What Utilitarianism is founded on is the notion that it is useful to figure out ways to make ourselves and the institutions we are connected with more useful. But, this begs the question, how are we to know if a thing or a person has become more useful? The answer is simple. Productivity. If it rises, utility rises. Not otherwise. The good news is that productivity is relatively easy to measure. Is more being produced using the same quantity of resources? Is the 'value added' rising?
Sen takes a different view.
IV. EQUALITY AND MORAL VALUATION I turn now to question (2b): Do utilitarian principles follow from WAIF if well-being is taken as utility?
Since WAIF is nonsense nothing follows from it. Well-being is multiply realizable and useless things can contribute to it. It is a fit subject for the therapist or the poet. Utility as linked to productivity is a different matter. Economists, Accountants and Engineers may be usefully employed in working out how to increase it.
It was argued in the first lecture that utilitarianism is really a combination of welfarism, sum ranking, and some-direct or indirect-version of consequentialism.
It is none of those things. It is about usefulness which is linked to productivity. We may find it useful to reduce our welfare or wellbeing or happiness or desire fulfilment. Just because some stupid. Why? Well, our nation's threat point is related to productivity. Having high and rising productivity can deter aggression. Equally, it is sometimes useful to mislead an enemy or potential ally as to your preferences. Sen's approach is to take words which mean different things and pretend they mean the same thing.
Therefore, the question can be seen as being about the derivability of these different factors from the union of (1) WAIF and (2) the identification of utility with well-being.
In which case WAIF is UAIF i.e. utility is the informational foundation of utility. Why stop there? Why not say cats are the informational foundation of cats?
Deriving welfarism, obviously, poses no challenge to this task. Nor, in fact, does welfarist consequentialism in general. If nothing other than well-being can count as a morally fundamental fact and if well-being is just utility, then it will be necessary to evaluate actions and other choice variables in terms of utility consequences only.
Because, Sen says, welfare is well-being is utility. It is also the cat which is the informational foundation of itself.
The factor that remains unmarshalled even in this demanding framework
how demanding is it to say that words which mean different things mean the same thing?
is sum ranking, viz., the view that the utilities are best valued aggregatively by summing them and by ignoring every other aspect of utility distributions, including the extent of inequality.
Utilities are never valued. It is not useful to do so. Still, useless pedants say 'aggregating utilities' enables us to calculate total utility. Nobody actually does so. It is useful to calculate National Income because that directly relates to Tax Revenue.
Nothing in WAIF or in the identifiction of well-being with utility can make sum ranking follow automatically without invoking some consideration that makes us unconcerned with equality of wellbeing.
Only because no one can add 24 to 76 without, at least momentarily, becoming unconcerned with the plight of starving Palestinian cats in Patagonia.
It is, therefore, a matter of considerable interest that arguments have been presented by some utilitarians that make sum ranking allegedly inescapable simply on grounds of logic, mathematics, or rationality.'
They can do this by using advanced mathematical techniques to show that 24 plus 76 is more than 11 plus 81. The presumption is that a bigger number is bigger than the smaller number.
How is this unusual feat performed? Consider the Vickrey-Harsanyi model' of "ethical preferences"Harsanyi’s utilitarian theorem states that the social welfare function is the weighted sum of individuals’ utility functions if: (i) society maximizes expected social welfare; (ii) individuals maximize expected utility; (iii) society is indifferent between two probability distributions over social states whenever all individuals are. The first provision says 'by magic, if there was a way for society to get the biggest possible cake and everybody wants more cake and Society doesn't play favorites, then people would accept the outcome. True, there may be 'distributional concerns' or a demand for a social minimum but then we could maximize cake production subject to that constraint. In other words, the thing is a tautology.
based on choosing between different states of affairs in a state of primordial equiprobability in which the chooser has an equal chance of being anyone.' If the as if behavior of this chooser satisfies certain "rationality" conditions (such as the von NeumannMorgenstern axioms20), then the position of being any persion i in any state x can be given a value Wi(x) such that the chooser's behavior can be represented as maximizing the mathematical expectation of these individual Wi values, i.e., maximizing li piWi, when pi is the probability of being person i. With the assumption of equiprobability of being anyone, this is no different from maximizing Zi Wi. If Wi is seen as person i's utility, then it looks as if sum ranking has somehow been deduced simply from rational behavior. Rationality must, it would seem, preclude any concern for equality of well-being in aggregating different persons' well-being!
