Khader and Kosko (2019) argue that there are three interpretations of Sen’s ‘having reason to value’ definition. On the procedural autonomy interpretation, an individual Y has reason to value doing or being X if Y has reasoned that X is valuable;
This is not a sustainable interpretation. Y may know that they are shit at reasoning. Indeed any Y not at the 'Pareto Front' of Reasoning, has a reason to reject procedural autonomy. Thus this interpretation either militates against 'real freedom' as being associated with 'capability' (save for those at the Pareto front of Reason) or else it suggests that 'procedural autonomy' is satisfied by delegation to an unknown expert- in other words, no actual procedural autonomy obtains.
One may say of Uighurs in a concentration camp, that they have procedural autonomy. They have a reason to value being alive in the camp over being dead, or have reason to value being tortured over being dead, or reason to value being shot in the back of the head instead of being tortured to death in a prolonged manner. Thus anyone alive has a reason to value anything at all that is happening to them.
on the process interpretation, what we have reason to value is not necessarily what we do value, but rather what we would value if we had gone through the proper process of individual reflection
The proper process of reflection may indeed be what 're-education centers' inculcate. Thus, the 'process interpretation' could be properly Stalinist or properly Ayn Randian or anything else. Indeed, open public discussion may- on the evidence of recent history- put any sort of straitjacket on our thinking.
How is the 'process interpretation' different from procedural autonomy where delegation of reasoning is permitted? Suppose it isn't permitted and that procedural autonomy is some stupid shit everyone in their right mind would reject, then it is still the case that the process interpretation is equally shit. Why? The fact that we haven't gone through that process of individual reflection indicates we wouldn't want to have wasted our time in that way because we'd have missed out on some more useful experience.
The fact is, I'd rather have my meal cooked for me by an expert chef. But I don't want to have spent time becoming an expert chef because the opportunity cost would be my not having my current job. I suppose you could say- 'wouldn't it be nice to have expert knowledge of cooking as a 'plug in'? Sure. Magic is cool- when you are 5 years old- but it palls rapidly. Suppose I could introject the life experience of a great chef. I'd probably end up having really simple meals. But, because I've never cooked professionally, I want to sit down to fancy stuff which a true chef would find boring and pretentious.
Both the procedural autonomy 'interpretation' and the 'process interpretation' are, of course, perfectly compatible with each other or with cats being dogs or anything else if we stipulate that 'values' doesn't mean 'values' but whatever we like. Thus for any given outcome, we can say it is procedurally autonomous or it expresses a reflexive equilibrium or is perfect or is having sex with She-Hulk or anything else we care to stipulate. Ex falso quodlibet. Sad.
(and on the perfectionist interpretation, what people have reason to value is what is objectively valuable: Y simply has reason to value X because X is valuable, even if Y does not herself value X (e.g., Arneson 2020).
If we knew what is objectively valuable there would be no need for language or money or markets. Imagine the following. I walk into the baker's shop and pick up a pie. The baker nods to me. He knows objectively that I will go to the house of Smith and fix his window. Smith knows objectively that in return for this valuable service he must go do something for Jones who ends up requiting the baker for the pie.
Khader & Kosko, neither of whom are starving, engage in a bit of poverty porn at the start of their 2019 paper-
Imagine that Amibesa is an illiterate woman in rural Ethiopia whose parents and siblings have never practiced family planning, despite having some knowledge about and access to contraception. Amibesa, like her neighbors, believes that children are an expression of God’s will, and that she has a duty to respect her husband’s desire for more children. She has never discussed family planning with her husband. Despite her low income, and an alarmingly high risk of death in childbirth or from an unsafe abortion, Amibesa does not wish to pursue any of the family planning methods available to her.
Since we are descended from Amibesas, we can understand her values. It is likely that, if we ourselves have descendants in the far future, at least some would inherit mitochondrial dna from her. This is an argument- if her love of God is not sufficiently persuasive- to help her here and now. We are related to her from way back when and because she sacrificed herself for her kids- we will be related to her- if our progeny reproduce- sometime in the future.
Although this example is fictional, real cases like Amibesa’s can pose difficulties for Amartya Sen’s variant of the capability approach. Sen argues that development is the expansion of freedom (Sen 1999b, see also 2002, 8).
