Sen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Adaptive Preferences and Higher Education |
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Authors: | Michael Watts |
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Institution: | 1.Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College,Cambridge,England, UK |
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Abstract: | Adaptive preferences are both a central justification and continuing problem for the use of the capability approach. They
are illustrated here with reference to a project examining the choices of young people who had rejected higher education.
Jon Elster, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have all criticised utilitarianism on the grounds that a focus on preference-satisfaction
fails to acknowledge the human tendency to adapt preferences under unfavourable circumstances and that self-assessments of
well-being are therefore likely to be distorted by deprivation. Elster’s addresses preference deformation through the sour
grapes phenomenon and retroactive rationalisation. Sen and Nussbaum are more concerned with adaptation as self-abnegation.
The capability approach developed by Sen and Nussbaum seeks to address the problem of adaptive preferences by taking into
account not only what individuals value but what they have reason to value. However, clear distinctions need to be made between
adaptations to the means of achieving well-being and adaptations to its ends. If Elster’s formulations are to be used in capability
assessments, they need to articulate with the relative weightings given to relevant functionings and freedoms. This enables
a more nuanced understanding of adaptive preferences that can account for the subtleties of the constraints they place upon
individual freedoms. |
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