If we define rationality in that way, then yes. True, the definition is arbitrary but so is any objection to it.
' But what are these Wi values? They are simply accounting values for predicting choice under uncertainty.
In a VNM universe, the Wi values predict behavior.
They need not coincide with any concept of utility that has independent meaning, such as happiness, or satisfaction, or desire fulfillment.
But they are supposed to predict behavior and this may be useful.
Not only may the values of Wi differ from the utilities Ui as perceived by persion i himself (his happiness, his desire fulfillment, etc.),
just as values given by physicists for the g-force an astronaut will experience may differ from what they report.
but they may also differ from what the chooser expects to enjoy in the counterfactual position of becoming person i.
So what? VNM is a model that predicts behavior and may be useful in open financial markets with lots of arbitrage such that there is no 'free lunch' or 'money pump'. It isn't a model about how people will feel under different financial circumstances.
The fact that W is the sum of the Wi values does not tell us anything at all about what the relationship is between W and the independently characterized utilities Ui of the respective persons.
It tells us enough. In a large enough market run for a long enough time, people whose behavior fails to conform with the model get weeded out.
In terms of the language of the von Neumann-Morgenstern model of choice, we might employ the term 'utility' for Wi, but Wi has no necessary role other than yielding accounting values in terms of which the chooser's behavior can be predicted.
Which was the object of the exercise. VNM is one of the building blocks of FinTech which is useful because it lowers uncertainty and raises productivity most of the time while causing 'shakeouts' or 'creative destruction at other times.
In fact, the numbering system of Wi works the way it does precisely by incorporating attitudes toward risk in the Wi values themselves.
Because that is what is of interest. Some are risk averse, some aren't. Everybody benefits if the latter shoulder, for a price, some of the risk of the latter.
And, in this framework, these attitudes toward risk correspond neatly to attitudes toward inequality.
Not necessarily. Still, it may be that poorer people are generally more risk averse and don't mind higher inequality if this yields them greater security.
If the chooser's attitude toward inequality changes (but "consistency" of choice is retained in the form of continuing to satisfy the von NeumannMorgenstern axioms), then the Wi functions will change correspondingly, even though the utilities Ui of the persons in the form of happiness or desire fulfillment may remain completely unaltered.
Which is what happens when you play the markets. You take a loss today but make a profit tomorrow. As for 'attitudes', if they don't get you fired or laid, they don't matter.
The fact that W is the sum of the Wi values does not imply sum ranking of the utility values Ui,
because they have been maximized by magic
and it presents an additive accounting procedure only through the devised values of Wi.
It is meaningless.
No substantive sum ranking result is entailed by the accounting procedure.
Nothing at all is entailed. This is a just so story.
It is, in fact, not surprising that the relevance of equality in moral valuation cannot be settled without assessing equality itself.
And equality itself can't be assessed without moral valuation. What a fucking waste of time!
The informational foundation of well-being yielded by WAIF leaves
us with no information whatsoever
it open how the well-being of different people are to be combined in assessing states and actions.
You can't combine what you don't know
And this issue is not obliterated even when "rational" behavior under uncertainty with primordial equiprobability is taken to be the basis of moral valuation
No. The issue is transformed into one of rough and ready approximation. Policy makers can say 'this policy appears to us to offer the greatest increase in GNP. How it will be distributed is not clear to us. Still, assuming the distribution does not change, some will gain while others will not lose. Let us therefore follow this policy. No doubt, there will be people who complain and it may be necessary to buy them off in some way.
. Rationality even in the limited sense of satisfying von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms-is no enemy of valuing equality of well-being.
Rationality is the enemy of doing impossible things- e.g. getting pigs to fly or 'valuing equality of well-being'.