This is not true. The production possibility frontier might be expanding like crazy while political and other freedoms are contracting.
If freedom is the ability to pursue what one values, then the opportunity to control the number and spacing of her children does not count as development in Amibesa’s case.
But it would show up in GDP which is why GDP is useful.
I suppose the authors want to argue that the fact this lady has a choice not to have a baby means that having the baby in obedience to the will of God is all the more valuable to her. Fair enough.
Sen’s phrase in the epigraph, echoed by David A. Crocker, has seemed to many to resolve this difficulty. Development is freedom, and freedom is the ability to pursue not only what one “values” but also what one “has reason to value.” Amibesa has reason to value access to and knowledge of contraception (even if she elects not to use it).
That's all that is needed to justify funding a marketing campaign for contraceptives. Evelyn Waugh depicts just such a campaign in East Africa in the Thirties in the novel Black Mischief. The problem, of course, was that take-up was low till incentive structures changed- i.e. women could get paying jobs.
But is the phrase “reason to value” really a solution to this difficulty? The idea that development is freedom, rather than access to some specific set of opportunities or goods, gains much of its appeal from promising to avoid certain paternalism and pluralism-related criticisms of development.
What it actually avoided- or actively prevented- was genuine Development. China curbed the freedom to indulge in Sen-tentious criticism of Development and developed rapidly. India was more handicapped in this regard.
One could certainly criticize a particular Marketing campaign as elitist or paternalist or whatever. But if a marketing campaign works and proves 'value for money' because economies of scope and scale are achieved, then such criticism is irrelevant. Nothing succeeds like success. We might initially listen to critics. Then we start criticizing them for their paternalistic reason to value their own incessant, not wholly epistemic, raping of dogs in the street. This puts them on the defensive. They search for reasons dogs might value being sodomized by Amartya Sen.
Crocker defends his “agency-focused version of capability ethics” (2008, 1) as particularly respectful of differences in values that guide people
but also street-dogs expressing a masochistic cross-species sexual preference
to lead the kinds of lives they desire. “Authentic development,” Crocker says, is something that “occurs when groups at whatever level become subjects who deliberate, decide, and act in the world rather than being either victims of circumstance or objects of someone else’s decisions, the tool of someone else’s designs” (2008, 339).
So, 'authentic development' was a feature of Neandertal life. Sadly it tended to peter out with the agricultural revolution.
For both Crocker and Sen, an “agent” is “someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives, whether or not we assess them in terms of some external criteria as well” (Sen 1999b, 19, emphasis ours).
So the pussycat is an agent. It valued jumping on my desk to play with the mouse. Shame it upset my cup of tea over the key-board. On the other hand my literary agent is not actually an agent because, he tells me with tears streaming down his cheeks, he really does not value getting dreck published. He'd much rather be publishing cutting edge Queer Theory (which he assumes Socioproctology to be a sub-branch off) instead of biographies of Corporate fat-cats.
The paternalism and pluralism-related criticisms
are themselves authoritarian and impose their own paranoid vision till we accuse them of epistemically raping street dogs incessantly
of the notion of development-as-freedom or agency suggest that development is something unacceptably imposed from without.
Unacceptably? Can we do regime change? No? Then let us accept we can't change shit in this respect.
Development-as-Freedom was what the US was selling Post War. Marketing could be sub-contracted to local Agencies. But, soon enough, there was absolutely no need for this. By the Sixties and Seventies 'Coke gives life' might be translated as 'Coke raises the ghosts of the dead' but locals were not put off. They valued Coke regardless of the strapline. A good wine needs no bush.
The reason Development Economics collapsed was because Development occurred only where it didn't exist. Those who had always objected to Development, because they were mentally retarded, then retreated to writing this sort of pseudo-woke shite-
They are commonsense worries, not articulated with a definition of paternalism or a particular defense of value pluralism in mind—and in fact they may be arrived at from a variety of philosophical perspectives.5 One such worry is that development extends the legacy of colonialism by offering people “benefits” that they do not perceive as such (see Escobar 1994, Apffel-Marglin 2004, Rahnema 1997).
