Sen's specious 'opportunity aspect' and 'process aspect' of Freedom

Sen claims that if

 social realizations are assessed in terms of capabilities that people actually have, rather than in terms of their utilities or happiness (as Jeremy Bentham and other utilitarians recommend), then some very significant departures are brought about.

Yes! Hitler's 'social realizations' were based on the capabilities people actually had. So were Stalin and Mao's 'social realization'. A human trafficker running brothels staffed by underage sex-slaves is bringing about a social realization based on capabilities. Bentham and other Utilitarians had no truck with this sort of 'capability'. Not even Marx entertained such a foolish theory.

All through History, oppressed people have suppressed information about their capabilities. The old story is that monkeys refuse to speak so as not to be forced to work.

The Sen-Dobb thesis had to do with freezing real wages (i.e. preventing malnourished Bengali workers from having more food and medicine which by itself would have raised their productivity) so as to generate a surplus that could be invested in capital intensive industries staffed by people with College degrees.

Had India remained a Fascist country, as it was during Indira Gandhi's Emergency, Sen's mentor Sukhamoy Charkroborty- a crawling sycophant she appointed head of the Planning Commission- would no doubt have been very willing to discuss how the 'capabilities' of India's poor could generate profits for MNC's and their local compradors- i.e. Mrs Gandhi's family and camp followers.

Perhaps, Sen used this sinister word 'Capabilities' so as to curry favour with the CPM, which ruled his native Bengal till recently. They were keen to enrich the relatives of their gerontocratic leadership with comprador profits derived from handing over fertile agricultural land to MNCs anxious to take advantage of Bengal's low real wages.

First, human lives are then seen inclusively, taking note of the substantive freedoms that people enjoy, rather than ignoring everything other than the pleasures or utilities they end up having.

What on earth does Sen mean? The vast majority of the people of the world have horrible jobs. They have to be compensated for the disutility associated with employment. Even if there is no disutility, there is some risk or responsibility which has disutility.
If we assume free entry and exit and that market power is not too concentrated, then we can say that utility counterbalances disutility. We need only look at the former.
In any case, ordinary people have no idea what their capabilities are. They do know these can change by things they can do and other things they can't do but which others can do for them. They also know that capabilities have changed because of new discoveries. But, they need advise and training and structured jobs so as to make concrete those capabilities.

 It may be that some students who studied Sen-tentious shite thought they'd thereby become more capable of making the world a fairer place. Boy, were they wrong!

There is also a second significant aspect of freedom: it makes us accountable for what we do.

Rubbish! Slaves are accountable for what they do. So are prisoners. Freedom allows us to exit jurisdictions where we are held accountable for certain actions and to enter other jurisdictions where we are not held accountable for them at all. Wesley Hohfeld has analysed rights into four 'incidents' or basic elements. One of these is 'immunity'. Freedom with respect to a particular action means immunity- which inter alia means non-accountability- in all respects concerning it. Thus if I choose to buy a pizza instead of a curry for myself with my own money, I am not accountable to anybody for this decision of mine. However, if I was acting as your agent and you had expressed a preference for curry, then I have to give an account of my action. I may say 'I saw diners vomiting in the curry restaurant. Some one said that the kitchen is very dirty and this had caused food poisoning. I saw on Yelp that the pizza place has excellent reviews. So I bought a pizza with the money I gave me. I was acting in good faith and with the intention of promoting your best interests.'

Freedom to choose gives us the opportunity to decide what we should do, but with that opportunity comes the responsibility for what we do – to the extent that they are chosen actions.

Sheer moonshine! A slave who has been appointed tutor to a patrician's son may be held responsible for the child's actions. An employer may be held responsible for his employee's actions. A Trustee may be held responsible for a dereliction on the part of an employee or Agent of the Trust. In some jurisdictions, this responsibility may be evaded by showing a proper standard of care. However, there will always be instances where we feel responsibility for a tort or felony has been placed on innocent shoulders.

Some jurisdictions have a 'Good Samaritan Law'. Others don't. Jerry Sienfeld and his friends, in the last episode of the hit show, do nothing to help a victim of a car-jacking because they are not aware that the local Law placed this responsibility upon them.

