The authors argue for a pluralistic capability-based conception of individual advantage for the purposes of a significantly prioritarian theory of justice. Their aim is to provide philosophically informed practical guidance to policy makers rather than compelling abstract philosophical arguments.
Wolff and De-Shalit employ a relatively novel and interesting justificatory methodology. They appeal to dynamic public reflective equilibrium among experts, where this is a social reflective equilibrium among experts on the relevant topics. They rightly understand expertise broadly to include both theoretical experts (e.g. social work theorists) and practical experts (e.g. social work practitioners and their clients). As part of their research, the authors conducted interviews about advantage with practical experts in Britain and Israel. As they acknowledge, the results are only suggestive.
Justice, they rightly assume, gives special priority to promoting the advantage of the least well off, but what is the relevant conception of advantage? They argue that advantage is not limited to material advantage; it also includes relational goods such as the absence of dominance, servility or shame. There is thus no need to abandon the view that justice is concerned with the distribution of goods – as some social-equality theorists claim.
A plausible account of advantage, they argue, will be pluralistic. Although I agree with many of their conclusions, I'm not sure about some of their arguments. First, they claim (p. 22) that monism about advantage entails that any two states of an individual are comparable (one of them being at least as advantageous as the other). I see no reason, however, to accept this. Advantage may be based only on happiness, but happiness may be somewhat indeterminate so that sometimes two states are happiness incomparable. Second, they claim that a monist account will fail to be ‘practically applicable’ (for the purposes of government policy). They rightly point out that subjective preference satisfaction is informationally too demanding to satisfy this requirement. However, doesn't a resourcist account based on market value satisfy this requirement?
Wolff and De-Shalit later distinguish between comparison monism – the view that all goods can be put on a single scale and substitution monism – the view that (below saturation levels), for any two goods, for any decrease in one, there is an increase in the second that leaves the individual's level of advantage unaffected. Even if all goods are fully comparable, substitution monism is false if some goods are lexically prior to others. Wolff and De-Shalit make clear that their thesis is that substitution monism is false. They reasonably claim that often no amount of money can fully compensate for certain increases in the risk of death or illness or for public humiliation. Moreover, cash compensation in response to the harm of harassment, for example, may demean the victim and make matters worse.
There is, however, a weaker form of substitution that they need, I think, to address. Even if not all goods are mutually substitutable, it may still be true that, for any good, there is at least one other good that is substitutable. Cash may not be substitutable for risk of death, but increased health may be. They assume (not unreasonably) that the compensation model of advantage is committed to cash compensation, but there is, it seems to me, a weaker version of the compensation model that is committed to the possibility of some kind of compensation even if cash compensation is not always possible.
The particular conception of advantage that Wolff and De-Shalit defend is a version of the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. This view focuses on opportunities to function (to do or to be) rather than the achievement of functionings. The authors suggest (p. 65) that the concept of capabilities is unacceptably vague and that the move to capabilities from functionings is less well motivated than usually thought. This seems wrong to me. The concept of capabilities is indeed capable of very different interpretations, but that is simply because it is a family of approaches (just as utilitarianism is a family of theories). Moreover, the move to capabilities rather than functionings is well motivated by the need to make room for holding agents accountable for their choices. Wolff and De-Shalit no doubt have more to say on the issue, but their discussion was far too brief in the book.
The authors agree that a theory of justice must make room for accountability, but they deny that it should do so by appealing to the metaphysical notion of moral responsibility. They argue that both the control account and the identification accounts of moral responsibility fail. They rightly note (p. 78) that simplistic versions of each model hold that that those who choose under conditions of significant inequality are either fully responsible for the outcomes or not responsible at all. Both conclusions are indeed implausible. The authors are too quick, however, to jump to the conclusion that sophisticated accounts of moral responsibility cannot handle such cases adequately. A plausible view will, I claim, invoke a notion of partial responsibility. An agent can be partly responsible for an outcome without being fully responsible. The authors note this possibility but reject it because it would land us in the metaphysical swamp of responsibility. I agree that it is a metaphysical swamp, but we are in such a swamp and it seems quite implausible to make the theory of justice insensitive to such metaphysical issues. Of course, given their focus on practical application, they are quite right to avoid the metaphysics for this purpose.