Sadly, poor people have not seen any 'benefit' in this sort of critique. Let the Rich dole out a little money to these cranks if this boosts their reputation. Charity can be of many types and the least deserving are often the most in need of it.
Another is that development is coercive, a violation of the autonomy of both individuals and communities (Kapoor 2002).
Yes. However, coercion is costly. By the folk theorem of repeated games, a non-coercive solution based on subsidiarity or autonomy is better- because cheaper. Development may be about non-coercive activity acquiring an instrument of coercion or it may work the other way around. It has nothing to do with freedom. It has everything to do with productivity. But this was well known before Sen was in short pants.
A third is that cultural homogenization is undesirable. The idea of development as freedom suggests that the “correct” types of interventions—that is, ones worthy of being described as “development” rather than “maldevelopment” (Penz, Drydyk, & Bose 2011)—do not prevent the beneficiaries from determining what types of lives they want to lead.
Sadly, there is no evidence for this view. Either productivity grows or else there has been no development worthy of the name. Freedom may have waxed as life-chances waned or vice versa. There is no necessary connection between the two.
As Wells summarizes in an autonomy-focused version of this line of defense: “development can be understood as transformational and in the interests of those concerned only if people are treated as autonomous agents whose own valuation of the life they have reason to value is central to the evaluation of advantage and development.” (Wells 2013, 11, emphasis ours)
Either people are autonomous or they aren't. A slave may be treated as though he were a King for some specific purpose. But a slave he remains. If it makes sense to say 'in this place, people are treated as autonomous', then they are not really autonomous at all. For a specific purpose, they have been granted a Hohfeldian immunity which however could be snatched back at any moment.
It is quite possible that a bunch of 'autonomous' collectives, or free individuals within those collectives, decide to 'pool sovereignty'. They may do as the Chief tells them. They have reason to value what they do because it is 'Law as Command' and they are discharging a duty which they freely contracted to.
However, suppose they are deluded. There was no free contract. Then, though nothing on the ground has changed, the system of government may be considered repugnant. This is a genuine problem for any type of Decision theory. The fact is there can be 'tipping points' such that there is a 'saltation'- a discontinuous change of state such that all that seemed fair now seems foul.
Graciella Chichilnisky, in a recent paper, has argued that the same topological structure which gives rise to Arrow's theorem also gives rise to Quantum paradoxes. What she won't accept is that Quantum stuff can make us much much more productive while worrying about Social Choice theory is a complete waste of time. Imposing topological structure- like 'treating agents as autonomous'- is moronic because an actual oxymoron is involved. A paradox isn't a scandal- it may be a 'money pump', something to exploit because it increases productivity perhaps by diminishing freedom or utility.
Khader & Kosko have a different objection to make to Wells-
But something moves too fast here. Doesn’t the very addition of the phrase “reason to value” suggest that people already value things they should not, or should value things that they do not—and thus that there are times where people’s “own values and objectives” are not the only standard of judgment about what counts as development?
It may do- or it may be mere puffery- like adding 'authentically empowering' to 'reason to value'
Who decides what people have reason to value, and what kinds of interventions are acceptable when and if people’s values conflict with it?
Chichilnisky says 'Physics is fine if everything is considered to be part of one big experiment. Then 'unicity' obtains. Once you have separate experiments you could end up with clashing coordinate systems and that's when quantum weirdness rears its ugly head'.
The same thing can be said of Society or the Economy. We can take the view that we are God-like in our power over both. But doing so means we miss out on spotting opportunities to make things more productive here and now.
The answers to these questions depend on what the phrase “reason to value” means. In the hands of his admirers, Sen’s phrase has become something of a pointer, a way to signal to an audience in the know that one is engaging the capability approach, and usually his version of it. The phrase is rarely discussed in its own right.
So, it is merely a shibboleth.
Yet Sen’s version of the capability approach, now widely described simply as “the capability approach” (Nussbaum’s is often referred to as “the capabilities approach”), is now widely defined using it: it is the idea that development increases people’s access to what they “value and have reason to value.”
This idea is false. More Development may occur where people's access to stuff they like falls. When things get worse, we get less of what we value. But, 'Necessity' may be 'the mother of invention'. We might find a way to be more productive so that, at the end of the day, we are all better off.