Responsibility is not a wholly social or legal concept. It also arises in 'games against nature' as well as in metaphysical areas in a non justiciable manner. It is foolish to equate it with Freedom because servitude features more responsibilities than enfranchisement.

Since a capability is the power to do something, the accountability that emanates from that ability – that power – is a part of the capability perspective, and this can make room for demands of duty – what can be broadly called deontological demands.

Power is the ability to defy any and every demand with respect to a particular object or relationship. If a capability is a power to do something then it is accountable to no one, it may be impossible to measure or independently verify, and is proof against any deontological demand, coercive threat or tortious interference.

John Stuart Mill linked Freedom to Punishability. He didn't link it to 'Responsibility' or consider that it remained 'Accountable' to anyone or subject to 'Deontological demands'.
Suppose he had believed, as Sen appears to do, that Power remains accountable and subject to deontological demands, then how could Mill have supported an extension of the suffrage to Catholic workers (who were believed to have a duty to obey their confessor and to vote as he directed) or, indeed, to married women (who supposedly had a Biblical duty to obey their hubbies and vote as they were ordered to do)?

It is a separate matter that a crime or tort committed by a free-man may be punished. However, the slave suffers additional chastisement for not working to his full capability. The Free, however, till Sen came along, were in no such danger.

There is an overlap here between agency-centred concerns and the implications of capability based approach; but there is nothing immediately comparable in the utilitarian perspective (tying one’s responsibility to one’s own happiness).

WTF? A ten year old girl who has to look after her four siblings and nurse her widowed Mum has a lot of responsibilities. Sen thinks they are tied to her own happiness. This is very generous of him I'm sure. No doubt he would congratulate her on her increased capabilities as a sex slave discharging a loathsome type of responsibility to her pimp.

The perspective of social realizations, including the actual capabilities that people can have, takes us inescapably to a large variety of further issues that turn out to be quite central to the analysis of justice in the world, and these will have to be examined and scrutinized.

Does Sen actually 'examine and scrutinise' anything to do with actual capabilities in Chapters 11 to 13 of his book?
No. He talks bombastic nonsense.

 Twenty-five hundred years ago, when young Gautama, later known as Buddha, left his princely home in the foothills of the Himalayas in search of enlightenment, he was moved specifically by the sight of mortality, morbidity and disability around him, and it agitated him greatly.

Everybody gets old, everybody falls ill, everybody dies. There were some fools and fraudsters who thought Human Capabilities included becoming immortal, invulnerable, omnescient etc. Buddha was gulled by these charlatans. He arrived at a 'Middle Path'- which consisted of claiming to have achieved something greater yet without showing any physical sign of having done so. He founded a rules based Monastic Institution which was wholly unconcerned with Social Justice and then ate some bad pork and fell ill and died.

But only apparently, because you see the Universe only exists momentarily. There is no past or future or causality or anything compound- like the ego. Instead, the Buddha attained a higher position than the Gods and...urm..don't forget to donate your wealth to the Monastery otherwise you will be reborn as an ant.

He was also distressed by the ignorance he encountered.

Right! Coz he wasn't ignorant at all!

It is easy to understand the sources of Gautama Buddha’s agony, particularly the deprivations and insecurities of human life, even if we may have to ponder more about his subsequent analysis of the ultimate nature of the universe.

Is it really easy to understand why a guy would leave his wife and baby son in the middle of the night just coz he finally understands that humans are mortals and subject to disease and senescence?
Ambedkar has a better theory. The Buddha left because his people were in conflict with a more powerful Kingdom- a conflict they were bound to lose. Buddha essentially said 'look, I'm leaving but, as a monk, I won't be contributing to the other side's power. What's more I'm not sticking around to argue against you guys resorting to military action. Thus, I'm not undermining your fighting spirit.' Ambedkar's point was that the Buddha, unlike Mahatma Gandhi, was making a choice for himself which did not undermine the cohesiveness and fighting spirit of his own people.
Ambedkar's theory, obviously, is imperative rather than purely alethic so the Buddha's action- if the conventional story is accepted- is still mysterious. With hindsight we are tempted to say that there was a 'timely', kairotic, aspect to the Buddha's decision. After all, the religion he founded helped Society move from a 'thymotic' (rajsic) equilibrium based on tribal cohesiveness to an 'universal', rational, type of bureaucratic Imperialism in which trade and commerce could burgeon.

