THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY IN AMARTYA SEN’S CAPABILITY APPROACH

Amartya Sen introduces the concept of capabilities, i.e. what people are able to do and to be, as a non-economic measure in the development evaluation. This essay seeks to explore how this concept deals with the issues of values and politics, which in many cases determines people’s identity. The main argument is that the concept of capabilities is built around a certain individualistic view of human beings, whereas identity suggests a more complex picture. As such, Sen’s capability approach cannot properly address the issue of identity and risks losing important insights which may contribute to people’s well-


INTRODUCTION
Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom suggests that freedom should be at the heart of all development. 1 Sen's idea of freedom uniquely combines the kind of freedom that is entrenched in economics, i.e. freedom to choose, with a different space over which choice is made, i.e. the notion of beings and doings. Sen's approach is known as the capability approach, and it has invited fruitful debates and contributions that often stretch beyond the confinement of the economics discipline. The latest incarnation of this approach has found its way into the UNDP's flagship Human Development Report in the form of the Multidimensional Poverty Index, which will feature in the annual report starting from the 2011 edition.
This essay intends to take seriously the invitation to look into the wider issues in development from the point of view of the capability approach. In particular it will deal with the problems of identity. The notion of identity may refer to different strands of social theories, but what is of chief concern here is how people value their identity and its consequences for people's well-being. It is precisely at this point that Sen's capability approach is seriously challenged. As it will become clear in the course of this essay, Sen's capability approach engages individuals in a particular way that is nearly immune to the social and cultural complexity that surrounds the issues of identity.
Thus, the main question for this essay is how the capability approach (henceforth CA) deals with the issues of identity in the pursuit of human well-being. Inevitably, the attempt to answer this question will expose some strengths and limits of the CA. The essay will begin with an outline of the core features of the CA, followed by an examination of the nature of identity. Afterwards how the CA could engage the problems of identity will be discussed. The discussion will become the central part of this essay, which will end with a conclusion.

SEN'S CAPABILITY APPROACH
To understand properly the core features of the CA, we need to put them in the context of Sen's engagement with the previous traditions in development thinking. That context will be elaborated below in three ways.

EQUALITY OF CAPABILITIES
Sen introduced the CA in the early 1980s to engage with prominent theories of justice, especially utilitarianism and Rawlesian welfarism. In this debate the main question concerns the kind of equality that everyone should have, as the title of Sen's 1979 Tanner Lectures "Equality of What?" aptly catches the essence. Sen offers equality of capabilities as alternative to utility or Rawls' primary goods.
Utilitarian theory had hitherto been the dominant moral philosophy in economics. It operates with incomes as the measurement of human welfare or utility, and utility maximisation is assumed to be the objective of economic activity. The moral imperative is to guarantee that each individual is able to maximise his or her satisfaction. Views differ on whether one can compare individual utilities, and so it is highly debatable whether one can make a judgment on income distribution, with income equality not always reflecting individual utility. John Rawls' justice as fairness theory challenges the utilitarian view by proposing a different space for equality, that is equality of basic liberties in the forms of "primary goods," i.e. liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect. 2 Unequal distribution of goods is justified only if it promotes the greatest benefit for the least advantaged.
Neither the utilitarian nor the Rawlesian criteria for justice satisfy Sen. Rawls' primary goods "suffer from fetishist handicap," Sen rebukes, for Rawls treats what is of instrumental value (that is goods) as having intrinsic value. 3 Rawls is still concerned with good things rather than 2 See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
3 Amartya Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 368. with what these good things do for human beings. Likewise, Sen criticises the utility approach for using a measurement that focuses only on a person's mental reaction such as satisfaction or happiness and fails to look into more active qualities such as the person's capabilities.
Utility, income, and basic goods are all the kinds of information which are given the most weight in the approaches discussed above.
Sen calls that space of information "informational base." For Sen the informational base for evaluating justice should be the capabilities to lead the kind of life a person wants. Capability is defined as the substantive freedom to achieve a combination of beings and doings (what people are able to be and to do), and what a person succeeds in doing and being with the capabilities available for him or her are called "functionings." The evaluative focus of the CA can be either on the capability set (real opportunity) someone has or on the realized functionings.
Thus, in contrast to the emphasis on commodities, the CA focuses not on the commodities themselves but on the qualities that they provide. As for the utility measurement, Sen argues that that measurement is deeply unfair to those suffering from persistent deprivation, as they will surely adjust their level of utility to the deprivation, resulting in a low level of aspiration.
Individual capabilities are determined by personal characteristics and social arrangements through the process of entitlement. Entitlement is the ownership and command that someone can establish over a given set of resources. 4 Therefore, a person's resources as well as social endowments determine the range of capabilities that she or he has. These include knowledge, physical characteristics, and environment as well as social, political, and economic institutions that surround the individual.

SOCIAL CHOICE EXERCISE
Another way of seeing Sen's CA is by looking at the shift of attention from the resources inputs to the outputs of development in the effort to 4 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 162. measure well-being. 5 Personal utility approach and the CA focus on the outcomes, while other approaches which emphasise primary goods, commodity bundles, income and resources holding, clearly put prime weight on the inputs. The emphasis on the inputs seems to be too universalistic, relying on a generalization that turns a blind eye to individual differences. On the other hand, concentrating on the utility is deemed too subjective, leaving too much to personal judgment.
The core features of the CA, however, are not totally concerned with the outcomes since capabilities refer to potentials rather than actualities. In other words, a capability is a non-utility effect of goods which Cohen calls "midware" as it is in a certain sense midway between goods and utility. 6 Thus, in assessing one's well-being we must look at the person's condition in abstraction from the utility she or he gets from certain goods. Taking Sen's favourite example, it is the person's being nourished which is the centre of attention rather than the supply of food or the satisfaction the person gets out of eating food.
The "midware" position allows the CA to be less subjective than the utility approach and to offer more choices than the primary goods approach. Suggesting a middle position, Sen opens up a space for public discussion to determine which functionings should receive more weight and how much weight should be placed on the capabilities compared with other relevant considerations. In short, the CA encourages a social choice exercise in indexing capability bundles rather than setting a homogenous evaluative criterion for all or leaving it totally to individual preferences.

ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS
Sen's approach is laid upon a strong moral foundation which is derived from Aristotle's ethics. While the other approaches value material supplies and achievement, Sen asserts, quoting Aristotle, that "wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else." 7 This is a statement of the non-material telos, and Sen goes on to define it in the Aristotelian view of the human good which is to "first ascertain the function of man" and then proceeds to explore "life in the sense of activity." 8 The stress on activity disqualifies the mere reading of mental states as in utilitarian procedures. The strength of the moral foundation is also reflected in the fact that the concern of the CA is not limited to poverty reduction. The enlargement of capabilities is relevant for all different levels of income and appeals to human dignity beyond opulence.
Following closely the line of thoughts in the CA, almost instantly we will notice that the whole framework evolves around the individual.
Right from the start, the individual marshals and selects among the range of capabilities, and eventually comes out in the end as a freer individual.
The capabilities are individual and so is the freedom. It is true that Sen mentions social arrangements and public endowments as determinants of individual capabilities, but in the end what matters to him is the individual. This feature will be shown to have serious consequences when the essay discusses the role of identity in people's well-being.

IDENTITY
It is now widely accepted that identity is a matter of social construction and therefore contingent and temporary in nature. Identity is defined as a set of significant traits with which people identify themselves. The traits can be religious, ethnic, national, regional, or a combination of two or more characteristics. Life-style, sexual orientation, and hobby are sometimes considered as important ingredients of identity, but this essay does not include them whenever it discusses identity. The proper People's identity is not something that is static or fixed. Its dynamic character, however, does not imply that identity plays marginal role in people's existence. On the contrary, identity is a lived experience and strongly felt by many people. It has inspired people to do various actions in history which can be deemed heroic and extraordinary, or simply stupid and barbarous. In this section we will discuss why people value their identity (hence, identity values) and how identity becomes instrumental in the struggle for pursuing well-being (hence, identity politics).

WHY DO PEOPLE VALUE THEIR IDENTITY?
It is quite puzzling to many that in the modern world of reason and global interconnectedness people still cling to particular identities which often carry a primordial nuance. Supposedly primordial characteristics no longer bear any importance in people's lives as they are deemed irrational, narrow, and without basis. Yet the fact is that strongly felt identities persist and become an enduring character of plural societies.
Global interconnectedness only adds to the plurality but does not reduce the problematic coexistence among groups, which is true in advanced modern societies such as those in the Western world as well as in the troubled world of many developing countries.
People do value their identity and act accordingly. This is understandable because identity is of great importance to their well-being, at least for two reasons. 11 Identity and group membership provide people with meaningful choice about how to lead their lives in the sense that "familiarity with a culture determines the boundaries of the imaginable." 12 When investigating the revival of Pentecostalism in Western Nigeria, Marshall concludes that religious identity is a way of symbolically constructing reality. 13 It enables people to relate to society and history in a meaningful way. If the culture or group values are decaying or dis-criminated against, the opportunities and options open to its members will also shrink. Another reason is that cultural identity provides an anchor for self-identification and the safety of effortless secure belonging. It implies that people's dignity is sustained by the respect and the chance of flourishing that is received by their culture.
Those reasons also serve to explain why people sometimes see their identity as real and having objective grounding in reality although it is actually a social construction. In fact, the effectiveness of identity as a group binder lies in it being seen as real. 14 Social theorists would easily dismiss this as an exercise in essentialism. However, for those people identity is real and so are the qualities that are embedded in it such as superiority over other groups.

THE INSTRUMENTAL ROLE OF IDENTITY
The effectiveness of identity has led to its use as a political vehicle. To summarise this section, identity offers social, political and economic benefits in two respects. On the one hand, it gives people some sense of belonging, familiar surrounding with high levels of trust and reciprocity, and dignity. That is why they value their identity strongly.
Instrumentally, identity also provides a basis for countering past discrimination and therefore for helping the underprivileged. On the other hand, the same identity can be the source of suppression and violence. Internally group members may want to impose restrictions on individual freedom to prevent dissent within the group. Externally a group may not want to see other groups become more dominant so it deliberately discriminates against them or even tries to wipe out their existence altogether. In any case the positive and negative impacts generated by identity indicate the significance of some social, cultural or political structures in the life of the individual. This last point will prove crucial in the next section.

THE FAILURE OF METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM
Having considered both the nature of the CA and the phenomenon of identity, in this section we will investigate how the former deals with the latter. In the CA framework the notion of identity as such is almost non-existent, but its features are employed in two separate spaces.  to address a wider audience. The relationship of individuals and society is obviously much richer than that suggested as social choice.

CONCLUSION
In this essay, it has been argued that the CA has provided an alternative to the dominant economic approach in development. In the Perhaps, the CA could be enriched by giving fuller attention to its Aristotelian roots. Aristotle is one of the earliest thinkers who suggest that a human being is basically a social animal who derives their wellbeing or eudaimonia from their membership in society either in the form of a family or that of a polis (city state). It is surprising, therefore, that while Aristotelian ethics has inspired thinking about community and collective ethics, Sen has completely ignored it.