We argue in this chapter that, despite the intuitive strength and strategic value of the idea that development should be guided by people’s own values, the phrase “reason to value” (or “R2V”) incorporates additional normative commitments into the CA.
How so? Values aren't subject to Pauli's Exclusion Principle. If you value an idea then you can just the change what you value in it to include any other values- known or unknown. As Sen points out, it doesn't matter if values are incomparable- indeed, that's why you can't be sure they are contradictory- you still get a poset and a maximal and so forth.
However, in our view, such commitments might be required for prospective judgments about what will enhance people’s lives, or what they will come to value over time--judgments development practice cannot do without.
Development practice did fine without any such shite in every single country which actually developed. Sen-tentious shite hasn't developed shit.
Having a range of substantive opportunities to be and do from which one might choose (capability) is, in Sen's view, more important than being or doing in any particular way (functioning).
Sadly, only the opportunity cost- i.e. best foregone alternative- matters. Failure to understand this leads to the sort of false consciousness ridiculed by Chekhov or Tennessee Williams. Thus, my contention that I could have been bigger than Beyonce on the basis of my Dad's compliment that I should take up twerking- I was more likely to make a success of that type of dance than achieve acclaim in literature- is the delusion of a sad and elderly man. It may warm the cockles of my heart but isn't really true. Once I accept that I could either have published articles on technical aspects of Cost and Management Accountancy or else concentrated on Poetry as Socioproctology, I grow contented with my lot. I have 'minimized regret'. Thankfully regret only extends to opportunity cost not the entire choice menu. Indeed 'regret minimization', not Chichilnisky's shite, is what solves all problems of Social Choice.
Yet Sen’s uses of the term “reasonable ” and “reason to value” point to a more normative strand in Sen’s writing.
But also to a moronic strand.
Sen argues that reasonableness requires that behavior be more than simply goal-oriented, and uses the example of self-harm to demonstrate this (Sen 2002, 40).
It is not reasonable to treat the word 'reasonableness' as other than a Tarskian primitive. Tort law doesn't define 'reasonable person'. Why would a philosopher rush into a field where Judges have proved so cautious?
The phrase R2V is often invoked to justify questioning people’s existing desires or going beyond people’s existing desires in assessing wellbeing (Sen 1999b, 14, 18, 63, 152; 2002,7, 13-14, 616). A need to question people’s existing desires also seems built into Sen’s commitment to fighting oppression of women and the poor,
by beating up pimps and muggers? Cool! Amartya Sen is like Batman!
given that he argues that the “objective illusions” created by sexist, racist, and elitist ideologies can create adaptive preferences and make it difficult to identify accurately what oppressed and deprived people need
Oh. Not like Batman then. Sad.
Is it really difficult to identify accurately what oppressed people need? No. Find one bunch of guys who are unanimous on demanding something reasonable. Help them get it. Word will get around. You have a queue outside your door. That's it. That's the whole story.
On the other hand my theoretical work on how best to qualitatively differentiate orgasm intensity as experienced by supermodels who will also pay me handsomely for my sexual services will definitely cause me to have to beat them off with a stick once the lockdown is lifted.
(Sen 2002, 469-483). Even Sen’s (2002) statement that “the ‘freedom to lead lives that we have reason to value’ cannot be independent of what we do value
this is nonsense. Provided there is some minimal level of indeterminacy in action, it must be the case that living in this manner is, at least in that moment, completely independent of what we value. On the other hand, Sen has just said Buddhist 'kshanikavada' is baloney. No wonder he was such a shit Chancellor of Nalanda!
(on this see Sen 1982b, 1982c, 1985a)” (Sen, 2002, p. 685) leaves room for nonidentity between what we value now and what we have reason to value.
As a matter of fact, there is no supervenience relationship, or indeed logical connection, between 'valuing' and 'reasoning' about that valuing. Consider the thousands of years spent discussing the 'paradox of value'. Did anyone really trade a diamond for a glass of water after hearing a philosophical argument?