It is not difficult to appreciate the centrality of human lives in reasoned assessments of the world in which we live.

It is much easier to appreciate the same thing in unreasoned assessments and lyrical outpourings. A reasoned assessment should have some practical value. That is what Sen's book lacks.

That, as has already been discussed in the Introduction and later, is a central feature of the perspective of nyaya in contrast with the rule-bound niti, even though the idea of nyaya is not at all alone in pointing to the relevance of human lives for assessing how a society is doing.

Sen comes from the traditional centre of the revived Nyaya (Logic & Epistemology) school. He knows very well that Nyaya is rule-bound and devotes a lot of time to arguing over what, if any, animals aren't too holy to be eaten.

The Pundits trained in this School had zero interest in Social Justice. They did not deny that customary law always took precedence in Hindu India. The big question was whether Niti rules which breached caste based ritualist codes could be tolerated. The answer was 'yes, provided the King fucks you over if you disobey. Might creates Right. Apadh Dharma- i.e. exigent circumstances- excuses everything. Sure, you can pay a bit of money to a priest for ritual expiation, but otherwise just keep your head down and make as much money as you can.'
Not surprisingly, this Nawadwip, Navya-Nyaya, school, which Sir William Jones compared to his other alma mater, Oxford (about which Adam Smith had bitter things to say), was fertile ground for future comprador 'Babus' who rapidly deserted it in favour of a worthless English literary education which further confused their thoughts but, alas!, placed no curb upon their wearisome eloquence. The greatest bores, as Brewer's Dictionary noted, are of the Brahmaputra.

A Government is a stationary bandit. It devotes some time and effort to discovering the resources of its realm- including 'human capabilities'- with a view to squeezing as much out of them as it can. That's why National Income accounts exist. Sen believes otherwise.

Indeed, the nature of the lives people can lead has been the object of attention of social analysts over the ages. Even though the much-used economic criteria of advancement, reflected in a mass of readily produced statistics, have tended to focus specifically on the enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience (for example, in the gross national product (GNP), and the gross domestic product (GDP), which have been the focus of a myriad of economic studies of progress), that concentration could be ultimately justified – to the extent it could be – only through what these objects do to the human lives they can directly or indirectly influence.

Right! So, if a slave-owner keeps an account book of how much his slaves produce, that could be justified as evincing a keen interest in the welfare of those whom his overseers periodically whip.

The case for using instead direct indicators of the quality of life and of the well-being and freedoms that human lives can bring has been increasingly recognized.

Quite true. Some morons- too stupid to be hired by the private sector- could get a job compiling these sorts of  metrics. However, they turned out to be shite. What is the point of a metric which says 'Cubans are better off than a certain segment of Americans'? We all know that Cuba exports medical and pharma goods and services and so is an exception to Baumol cost-disease. We also know that its regime scares the shite out of even Columbian narco-kings. So, sure, it has that going for it. But the metric is still meaningless. It is comparing apples with not even oranges but hand grenades.

Even the originators of quantitative national income estimation, which receives such attention and adherence, did try to explain that their ultimate interest lay in the richness of human lives, even though it is their measures, rather than their motivational justifications, that have received wide attention. For example, William Petty, the seventeenth-century pioneer of national income estimation (he proposed ways and means of assessing national income through the use of both ‘the income method’ and ‘the expenditure method’, as they are now called), spoke about his interest in examining whether ‘the King’s subjects’ were in ‘so bad a condition, as discontented Men would make them’. He went on to explain the various determinants of the condition of people, including ‘the Common Safety’ and ‘each Man’s particular Happiness’.

Petty's pamphlet was similar to other pamphlets circulating at the time. Like them, his too was disingenuous and strategic. Sen knows this. Why is he pretending that originally there was a 'good' type of N.I accounts which was sabotaged later on by stupid Utilitarians?

That motivating connection has often been ignored in economic analysis that concentrates on the means of living as the endpoint of investigation.