Wolff and De-Shalit argue that the relevant conception of advantage is capabilities understood as genuine opportunities for secure functioning. An opportunity is genuine if and only if it a reasonable choice in the sense of not involving ‘undue’ costs. A functioning is secure roughly just in case there is a sufficiently high probability of it occurring and being sustained. I fully agree that justice is concerned with effective opportunities and not merely formal opportunities. Thus, the probabilities of functionings are indeed relevant. A more plausible way to go, however, is to appeal to probability distributions over functionings and to focus on improving the value of such probabilistic opportunity sets. Sometimes for example, it may be appropriate to increase significantly the probability of several functionings while leaving each insecure rather than making just one of them secure. I am also sceptical of the appeal to the ‘reasonableness’ of the costs of choices. Instead, I would appeal to a metaphysical account of responsibility.
Given that there are multiple capabilities, how are capability sets assessed? Wolff and De-Shalit rightly argue that an overall assessment is needed. Otherwise, one would not be able to determine how much money and effort to spend on promoting each capability. Below I shall consider the approach they advocate, but it is puzzling how they can square the possibility of making such global assessments of capability sets with their rejection of substitution monism. The answer, I guess, is that they reject the substitutability of cash for various capabilities, but do not reject the substitutability of some capability for any other given capability. They reject, that is, strong substitution monism but not the weak form of substitution that I identified above.
How, then, are capability sets compared? Wolff and De-Shalit appeal to the intersection (or supervaluation) approach. This appeals to rankings that are common to all (or at least most) reasonable assessment schemes. The reasonable schemes are, according to the authors, the schemes endorsed by the members of society (or at least the experts) in public dynamic reflective equilibrium.
The theoretically most plausible approach, I think, is to hold that (1) if all reasonable assessment schemes agree that one capability set is at least as valuable as another, then it is; and (2) where there is disagreement among reasonable assessment schemes, then there is no determinate answer. Because the authors are concerned with practical application, they develop a different approach. They identify certain basic capabilities and propose (roughly) that one basic capability set is at least as valuable as another if it is at least as valuable (e.g. as measured on both subjective and objective measures) for most of the basic capabilities. They argue that six of the ten capabilities identified by Martha Nussbaum are basic capabilities: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, affiliation, control over one's environment, sense-imagination-thought. Not surprisingly, emotional life, practical reason, other species and play are considered less important. Their interviews with practical experts further suggest that the capability of doing good for others is an important capability, but for simplicity they do not add this to their list.
One general concern that I have with any short list is that it leaves out all kinds of less important capabilities (of which there are a huge number) and it seems inappropriate to leave them out. Justice, I believe, is concerned with all capabilities – not just the most important ones. Moreover, I'm suspicious of ranking capabilities based on being superior for most – rather than all – of the relevant capabilities. Still, I agree that, for practical purposes, this approach seems sensible.
A second general concern that I have is that Wolff and De-Shalit focus on the worst off groups, but never defend the focus on groups nor clarify how they are defined. Theoretically, a focus on individuals seems far more plausible.
The book contains interesting discussion of the empirical research on how advantages and disadvantages often cluster (go together). In particular, the six basic capabilities often seem to cluster. Given this clustering, their method of assessment is much more robust than it would otherwise be. In particular, it makes it much more likely that there is a well-defined least advantaged group (or individual).
This clustering also makes clear that a main demand of justice on governments is to decluster advantage so as to minimize the existence of capability sets that are superior to others for most of the basic capabilities. Wolff and De-Shalit rightly emphasize the practical importance of focusing, for the most disadvantaged, on improving corrosive disadvantages (those linked to other disadvantages) and fertile advantages (those linked to other advantages).
The book is superbly written and well argued. It contains useful philosophical discussion, but its main strength is the usefulness of the philosophically sophisticated practical advice that it offers to policy-makers.