It may be objected that the value-laden remarks in this paragraph are not really part of the CA—and rather just parts of Sen’s general body of political and economic thought. As Mozaffar Qizilbash (2012) argues, however, even though Sen sometimes defends only the narrow view that interpersonal comparisons of well-being should attempt to measure abilities to be and do rather than completed functionings or access to resources (a “capability perspective”),
whereas, in life, we do the opposite. Twerkers imitate Beyonce, not me, because her functioning is better, though- no doubt- properly considered my capabilities are greater than that poor lady.
he also develops a unique theory of the role of capabilities, one that focuses heavily on choice and public reason (a “capability approach”). Whatever Sen’s intentions, the phrase R2V operates in the secondary literature to restrict the range of abilities to be and do that count as constitutive of freedom. In an important CA handbook, Sabina Alkire and Séverine Deneulin make the notion of reason to value a defining one: “The capability approach contains three central concepts: functioning, capability and agency. A functioning is being or doing what people value and have reason to value. A capability is a person’s freedom to enjoy various functionings—to be or do things that contribute to their well-being. Agency is a person’s ability to pursue and realize goals she values and has reason to value” (Alkire & Deneulin, 2009, p. 22).
Cool. In an advanced economy very few are 'functioning' at all- during their day time job. Their capability is much greater- unless they start functioning- in which case they are fucked. They have no agency because their ability to pursue goals is predicated on a very complex web of interdependence. It is a sad fact that a Wall Street banker can't even shit on the sidewalk the way a hunter gatherer can.
On the other hand, the fellow has the capability of quitting his job and joining some worthless Foundation after getting a credential which involves reading poverty porn of the following stripe-
Consider a case where Amibesa believes that reproductive decisions are appropriately left to her husband, or that they simply ought to be outside of human control (i.e., left to God). If R2V is a notion that expands, rather than contracts, her freedom, then not controlling her fertility (what she values) and having control over the number and spacing of her children (what she has reason to value) are equally constitutive of her freedom.
This is foolish. Amibesa's wants the freedom to set fire to an abortion clinic- or at least protest against the existence of contraceptive devices in the godless metropolis. It is your job to build such clinics so that real freedom can be exercised. Also send some tame SEALS for Osama's acolytes to kill.
One problem with this view for pluralists or antipaternalists is that, without a weighting of the various freedoms, neither alternative is better than the other.
The solution is simple. Start with a base case where there is no ambiguity. If you do well there, you get invited to do the same elsewhere.
Economics accepted that 'substantive rationality' involving access to perfect information was actively misleading. Procedural rationality expressed by search or sorting algorithms were what paid the bills.
Consider the Secretary problem. How do you get the best Secretary for the wage you can afford? One approach would be a complicated weighting system which the 'anti-paternalist' is bound to dislike because dick-size not boob-size is what should count. Anyway, after a few thousand man-hours spent on this delightful task, you realize that it is very difficult to get Secretaries to submit to a proper weighting procedure. So you eventually adopt the common sense- but also mathematically provably optimal rule- viz. reject the first two or three and then hire the first at least as good. You have done 'discovery' and have applied a 'stopping rule'. Then your wife founds out. Sad.
Pluralists and anti-paternalists who are attracted to the term R2V will find no reason to defer to Amibesa’s actual desires in an expansive understanding of R2V, since it merely proliferates, and does not weight, objects that are constitutive of her freedom.
Objects are not constitutive of freedom. Mums generally find kids limit their freedom. But kids are cute- so Mummy doesn't mind and only insists you move out after you turn 50 and start losing your hair.
Similarly, those who think Amibesa ought to have (substantive) access to contraception will find no reason to encourage this rather than respect her wishes.
Sad. I would eagerly watch a You Tube video of these guys prancing around Amibesa so as to encourage her to use contraception or vibrators or whatever.
More importantly, the use of the phrase R2V to eliminate “bad” capabilities from counting as valuable suggests that CA advocates like Alkire and Deneulin do not intend the “and” to be inclusive. In explanations of the phrase R2V, the focus is often on the CA’s not being committed to expanding access to “harmful”—or what Alkire (2005) calls “horrid”— functionings, for example self-cutting, or more spectacularly, murder.