The motivating connection was competition between pamphleteers which could result in the gaining of valuable sinecures. In Petty's case more money was involved because he was part of the rape of Ireland. Sen has lived in England for more years put together than I've been alive. He must know that Petty's prosperity was founded upon Catholic Ireland's enslavement and destitution.

Why does this senile old fool not simply say 'Hitler was a Saint who greatly benefited the Jewish and Romany and Slavic people by keeping meticulous records of their capabilities?'  'Dr.Carl Vaernet was an even greater Saint because, at Buchenwald, he sought to increase the capabilities of homosexual men to include having sex with women.'

There are excellent reasons for not confusing means with ends, and for not seeing incomes and opulence as important in themselves, rather than valuing them conditionally for what they help people to achieve, including good and worthwhile lives.* It is important to note that economic opulence and substantive freedom, while not unconnected, can frequently diverge. Even in terms of being free to live reasonably long lives (free of preventable ailments and other causes of premature mortality), it is remarkable that the extent of deprivation of particular socially disadvantaged groups, even in very rich countries, can be comparable to that in the developing economies. For example, in the United States, inner-city AfricanAmericans as a group frequently have no higher – indeed, often a substantially lower – chance of reaching an advanced age than do people born in the many poorer regions, such as Costa Rica, Jamaica, Sri Lanka or large parts of China and India. Freedom from premature mortality is, of course, by and large helped by having a higher income (that is not in dispute), but it also depends on many other features.

Like not getting shot or not doing drugs. African-American people don't need any comparative metrics to know what needs to be done and why doing it has, quite intentionally, been made so difficult by the majority community. They have produced great Economists who do first order work which can actually improve outcomes.
By contrast, Comparative metrics are worthless. At one time, they seemed a good stick with which to beat Liberal administrations. But that stick broke once people like Sen started saying 'Cubans are better off than African Americans' because it was obvious that there was no big migration from the richer country to the poorer. Kerala and Cuba beat Baumol cost-disease by exporting health workers. America, very visibly, does the reverse. Why? It is rich and offers freedom. By contrast, Cuba uses its very efficient and innovative Pharma sector as a cash-cow.

Sen has linked his notion of Capabilities to Freedom in an arbitrary manner. How does he justify it? The answer is he even further vitiates the notion of Freedom by making a distinction without a difference.

Let me first consider a simple illustration of the distinction between the opportunity aspect and the process aspect of freedom. Kim decides one Sunday that he would prefer to stay at home rather than go out and do anything active. If he manages to do exactly what he wants, we can call it ‘scenario A’. Alternatively, some strong-armed thugs arrive to interrupt Kim’s life and drag him out and dump him in a large gutter. This terrible, indeed repulsive, situation may be called ‘scenario B’. In a third instance, ‘scenario C’, the thugs restrain Kim by commanding that he must not go out of his house, with the threat of severe punishment if he violates this restriction. It is easy to see that in scenario B the freedom of Kim is badly affected: he cannot do what he would like to do (to stay at home), and his freedom to decide for himself is also gone. So there are violations of both the opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom (his opportunities are severely curtailed) and the process aspect (he cannot decide for himself what to do). What about scenario C? Clearly the process aspect of Kim’s freedom is affected (even if he does under duress what he would have done anyway, the choice is no longer his): he could not have done anything else without being badly punished for it. The interesting question concerns the opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom. Since he does the same thing in both cases, with or without duress, could it be said that therefore his opportunity aspect is the same in both cases?

No. Opportunity cost is a global concept. But, for that very reason, it can't have a separate 'process' aspect for a free agent. 'Process vs Outcome' Accountability only arises where there is Agent Principal hazard or an incomplete contract. It can't arise in the self-employment or self-regarding actions of a free agent. No doubt, I may not want to be free because I make bad choices or because my information set is inadequate. I may seek to bind myself to a particular diet or discipline. But that process is still the outcome of freedom.

In the case Sen mentions,  what is relevant is that thugs have the power to curb Kim's freedom. It does not matter whether or not they exercise actual coercion. Kim's global choice menu is 'get the fuck away from a thug ridden neighborhood' and 'stay and try to gain as much utility as possible'. It may be that what he did, in deciding to stay home, was in the nature of a 'discovery process'. He was trying to find out how likely an attack was. His information set changes when the thugs throw him in a ditch. This may turn out to be turning point in his life. He decides to move and, after many tribulations and hardships, attains a good position in a secure and prosperous neighborhood.