While the issue of equality has to be faced,
It does not. On the other hand, the issue of compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual and bisexual men must be faced because such penises cause RAPE! My point is that if some nutters start banging on about Equality, other nutters can start banging on about bees in their own bonnets.
the fact that there are many different notions of equality implies that
the thing is an artificial grievance. Clearly the most glaring type of inequality arises from the existence of penises. Why do women have to sit down to pee? The thing is manifestly unfair.
conflicts among these different egalitarian views have to be faced as well. In an important study called Equalities, Douglas Rae has argued that the "one idea that is more powerful than order or efficiency or freedom in resisting equality" is "equality itself."
Rae's book 'Equalities' came out in 1981 just when Thatcher & Reagan were decisively changing politics. Nobody cared about Equality. The Chinese recalled that Marx had said 'to each according to his contribution' and thus decided that 'to get rich is glorious'.
Peter Westen has gone further and has suggested that equality is "an empty form having no substantive content of its own."
Which is why it is a useful slogan which can be used to pose a hold out problem. But, 'Diversity' works just as well. Alternatively, one can bang on about the plight of the Palestinians or the dangers of resurgent Nazism or the risk of Environmental collapse.
It may be tempting to dismiss concern with equality in moral evaluation on grounds of this alleged "emptiness."
Since moral evaluation is itself empty, it is welcome to concern itself with any old bollocks.
However, the multiplicity of notions of equality arises from various sources, and often enough these sources do not appear to be peculiar to equality at all.
Because what could be said of Equality could also be said of Diversity or what is necessary to the True Faith or the defeat of resurgent Nazism.
A person's advantage can be judged in many different ways, and corresponding to these different ways, there are various characterizations of equality.
Anybody can judge anybody else to be a poofter or a serial killer or a Nazi or anything else they like.
Utility, income, opulence, need-fulfillment, etc.,
are 'intensions' whose 'extensions' are unknowable though you are welcome to give it any arbitrary definition you like- e.g. true utility can't be gained from eating good food. It can only be gained by eating your own shit. True Income is not money you earn. It is the farts you get to smell. What men really need is gender reassignment surgery. Sadly, Neo-Liberalism is enforcing Patriarchy which, capriciously, is refusing to chop off its own dick.
provide different ways of seeing a person's success, and each of them would lead to a corresponding approach to equality. But this plurality is not special to equality. Any derivative notion for which individual advantage provides the informational base, would have this plurality.
Nonsense! Equality of height is based on an objective measurement of height. Equality of income too is objective. Equality of well-being or happiness is wholly subjective. It is only there that every opinion will be different.
For example, the notion of "efficiency" in terms of achievements (that the situation is such that no one can be made more advantaged without reducing someone else's advantage) will have exactly the same variability.
No. Pareto efficiency just means that no two individuals can trade to mutual advantage or no further arbitrage can occur. That is objective enough.
If advantage is seen in absolute terms and identified with utility, then the notion of efficiency immediately becomes the concept-much used in economics-of "Pareto optimality."
This is not necessary at all. Pareto's 'ophelimity' has the meaning of 'profit'. If no further profitable arbitrage or trade can occur, then there is Pareto optimality. But this depends on the cost of information and making transactions. Technology can greatly reduce both greatly increasing allocative efficiency.
But related to the other notions of advantage- income,
if even one person could get a higher income by becoming more productive then Pareto optimality has not been achieved. That is objective.
opulence,
is just Income with Wealth unaltered
need fulfillment, etc.
needs are plastic and multiply realizable. Still, higher income, ceteris paribus, correlates with higher need fulfilment. That is why raising the productivity and thus income of needy people is a good thing.
-there will be the corresponding notions of efficiency. In rejecting the claims of utility to represent well-being, we
have done something very silly. Utility means well-being. Neither can be measured. One might as well reject the claim that a beautiful girl is also a pretty girl.
have outlined the need for an alternative approach.
Who needs that alternative approach? Only pedants teaching nonsense.
The issue of equality will again arise in whatever alternative concept of well-being we accept.
Just like the issue of compulsory gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual men and the urgent need for all Americans to give up their illegal occupation of 'Turtle island'.
