no such actions are justified even if there is a net increase in capabilities. 

Also, I think the problem associated with traditional methods of measuring wellbeing (e.g., happiness, SWB) where they don’t align with people’s priorities can be solved if the metric being measured is personal meaning: even if having children, believing in a religion, or viewing pieces of art that evoke sadness don’t necessarily maximise happiness, they can all facilitate feelings of subjective meaning in individuals. That being said, this still isn’t perfect, as the AI example could just be about using a different drug that maximises different neurotransmitters like serotonin or oxytocin rather than simply dopamine.

Thanks so much for this interesting post - this framing of wellbeing had never occurred to me before. On the first example you use to explain why you find the capabilities framing to be more intuitive than a preference framing: can't we square your intuition that the second child's wellbeing is better with preference satisfaction by noting that people often have a preference to have the option to do things they don't currently prefer? I think this preference comes from (a) the fact that preferences can change, so the option value is instrumentally useful, and (b) it feels better to do what you'd prefer freely than to do so with no other option. You can account for the second example the same way.

The example of women reporting to be happier in the 70s (which lets take to be true for the sake of argument) is interesting, but for me that's a point against hedonic accounts of wellbeing, not preference accounts of wellbeing: our happiness is just one (albeit very very important!) thing we care about. So whilst women might have been happier in the US in the 70s, they may well have had preferences thwarted by discrimination... and even if their preferences were satisfied as in your first two examples (e.g. suppose they preferred playing the economic role they were forced by discrimination to play) they presumably would have preferred to have more options, and to choose freely.

I don't purport to have shown why the capabilities account of wellbeing is wrong, but rather to show why I’m not convinced that the holes (in the preference account of wellbeing) it's supposed to fill, exist in the first place.

[Sorry for the scrappy writing - written on my phone whilst walking]