Sen's Kim is a fool. He doesn't know what opportunities he really has. This also means that a process of public reasoning in which Kim has voice won't be able to arrive at the globally correct or substantive policy solution.

Suppose Kim is a newly landed immigrant living near the docks which are rife with crime. The presence of thugs causes him to migrate. With hindsight, this turns out to be a good thing for both him personally as well as the country at large.
The global solution here might be to tolerate criminality in an area people need and want to leave, unless they are subject to inherent vice, while ensuring that new communities are ab ovo better governed by ensuring subsidiarity based Tiebout sorting.

If the opportunity that people enjoy is to be judged only by whether they end up doing what they would respectively choose to do if unrestrained, then it must be said that there is no difference between scenarios A and C. The opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom is unaltered in this narrow view of opportunity, since he can stay at home in either case, exactly as he planned. But does this give adequate recognition to what we understand by opportunity? Can we judge opportunities we have only by whether or not we end up in the state that we would choose to be in, irrespective of whether or not there are other significant alternatives that we could the other. The nature and implications of the distinction were investigated in my Kenneth Arrow Lectures, ‘Freedom and Social Choice’, included in my book, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Chapters 20–22. 230 the idea of justice have chosen if we wanted? What about choosing to go for a nice walk – not Kim’s preferred alternative that Sunday but perhaps an interesting enough possibility – certainly preferable to being dumped in the gutter? Or, what about the opportunity to change one’s mind and, perhaps more immediately, what about the opportunity to choose freely to stay at home rather than the opportunity just to stay at home (and nothing else)? There are distinctions here between scenario C and scenario A even in terms of opportunities. If these concerns are serious, then it seems plausible to argue that in scenario C the opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom is also affected, though obviously not as radically as in scenario B. The distinction between ‘culmination outcome’ and ‘comprehensive outcome’, discussed earlier, is relevant here. The opportunity aspect of freedom can be seen in different ways in light of that distinction. It can be defined only in terms of the opportunity for ‘culmination outcomes’ (what a person ends up with), if we see opportunity in that particularly narrow way and regard the existence of options and the freedom of choice to be somehow unimportant. Alternatively, we can define opportunity more broadly – and I believe with greater plausibility – in terms of the achievement of ‘comprehensive outcomes’, taking note also of the way the person reaches the culmination situation (for example, whether through his own choice or through the dictates of others). In the broader view, the opportunity aspect of Kim’s freedom is clearly undermined in scenario C, by his being ordered to stay at home (he cannot choose anything else). In scenario A, in contrast, Kim does have the opportunity to consider the various alternatives that are feasible and then choose to stay at home if he is that way inclined, whereas in scenario C he definitely does not have that freedom. The distinction between the narrow and broad views of opportunity will turn out to be quite central when we move from the basic idea of freedom to more specific concepts, such as the capabilities that a person has. We must examine in that context whether a person’s capability to lead the kind of life she values should be assessed only by the culmination alternative that she would actually end up with, or by using a broader approach that takes note of the process of choice involved, in particular the other alternatives that she could also choose, within her actual ability to do so

I'm sorry for quoting Sen's shite at such length but his stupidity has to be experienced first hand to be believed. Sen's 'broad view' is  that  Kim can go for a walk instead of staying at home and being molested by thugs. The global view is that he can run like hell from gangster infested neighborhoods. There is no question of being Free if the Mafia are running your block.

Sen doesn't get that people are plastic, they are mobile, they adapt to the fitness landscape. Through 'limited arbitrage'- e.g. Kim's encounter with the thugs- they nevertheless quickly gravitate to the global solution- Kim tells his work-colleagues about his unfortunate experience and then someone  says- 'you know what? There are jobs in the next State over and a lot less crime. If I were you I'd move there even though it doesn't have all the amenities we have here. Still, it's a place where a young man can really establish himself and put down roots'.

