The “struggle between liberties and authorities”, as described by Mill, refers to the tension between individual rights and the rules restricting them that are imposed by public authorities exerting their power over civil society. In this paper I argue that contemporary information societies are experiencing a new form of such a struggle, which now involves liberties and authorities in the cyber-sphere and, more specifically, refers to the tension between cyber-security measures and individual liberties. Ethicists, political philosophers and political scientists have (...) long debated how to strike an ethically sound balance between security measures and individual rights. I argue that such a balance can only be reached once individual rights are clearly defined, and that such a definition cannot prescind from an analysis of individual well-being in the information age. Hence, I propose an analysis of individual well-being which rests on the capability approach, and I then identify a set of rights that individuals should claim for themselves. Finally, I consider a criterion for balancing the proposed set of individual rights with cyber-security measures in the information age. (shrink)

The capability approach, originated by Amartya Sen is among the most comprehensive and influential accounts of justice that applies to issues of health and health care. However, although health is always presumed as an important capability in Sen’s works, he never manages to fully explain why health is distinctively valuable. This paper provides an explanation. It does this by firstly laying out the general capability-based argument for health justice. It then discusses two recent attempts to justify why health is distinctively (...) valuable from within a capability framework – these are Sridhar Venkatapuram’s conception of health as the central human meta-capability and, respectively, Norman Daniels’ embrace of the capability metric in his use of Rawls’ principle of fair equality of opportunity. The paper argues that none of these accounts succeed in providing a plausible justification of the value of health. Finally, the paper suggests an alternative more complex justification, closely tied to different but central element of the capability view, that captures the core intuitions of both Venkatapuram and Daniels’ accounts but without being vulnerable to the objections raised against each of them. This, the paper concludes, provides a promising ground on which the capability view on health justice should be founded. (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that we might do well to adopt a hybrid theory of well-being: a theory that incorporates both an objective-value constraint and a pro-attitude constraint. Hybrid theories are attractive for two main reasons. First, unlike desire theories of well-being, hybrid theories need not worry about the problem of defective desires. This is so because, unlike desire theories, hybrid theories place an objective-value constraint on well-being. Second, unlike objectivist theories of well-being, hybrid theories need not worry about being (...) overly alienating. This is so because, unlike objectivist theories, hybrid theories place a pro-attitude constraint on well-being. However, from the point of view of objectivists, hybrid theories are not objectivist enough, and this can be seen clearly in missing-desires cases. For instance, hybrid theories entail that, if someone lacks the desire for health, then health is not a component of her well-being. This, objectivists say, is implausible. It is obvious, objectivists say, that someone’s life goes better for herself inasmuch as she is healthy, and hence that health is a component of her welfare. This paper focuses on the missing-desires objection (as leveled by objectivists) to hybrid theories of well-being. My argument is that the missing-desires objection can be answered in a way that is generally convincing and, in particular, in a way that pays a good deal of respect to objectivist intuitions about well-being. My hope, then, is that this paper will help to persuade objectivists about well-being to become hybrid theorists. (shrink)

Development ethicists see reducing intrahousehold gender inequality as an important policy aim. However, it is unclear that a minimalist cross-cultural consensus can be formed around this goal. Inequality on its own may not bring women beneath a minimal welfare threshold. Further, adherents of complementarian metaphysical doctrines may view attempts to reduce intrahousehold inequality as attacks on their worldviews. Complicating the justificatory task is the fact that familiar arguments against intrahousehold inequality, including those from agency and self-esteem, depart from premises that (...) complementarians reject—premises about the value of independence or the moral irrelevance of gender. I propose that development ethicists should offer complementarianism-compatible arguments against the norms and practices constitutive of intrahousehold inequality. I develop arguments against two intrahousehold inequality-supportive practices that depart from complementarian premises. Specifically, I argue that patriarchal risk and gender schemas that devalue women's labor prevent men from discharging complementarian duties to promote women's welfare. (shrink)

