Gelenekselin Ötesi -Sen’in Yapabilirlik Yaklaşımının Sosyolojik Bir Eleştirisi
Beyond the Conventional -A Sociological Criticism of Sen’s Capability Approach
Justice is not only one of the most divine ideals of mankind. It is also one of the most controversial issues of our social history. This can easily be observed with a brief look at existing discussions in literature on social justice which is nowadays dominated by a number of contested political ideas and their persuasive philosophical justifications. Among these ideas, Amartya Sen’s capability approach (which advocates the assessment of justice in relation to people’s capability or freedom to achieve what they have reason to value) is a new evaluative framework that is also frequently used by scholars and policy makers who work in the fields of development, welfare, poverty and social choice. Sen’s capability approach creates a space for itself in the relevant literature by critically approaching, primarily, three mainstream theories of justice, namely utilitarian, libertarian and Rawlsian models of social justice. Although it provides various criticisms on these theories of justice, most of these criticisms arise from a sociologically-informed perspective of diversity embedded in people’s various characteristics (e.g. gender, age, social status) and their social/institutional surroundings (e.g. existence of unconstrained flow of information, rule of law, dominant conventions and customs, distributional rules within the family). For example, claiming that the Rawlsian approach to social justice overlooks people’s diverse abilities of converting their holdings into something that they value, or the utilitarian account of justice ignores the influence of diverse social conditions on people’s mental states. The capability approach boldly underlines influence and significance of social structure. Therefore, the approach is usually addressed as a “sociological turn” within the relevant literature of social justice. However, beyond some conventional criticisms to the capability approach in literature, I argue that the approach employs such a sociologically-informed perspective of diversity, primarily to criticize rival theories of justice, rather than to configure the analytical texture of its own authentic proposal. For example, it draws heavily on a sociological account of the social actor while criticizing certain mainstream theories of justice, but turns to an economic account of the rational actor whose reasoning is reliable in specifying what s/he should be able to be and do. Based on such a critical examination of the primary proposal of the capability approach, I discuss that although the capability approach is addressed as a sociological turn in the relevant literature, this is not a fully-deserved characteristic and its analytical texture still needs to be developed further in relation to a sociologically-informed perspective of both actor and structure.