Why does this scenario not cross Sen's mind? Why does he give his Kim less Freedom  than Rudyard Kipling gave the eponymous hero of his best novel? The answer is that Sen is a sack of shite. He despises the poor people he pretends to care about. He is a typical Bengali Babu. Jyoti Basu enjoyed his Cuban cigars and French Cognac while the people of his state lacked electricity. When asked why Bengal exported electricity when most people in Calcutta only got electricity for a few hours a day, the great Communist Chief Minister replied 'What will our poor people do with electricity? They can't eat it!'

This contempt for the poor is what turned the Bengali Babu into a worse ruler than the British official. Why? Unlike the Britisher who could see that the expected present value of his pension would fall if Bengal starved to death and, moreover, that he himself might be censured or lose a 'gong' if a famine occurred on his watch, the Bengali Babu could enrich himself off a collective begging bowl. No doubt, amour propre required some biting of the hand that filled that bowl- for example, by compiling comparative metrics showing Cubans to be better off than Americans and Kerala very Heaven, but the Babu's bite is buried deep within some barking mad bombast camouflaged as 'deep' thought.

Perhaps Bengali intellectuals of Sen's generation were indoctrinated in an elitist view of human beings and thus could not conceive of a 'Freedom as Enlightenment' arising in a 'bottom up' fashion.

In a different chapter Sen writes-

Consider a young person, let us call her Sula, who decides that she would like to go out dancing with a friend in the evening. To take care of some considerations that are not central to the issues involved here (but which could make the discussion unnecessarily complex), it is assumed that there are no particular safety risks involved in her going out, and that she has critically reflected on this decision and judged that going out would be sensible (indeed, as she sees it, the ‘ideal’ thing to do). Now consider the threat of a violation of this freedom if some authoritarian guardians of society decide that she must not go dancing (‘it is most unseemly’), and force her, in one way or another, to stay indoors. To see that there are two distinct issues involved in this one violation, consider an alternative case in which the authoritarian human rights and global imperatives 371 bosses decide that she must – absolutely must – go out (‘you are expelled for the evening – stay away from us this evening – we are entertaining some important guests who would be upset by your behaviour and outlandish look’). There is clearly a violation of freedom even in this case, and yet Sula is being forced to do something that she would have chosen to do anyway (she has to go out to go dancing), and this is readily seen when we compare the two alternatives: ‘choosing freely to go out’ and ‘being forced to go out’. The latter involves an immediate violation of the ‘process aspect’ of Sula’s freedom, since an action is being forced on her, even though it is an action she would have also freely chosen (‘imagine spending time with those pompous guests, rather than dancing with Bob’). The opportunity aspect is affected too, though in an indirect way, since a plausible accounting of opportunities can include having options and Sula can inter alia include valuing free choice (an issue that was discussed in Chapter 11, ‘Lives, Freedoms and Capabilities’).

Sula is not free, period. She needs to understand that. Presumably, her lack of freedom arises from her being a minor. The fact that Sula is not free does not mean she doesn't have rights and that her guardians have corresponding duties. If they fail to discharge those obligations in a proper manner then Sula should apply to be emancipated.
Her 'process' and 'opportunity' freedoms don't matter. What matters is the intention and ability of her guardian. Suppose Sula's guardian secretly plans to defraud her of her fortune on her achieving majority. He is following a cunning policy of always discussing her various options with her and giving her good advise on the risks and benefits associated with these alternatives. Thus, on attaining majority, Sula has reason to trust her guardian. He may present her with a seemingly attractive investment opportunity while dwelling on the associated risks. She may think, 'my former guardian must think this is a good opportunity for me. Since he has trained me to exercise my own freedom of choice in a responsible way, I can decide this for myself.'

In this case, though there was no 'process' or 'opportunity' type injustice during minority, still her rights were violated. She was not truly free when she signed over her inheritance. There has been 'undue influence'. We may say an essential aspect of a minor's to develop into a person able to choose freely has been damaged by the guardian.

All minors need to understand they are not free. Their guardians owe them a duty of care but, being human, may have their own biases or agendas. Petty tyrannies may be a good thing because it reminds children of this fact about the world. Simulated concern, of the sort evinced by the evil guardian, may be the worst thing for the child.

However, the violation of the opportunity aspect would be more substantial and manifest if Sula were not only forced to do something chosen by another, but in fact forced to do something she would not otherwise choose to do.