I return now to the characterization of well-being.
Which is fully characterised by being well.
V. FUNCTIONINGS AND WELL-BEING It is useful to contrast two closely related ideas, which are quite clearly different. One is the idea of being "well off" and the other of being "well," or having "well-being."
Being rich doesn't mean being healthy. Everybody already knows this.
The former is really a concept of opulence-how rich is she? what goods and services can she buy? what offices are open to her? and so on. This refers to a person's command over things outside- including what Rawls calls "primary goods." Having "well-being," on the other hand, is not something outside her that she commands, but something in her that she achieves. What kind of a life is she leading? What does she succeed in doing and in being?
Since 'doing and being' depend on command of resources, we can say that, ceteris paribus, being well-off means having more well-being than would otherwise be the case. The rich man and the poor man may suffer the same disease. But the rich man's last days are likely to be more comfortable.
Being "well off" may help, other things given, to have "well-being," but there is a distinctly personal quality in the latter absent in the former.
Other things being equal- no there isn't. Economists are concerned only with what happens ceteris paribus.
In looking for an appropriate approach to well-being, there are two different dangers to avoid, coming from two different directions.
There is only one danger- viz. that of wasting your time in a particularly stupid manner.
One problem lies in taking a basically subjectivist view in terms of one of the mental-state metrics of utility.
Nothing wrong with taking a 'subjectivist' view. The Marketing Dept. needs to know what is the subjective motivation of the customer. Are they buying the product because it is useful or because it is a status symbol or because it offers some psychic benefit (e.g. it satisfies nostalgia).
Being happy may be a valuable thing to be,
No. We value being happy. But Happiness is not a thing. It can't be bought and sold.
and not having one's desires frustrated may also have value,
No. Feeling frustrated imposes a psychic cost. But Frustration is not itself a cost in the sense that Pollution imposes a cost on Society.
but there are clearly other things that are also valuable to do or be.
No things exist which we can do or be. True you may think it would be nice to be a tree or to burn by nuclear fusion like the sun, but you can't achieve either objective.
We have to value the different types of doings and beings, but "desiring" is not a valuational activity in itself,
Yes it is. Indeed, it is a better indication that a thing is valuable than an expert appraisal. Thus a particular person may be described- as Sen is described- as a brilliant economist, but if nobody desires to follow his advise, this appraisal may not be reliable.
though it may be the consequence of one.
Sen desired his best friend's wife. I suppose this was a consequence of his evaluation that she would help his career more than his current spouse.
The linkage may give desiring an "evidential" value, which was discussed, but the limitations of which, especially in interpersonal comparison, also emerged clearly enough.
There is no such problem for commodities bought and sold on open markets. Economics is concerned with what can be usefully done not with finding excuses to do nothing.
We are, thus, pulled in the objectivist (and, in one sense, "impersonal") direction, looking for a criterion that does not get messed up by circumstantial contingencies (as the "evidential" value of desire information clearly can). What form would an "objective" criterion of well-being take?
Disposable income. True, a person has disutility equal to opportunity cost. If that rises, they do something else. It may be that they would pay a certain sum of money to return to the previous arrangement. Economists are welcome to take account of this.
"By an objective criterion I mean a criterion that provides a basis for appraisal of a person's well-being which is independent of the person's tastes and interests," says Scanlon.
Objective measures are limited in number. You have to pick one which actually exists and which isn't too expensive to acquire.
But why should an objective criterion not take note of the objective basis of differences of different people's "tastes and interests"?
Because a criterion does not have a mind or a heart. It can't take note of stuff or feel rapture as it does so.
As discussed in the first lecture (in the context of the quite different problem of positionr elativity of moral judgments of actions and states, ), the personal features that make a relevant objective difference (and which others too can see) can be built parametrically into an evaluation function without losing objectivity.
Only if the relevant data is easy to acquire. In practice, you use a proxy.
