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| Equality of Capability: Is It the Third Way? |
| Yao Dazhi |
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Abstract In the contention of contemporary egalitarian theory, the focus of issue is ″equality of what.″ There are two basic approaches to the issue, that is, welfarism and resourcism. However, some egalitarians are not content with either of them, and try to open up a third way, which may draw on the strengths of both approaches while minimizing its exposure to their weaknesses. The most significant representative of the third way is Amartya Sen's conception of equality of capability. We will put forward three questions to examine Sen's conception of equality of capability. First, what is meant by Sen's capability? There are two possibilities: it may refer to some capabilities of a human being, or it may refer to all his capabilities. In Sen's major works, we can find two different formulations. In some of his earlier works, Sen employed the term ″capability″ to refer to human being's ″basic capability,″ which obviously means some capabilities of a human being. But in his some of his later works, Sen used the term ″capability″ to refer to ″freedom,″ which seems to refer to all the capabilities of a human being. Whichever possibility Sen's formulations provides, his conception of equality of capability would face some serious difficulties. Second, is Sen's conception of equality of capability a pluralism? When Sen commented on welfarism and resourcism, he criticized that both theories only uses one index (welfare or resource) to evaluate things, which is why their respective informational base is too limited. On the contrary, Sen argued that the equality of capability has a pluralist position in evaluating things and uses more indexes to evaluate the equality of things. These indexes are well-being achievement, agency achievement, well-being freedom and agency freedom. However, if we take a further analysis of Sen's major works, we will find that his conception of equality of capability is dualist or monist rather than pluralist. Third, is the capability the standard or the currency of equality? According to Sen, the capability should be not only a standard which is used to evaluate equality or inequality between people, but also a currency with which the disadvantaged could get the compensations based on distributive justice. However, Sen's equality of capability faces a problem here: Ever if the capability can play a role of the standard of equality, it cannot play a role of the currency of equality. We try to prove that it is not only undesirable but also infeasible to use the capability as the currency of equality.
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2014, Vol. 44 