Sheer nonsense! There is no violation here unless the guardian has an improper motive or is otherwise incapable of discharging a duty of care.

The comparison between ‘being forced to go out’ when she would have chosen to go out anyway, and being forced to stay at home with boring guests, brings out this contrast, which lies primarily in the opportunity aspect, rather than in the process aspect. In being forced to stay at home to listen to pontificating bankers, Sula loses freedom in two different ways, related respectively to being forced to do something with no freedom of choice, and being obliged in particular to do something she would not choose to do. Both processes and opportunities can figure in human rights.

No, Rights are related to Obligations under a bond of law. They are not 'internalised' in a Coasian manner. A Business enterprise finds it useful to distinguish between Process (employees doing what they are told) and Opportunity (employees thinking outside the box and thus boosting profits) under incomplete contracts. Nothing similar can be said about Rights. What matters is the intention and whether due care was taken.

A Ponzi scheme may pretend to be fulfilling a human right to financial security. A populist Government may promise to fulfill all sorts of 'opportunity' based rights. The Dictator of a collapsing regime may promise all sorts of rights if his people will stand with him rather than permit him to be captured and tried for war crimes.

Such rights soon prove to be a chimera. Their promoters may make a profit in the short run. In the long run these 'opportunity' type rights turn out to be non justiciable by reason of insolvency, infeasibility, sovereign immunity or some procedural loophole. This is not to say that an incentive compatible market or institution can't provide the same thing. But it won't be a 'human right' type cheap-talk 'pooling equilibrium'. It will be a separating equilibrium based on costly signals. Thus Social Insurance finance by contributions is feasible. Human rights based Basic Income is not. In practice, some Human right- e.g. that of free ingress- has to be denied or else 'Basic Income' turns out to be purely gestural and not 'Basic' at all.

For the opportunity aspect of freedom, the idea of ‘capability’ – the real opportunity to achieve valuable functionings – would typically be a good way of formalizing freedoms, but issues related to the process aspect of freedom demand that we go beyond seeing freedoms only in terms of capabilities. A denial of ‘due process’ in being, say, imprisoned without a proper trial can be the subject matter of human rights – no matter whether the outcome of a fair trial could be expected to be any different or not.

Due process is part of the Law. There is no valid judgment if there is no due process. By contrast, opportunity or process or anything else does not qualify freedom in any way. To say 'Freedom, for India, meant the freedom to starve for millions and the freedom to sodomise my neighbour's cat for Montek Singh Ahluwalia' is merely a stupid sort of rhetoric.

We don't know what opportunities other people have, or indeed what opportunities we ourselves have. We think Freedom is a good thing because it permits mimetic effects, including Exit from horrible places, to proliferate more rapidly. However, there are certain mimetic effects- like kids joining ISIS, or learning Montek Singh Ahluwalia's way with felines- which we want to suppress.

Nothing is added to either the idea or the practice of Justice by distinguishing between 'opportunities' which we know nothing about, and processes about which we can have some circumstantial knowledge. What matters is intention, due care and the nature of the vinculum juris.

Sen, like other crap second order thinkers, continually takes up a figure of speech- 'e.g I'm no better than a slave because I've got no option but to go to work in that horrible office'- and treats that metaphor as a concrete reality. He then creates a second metaphor- a meta-metaphor- which pretends that this figment of the imagination can be treated like a brute fact about the world. Thus, he might say 'We can help enfranchise office-slaves by distinguishing between their opportunity and process type unfreedoms. Thus, by re-defining the water cooler as a vacation in Hawaii, opportunity unfreedom is reduced- because you can go surfing in Hawaii but can't in the water-cooler- without compromising process type efficiency.' Clearly, I'm putting words in Sen's mouth. But what else does his analysis cash out as?

Consider the following-

While primary goods are, at best, means to the valued ends of human life, in the Rawlsian formulation of principles of justice they become the central issues in judging distributional equity.

Primary goods are necessary means to ends. Most ends have no value in themselves. Sen is a pedagogue. But the subject he teaches has no value at all. In this case, the means are valuable but the end is worthless. After all, Sen could have taught calculus or corrected English grammar.