Good to know. Still, it is a shame these guys aren't dancing around African villages- or inner city Middle Schools- in a manner which encourages people to use contraception.
... Sen and his interpreters tell us that a person who does not value a functioning, and whose other values are unknown, still has reason to value it
How so? This is like saying 'you have a nuclear bomb' in your underpants. You reply- 'No I don't. I don't even like nuclear bombs.' You sternly reply 'You have a reason to value nuclear bombs in your underpants. It isn't your reason- it is mine- but I'm gifting it to you. But this means you definitely have a nuclear bomb in your underpants'.
The problem here- at least in Navya Nyaya Indian law- is that this 'gift' does not vest in the person save by some overt act of theirs. In Anglo-Saxon law, acceptance is required for a thing to be yours.
Now it is quite true that you have an immunity in Law to do certain things to protect the the things others value even if they didn't want you to act because they didn't really value those things. This is where a 'reasonable person' test comes in. But this is restricted to actions of immediate, obvious and direct utility. It can't extend to any complex type reasoning on behalf of another without explicit authority.
and, conversely, a person who values a “horrid” functioning might not have reason to value it.
So, reasoning and valuing are independent. Neither supervenes on the other. But this means there is no 'natural' or 'reasonable' way to link what is valued with 'reason to value'.
There may be a strategic interplay between 'value' and 'reason to value'.
Mum says 'Come have your dinner. You must be famished.' I turn away. In a miserable but dignified tone I deny being hungry- though saliva is dripping from my lip. Mum reflects for a moment and gives in- 'I was wrong to say you don't twerk better than Beyonce. You took it to mean that your twerking was too vulgar because your bum was bigger than hers. That is why you don't now value this tasty meal. What you value is losing weight. But this is unnecessary. All I meant was that you shouldn't let anyone see you twerking. They'll want to video it and post it on Tiktok. Then Beyonce's Agent will have you killed because your bum is bigger than hers. Amartya Sen has explained all this in his latest book. Read it and see for yourself.'
Strategic considerations in Social contexts lead to different forces operating on 'costly signals'= e.g. actual values- which give rise to a separating equilibrium- while 'cheap talk'- e.g reasons to value- only generates a pooling equilibrium.
As a matter of fact it is rational for a population of Amibesas to split on the issue of contraception. Some take it up to have a higher quality of life but pretend not to to remain part of a pooling equilibrium. Others reject it and gain reputationally- God has favored them! They may have higher reproductive success and gain other benefits- e.g. more political voice and greater access to club goods- so it is an open question as to the evolutionarily stable proportion of 'cheap talk' Amibesas relative to 'costly signal' Amibesas. Then you look at historic demographic data are realize contraception we have always had with us. Women just didn't talk about it.
But surely a person can use their reason to come to value having their reproductive life determined by others, for example. Sen’s typical recommendation for such cases is public deliberation or expansion of their capability set expanded with the aim of bringing that person to value (or devalue) that functioning, or with the expectation that she will come to (de-)value it.
As a young man, Sen would have seen Family Planning workers and other such outreach teams going off into the villages and encouraging 'public deliberation' and so on. That shite didn't work because the incentive structure had stayed the same. What worked was getting rural girls into big factory dormitories by giving them something they valued- transferable utility- i.e. money.
I suppose the guys writing this shite are getting paid. They are 'functioning'. Maybe some of them will be able to save enough to go off to Africa to try to do first order good. I suggest that they study my Tiktok twerking videos to learn how to encourage Amibesa's to stick diaphragms or whatever up their whatsits. In this way 'Freedom-as-Development' will have fulfilled their Capabilities to the uttermost.
Capabilities may be hot air- just harmless jargon indulged in by imbeciles- but another aspect of Sen's work- viz. championing open public discussion as a panacea- is clearly having a mischievous impact in an India reeling under COVID.
The Process Interpretation A second interpretation of R2V, the process interpretation, suggests that one has reason to value what one values after deliberative processes, changes in one’s opportunity set, or both.
This is foolish. Only the information set, which contains all you know about your opportunity set, matters. How it is enlarged is irrelevant. To argue otherwise is to say information is not univocal. If a bad man discovered a Scientific Law we must have nothing to do with it. This is sheer magical thinking. Boko Haram may be right to say that the White Man brought evil. But they are wrong to say books are evil just because White people brought them.