How is freedom valuable? And how should we go about defining freedom? In this essay, I discuss a distinction between two general ways of valuing freedom: one appeals to the good (e.g., to freedom's contribution to well-being); the other appeals to how persons have reason to treat one another in virtue of their status as purposive beings (to the right). The analysis of these two values has many relevant implications and it is preliminary to a better understanding of the relationships (...) between freedom and justice. First, it contributes to shed light on the relationship between trust and the value of freedom, and on two attitudes towards freedom – promoting and respecting freedom. Second, it disambiguates between two versions of the claim that freedom has non-specific/content-independent value: one appeals to the good, the other to the right. And third, I show that certain implications concerning the definition of freedom follow from assuming an account of the value of freedom that exclusively appeals to the right, illustrating how the value of freedom can shape what freedom is. (shrink)

A capability approach prescribes paternalist government actions to the extent that it requires the promotion of specific functionings, instead of the corresponding capabilities. Capability theorists have argued that their theories do not have much of these paternalist implications, since promoting capabilities will be the rule, promoting functionings the exception. This paper critically surveys that claim. From a close investigation of Nussbaum's statements about these exceptions, it derives a framework of five categories of functionings promotion that are more or less unavoidable (...) in a capability theory. It argues that some of these categories may have an expansionary dynamic; they may give rise to widespread functionings promotion, which would defeat the capabilitarian promise that paternalist interventions will be exceptions to the rule of a focus on capabilities. Finally, the paper discusses three further theoretical issues that will be decisive in holding this paternalist tendency in check: how high one sets threshold levels of capability protection, how lengthy one's list of basic capabilities is, and how one deals with individual responsibility for choices resulting in a loss of one's capabilities. (shrink)

Capability theorists have suggested different, sometimes incompatible, ways in which their approach takes account of the value of freedom, each of which implies a different kind of normative relation between functionings and capabilities. This paper examines three possible accounts of the normative relation between functionings and capabilities, and the implications of each of these accounts in terms of degrees of paternalism. The way in which capability theorists apparently oscillate between these different accounts is shown to rest on an apparent tension (...) between anti-paternalism and anti-fetishism. The paper then advances a fourth account, which incorporates a concern with the content-independent or ‘non-specific’ value of freedom. Only the fourth account would remove all traces of paternalism from the capability approach. Whatever reasons advocates of the capability approach might have had for rejecting this fourth account, those reasons are not internal to the capability approach itself. (shrink)

The capability approach was developed as a response to the ‘equality of what?’ question, which asks what the metric of equality should be. The alternative answers are, broadly, welfare, resources or capabilities. G.A. Cohen has raised influential criticisms of this last response. He suggests that the capability approach’s focus on individuals’ freedom – their capability to control their own lives – renders its view of well-being excessively ‘athletic’, ignoring benefits achieved passively, without the active involvement of the benefitted individual. However, (...) positing ‘capabilities’ as the appropriate metric of distributive justice need not commit capability theorists to a comprehensive account of well-being, and so not to the athletic conception Cohen ascribes to them. Their aim can, instead, be to delineate legitimate government action and guide egalitarian public policy. Capabilities, in this context, are not just components of individual well-being; they must also be the appropriate goal of just distributive policies. When understood in this way, as a guide to policy, I will argue that the capability approach’s focus on ‘athletic’ individual freedom and control is justified: in the public domain, it is important not just that individuals receive ‘benefits’, but that they participate in their achievement. (shrink)

Amartya Sen, the initiator of the Capability Approach, rejects perfectionism and the idea that theorists can, or ought to, predefine what capabilities we have reason to value. Instead he insists that the route to social justice stay true to the liberal ideal of value pluralism and human diversity and demands a content-neutral procedure of reflective scrutiny. This paper investigates the theoretical underpinnings assumed in such a procedural account. Can it avoid perfectionistic assumptions? I think it cannot for two reasons. First, (...) it is clear that a deliberative process is taken to be valuable without it being a product of such a process. It is thus taken to be a priori valuable. Consequently, the capabilities that enable citizens to successfully partake in such a process are taken to be what we have reason to value. Second, I argue, Sen’s procedural approach is primarily aimed at enhancing freedom understood as personal autonomy. I then ask if Sen successfully can deflect perfectionistic allegations by referring to a formal and content-neutral account of autonomy. Again, I conclude he cannot. This suggests that Sen’s rejection of perfectionism is untenable. (shrink)