Primary goods always have value, under scarcity. Ends may or may not. I may decide, after ten years on life support hoping for a miracle cure, that my suffering served no purpose. The money spent on my care was wasted.

Distributional equity can only be about stuff that can be distributed- that is means, not ends. The clue is in the name. Why is Sen pretending that ends can be evaluated? There are obvious preference revelation problems.

This, I have argued, is a mistake, for primary goods are merely means to other things, in particular freedom (as was briefly discussed in Chapter 2). But it was also briefly mentioned in that discussion that the motivation behind Rawlsian reasoning, in particular his focus on advancing human freedom, is quite compatible with – and may be better served by – a direct concentration on the assessment of freedom, rather than counting the means towards achieving it (so that I see the contrast as being less foundational than it might first appear). These issues will be more fully considered in the next chapter. The capability approach is particularly concerned with correcting this focus on means rather than on the opportunity to fulfil ends and the substantive freedom to achieve those reasoned ends.*

Rawls was a silly man who didn't get that compulsory Social Insurance is the correct solution. Sen is repeating the same error. We already have a way of determining quality of life and adjusting compensation accordingly through judicial or administrative tribunals.

Thus if a person has problems with mobility or housekeeping or requires assistance to complete particular tasks, then there is already a mechanism for transfers which bring 'quality of life' up to an acceptable level.

Bullshitting about Freedom helps nobody. First order work can help show how more can be done with the same resources and also how more resources could be made available in an 'incentive compatible' manner.

Furthermore, the fact that a Redistributionary Mechanism exists is an 'opportunity aspect' unfreedom'. It would be prudent to destroy or it, or make ourselves immune to its actions, because there is no way to be certain it might not be captured by malevolent sociopaths.

Still, this does not mean that research in 'Mechanism Design' or 'Incomplete Contracts' can't be useful. It would be good to know how to set up an efficient Redistributionary Mechanism 'just in case'. For example if an asteroid is about to hit the earth and we need to mobilize trillions of dollars worth of resources to avert disaster, it would be very useful if 'first order' research is ready to hand so that the burden of raising this money is equitably distributed in a manner which has no efficiency costs or adverse side-effects.

But Sen isn't doing any such work. He is posing as the Buddha of a Nirvana he has done nothing to create.

It is not hard to see that the reasoning underlying this departure in favour of capability can make a significant, and constructive, difference; for example, if a person has a high income but is also very prone to persistent illness, or is handicapped by some serious physical disability, then the person need not necessarily be seen as being very advantaged, on the mere ground that her income is high.

Absolutely! A 100 year old millionaire who needs a billion to be spent to keep him alive is very disadvantaged compared to the poor nurse, on minimum wage, who tends him.

She certainly has more of one of the means of living well (that is, a lot of income), but she faces difficulty in translating that into good living (that is, living in a way that she has reason to celebrate) because of the adversities of illness and physical handicap.

So true! The rich have ailments that are so expensive to diagnose, poor people never discover they have them save on their death bed. We must do more for our very rich who are aware that they have persistent illnesses and handicaps poor people die before discovering they share.

We have to look instead at the extent to which she can actually achieve, if she so chooses, a state of good health and wellness, and being fit enough to do what she has reason to value. To understand that the means of satisfactory human living are not themselves the ends of good living helps to bring about a significant extension of the reach of the evaluative exercise. And the use of the capability perspective begins right there.

Quite right! Ninety year olds are capable of getting nineteen year olds pregnant. We must help them achieve this capability. Not to do so means we as a Society suffer from an 'unfreedom'.

Sen is writing worthless shite- but the globalised market is for nothing else in this area, so good luck to him. The opportunity and process aspect of Freedom are one and the same thing. Spinoza referred to this as 'conatus'. Sen's process involves churning out high minded nonsense. This is all that his Freedom, or inertial conatus, amounts to. It is not the case that some opportunity available to him was curtailed thereby. It would not be possible to compensate him so adequately that he'd write a better book or one with a different import. Indeed, on examination, we see that Sen could not have written a better satire on his own worthless availability cascade than this final, and utterly futile, distillation of his oeuvre.

There is a lesson here all who run may read.
Mind it kindly.
Aiyayo.