It is forward-looking and suggests that the term R2V tells us what people would value after undergoing certain changes.
No. It has no such magical quality. Nobody can say with certainty how any person will think after undergoing some pedagogic or discursive process. It is not the case that students who took the same courses have the same values. Harvard or the LSE is not a brainwashing center. After Sen finishes a debate, it is not the case that he and his interlocutor have 'Aumann agreement'.
This is the interpretation that Crocker seems most committed to, both in his writing and in public lectures and discussion. Crocker has done much to forward Sen’s distinction between the process and opportunity aspects of freedom,
I have argued this is specious elsewhere
a distinction that can help us get clearer about which processes, in addition to an agent’s internal reasoning, are necessary for a person to come to have reason to value something:
This is foolish. Either you value something or you don't. In the former case you may have a reason to do so in which case whatever process that reasoning took- e.g. comparison, x is doing better than me coz x values y, hence I too shall value y- is the process.
Imputing values is something we do out of normal 'theory of mind'. It is quite natural. 'I thought you must be hungry and would want this food' is a perfectly innocent thing to say. But 'imputing reasons for values' smacks of insincerity. You are laying it on too thick if you say- 'I thought, oh great sage, that though you are impervious to hunger yet, as a favor to your humble acolyte, you might deign to partake of this dish'.
It is perfectly acceptable when surveying a market or making a fiscal decision to impute values of a natural type to people whom you don't know. But 'reasons to value' can't be natural. They must be independently corroborated precisely because they don't seem natural even to their proposer.
In any case, as a matter of common sense, it is the do-gooder whose 'reasons to value' should change- if the thing really is ethical- not the other way around. We think well of the Vicar who finds new reasons to value reprobates every day. We don't think well of holier than thou hypocrites who ape the mannerisms of that good man.
“Freedom is concerned with the processes of decision making as well as the opportunities to achieve valued outcomes” (Sen 1999b, 291).
Is this true? No. Administration is concerned with this. Freedom is not. It is a set of Hohfeldian immunities representing Rights which have judicial remedies (though these may be self-supplied). One may say Freedom is concerned with Administration. But Slavery is more so.
Exercise of political freedoms (like public discussion and free speech)
Political freedoms- i.e. the ability to participate in political processes- may be wholly lacking whereas speech may be wholly free. The opposite too may be the case.
or expansion of available opportunities (a change in one’s circumstances that results in an expansion of one’s real capability set) might be reason-giving processes.
only if they are inscribed in the information set.
If having R2V something means one would value it following certain kinds of processes, then the function of R2V is largely to facilitate prospective judgments, allowing development practitioners to anticipate what Amibesa might, after an intervention, “have reason to value,” irrespective of what she currently values.
So the process still ends in an imputation of values. What difference does it make if I chop off your head in a fit of rage or if I do it after some process of reasoning such that I think you'd really value not having a head on your shoulders?
This is merely bureaucratic pettifogging of a Kafkaesque type.
We have identified two types of process that might make Amibesa’s values count as reasoned: her participation in collective deliberation and an expansion of her capability set.
So, we can demand she get her tubes tied provided we
1) organized a discussion about this in her village so she had her chance to participate
2) set up a Family Planning Clinic able to perform tubectomy in the region
This is a bit like what happens in Douglas Adam's 'Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy'. Our planet can get bulldozed to construct a Galactic super-highway provided we were notified of a public hearing and provided a Vogon 'Constructor Fleet' is ready at hand.
According to the first, which we call the “deliberative-process” version of this interpretation, when we say that Amibesa values and has reason to value something, we are saying that: Through a public, deliberative process, she has reasoned (or will reason) that X is valuable.
Cool! That's what the Chinese say about the Uighurs. But why stop there? Given enough re-education they will gladly commit suicide so more living space is available for their betters.
Notice no 'natural' imputation of values to Uighurs would permit such a perverse outcome. What is truly monstrous is not that ordinary people 'impute values' in a manner we find natural, but that stupid, virtue signaling, egg-heads impute highly artificial 'reasons to value' to poor people such that any atrocity whatsoever could be justified under the rubric of 'freedom-as-development'
Though this interpretation of R2V is largely absent in the secondary literature on R2V it would be consistent with Sen’s emphasis on the role of political freedom in value formation, emphasis Crocker embraces. Sen argues that the ability to participate in politics and public discussions is valuable, not only because of its ability to motivate governments to act in the public interest, but also because it plays a constitutive role in development, by facilitating value formation.
Things are either valuable in themselves or because they are causally linked to valuable things. The ability to participate in politics may be valuable in itself. It may be causally linked to 'motivating governments'. But what is the causal link to that government acting in the public interest? There is none. It may be argued that the Government is afraid of public opinion. But that is also true of tyranny! Moreover, there is no evidence in the annals of history that public opinion reflects 'the public interest'.
Sen should be satisfied in saying x is valuable in itself. People like having it. Try taking it away from them. They will get angry.
Instead he says x is valuable because x causes pigs to fly and is constitutive of aerobatic porcine aeronautics by the manner in which it facilitates saying stupid shit like this.
Collective decision making processes are central to the development, evaluation, and evolution of weights and values that individuals might place on ways of doing and being and on various goods (Sen 1999b, 152).
No. Individual 'weights' and 'values' are inputs to mechanisms created collectively or tyranically or imposed exogenously. No doubt, in a small tribal republic, it may seem that the Ecclesia- i.e. the assembly of the free citizens- is important. But if you look a bit closer even at Plato's Athens you see that the Ecclesia wasn't important. There were mechanisms- judicial, military etc- which said they took their authority from the Ecclesia. But dealing with them was a matter of incentives not arguments.
Sen and Crocker both suggest that public deliberation transforms the normative status of values; their being deliberated upon makes them especially worthy of playing a role in development policy.
Cool! So Sen is really happy that India is getting a big Ram Temple in Ayodhya. There was a lot of deliberation about there wasn't there? Clearly Ram Temples play a big role in 'development policy'.
In many cases, Sen treats values that have not undergone scrutiny through some kind of public process as in some way suspect, perhaps unreliable as guides to the actual (uninformed, unregimented) values a person holds: “We cannot, in general, take preferences as given independently of public discussion, that is, irrespective of whether open debates and interchanges are permitted or not” (Sen 1999b,153).
Cool! We can't say Sen's shite aint shite till there has been a full public discussion about its utility. But would Sen really want to debate me and the millions of other knuckle dragging trolls like me?
Sen writes “In examining a person's opportunities, it is possible to go beyond the actual preferences used in her choice acts into the preferences she could have chosen to have” under different circumstances (Sen 2002, 616).
What should Sen have done with his life? Physics? He hints as much. But he was too stupid to make a mark there.
This is not to say Sen- like Spivak- wasn't useful to his people. Back in the Seventies, the safe thing to do on University Campuses was to pretend to be a 'useful idiot'. You needed to show that you were too stupid to read Marx- thus you couldn't be a left deviationist or a right opportunist or whatever- but also too stupid to understand Adam Smith. Thus you could say 'what puzzles me is why Smith's so called devotees don't join the Communist Party. There's a Professor in America who has made this point in a marvelous manner. I'm hoping to go work under him.' The Reds would then consider you a sort of Trojan Horse and send you on your merry way. Sooner or later you would come to Marx. Meanwhile your oeuvre was just what the Doctor ordered when it came to showing bright young Commies just exactly how useless and fucked in the head bourgeois liberalism actually was.
Sen's class were academo-bureaucratic parasites in India. Now his acolytes secure their careers by preying vulture fashion off a Developmental Aid which looks more and more skeletal.
What if there is a sudden collapse in this Credentialized Ponzi scheme? Suppose 'tenure' for virtue signaling cretins suddenly disappears? What if Gates actually figures out a way to lift up the poor and then the Ford Foundation and so on are shamed into following suit?
Would 'deliberative public reason' rally round these soi disant savants who have become a victim to epistemic entitlement failure? Of will they impute to them 'reasons to value' being thrown on the scrap heap?
I'm kidding. These are good people. If their citation cartel collapses, they will get jobs doing first order good. Then, they will be happy.
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