One reason why "being well off" is quite different from "being well,"
ceteris paribus, it is one and the same. Anyway, we would not refer to a guy who is earning well but whose medical bills are twice his pay-packet to be 'well off'. We would say he is so badly off that he is having to sell his house and his car and his fancy watch just to stay alive.
despite the fact that the former is causally related to the latter, is the variability of personal characteristics which makes the causal relations person-specific.
The causal relationship between 'being well' is with 'physical and mental health'. That is a matter for Doctors to establish.
The Charybdis of overrigidity threatens us as much as the Scylla of subjectivist variability, and we must not lose sight of the important personal parameters in developing an approach to well-being.
No. If you are hired to evaluate a thing, just fucking do it already. Don't keep sight of 'personal parameters'. I want to know how much my house is worth. I hire a guy who knows how much it can sell for. I don't want him to keep sight of the fact that I am as fat as fuck or that my wife is sleeping with the milkman.
Consider a disabled person, who, with the same level of real income and opulence, cannot do many things that a normal person can.
Figure out how much the Government can afford to pay people with that disability. It may turn out that a modest D.L.A payment enables disabled people to become more productive. If so the entitlement may 'pay for itself'.
His tastes in commodities will be different (and typically more expensive), and his interests will make very different demands on others. In what way does this disabled person differ in terms of this issue from the person with "expensive tastes," who has received such a lot of attention recently (and, to indulge in an aside, whose taste for having expensive and exquisite attention must by now be well satisfied by what he has got from Kenneth Arrow, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Tim Scanlon, among others)?
Nobody benefits from the bollocks talked by virtue signalling pedants.
One important difference between the two cases relates to the likely fact that the expensive-taste person may be able to do most things a normal person can and be handicapped only in the context of achieving contentment or satisfaction, whereas the disabled person may be handicapped in terms of a much wider range of activities.
This does not follow. A person with expensive tastes may gain pleasure from things others find repugnant. This does not mean they can relish coarse fair. Oscar Wilde, in Reading Jail, relished white bread just as much as any Cockney convict. In Evelyn Waugh's 'Decline & Fall', a prisoner indignantly rejects truffles and caviar which have been served to him by mistake. But the hero, being a Public School man, finds the monastic conditions of prison quite agreeable whereas the hardened criminals miss the noisy conviviality of the slums.
As Scanlon describes the refined being, he could not be raised to a "normal level of satisfaction" without very high expenditure (659).
Scanlon is wrong. The Princess may be unable to sleep on even the softest pile of mattresses if there is a pea underneath it. But that is a fairy story. She will soon learn to adjust. The disabled person too learns to adjust. Helen Keller did pretty well for herself.
The Arrow-Dworkin creature hooked on "plovers' eggs and pre-phylloxera claret" is unhappy unless he gets these extraordinary provisions, even though there is nothing to suggest that he cannot do the usual things that other people can, except that of being happy.
Being happy is not something one can do. It is certainly true that if you have a 'bliss point' which is easily reached, you are unlikely to achieve much in life. Guys with expensive tastes may make the economy more dynamic. However, if what they suffer from is addiction, then they are similar to disabled people and thus may benefit from some type of medical treatment.
In contrast, the deprivation of the handicapped person relates also to his inability to do many entirely normal things (unless, of course, we are considering some exotic type of handicap). The disadvantages that he suffers in his "being" do not have to be seen in terms of utilities at all.
They could be seen as tests set by God.
In fact, handicapped people are often cheerful enough, and do not lead a life of frustrated desires, since their desires adapt to the reality of their handicap (a point that relates to the issue of circumstantial contingency of desires, which was discussed earlier).
In other words, disabled people are just people. We all adjust to reality. If we can't, there may be medical treatment we would profit from receiving. I suppose I should be grateful for the 'being-kneed-in-the-groin Therapy I regularly receive from ladies whom I ask to sleep with me. The fact is, I have indeed adjusted- albeit very painfully- to the reality that I will die a virgin.
The primary disability certainly would be in matters of leading a normal life-being able to get around, being able to hear or see, or something like that. That it is reflected in a lowered utility level is secondary, if true, and it may not even be true.
Nevertheless, the fact is, voters are content that an insurance scheme exists such that disabled people receive payments based on the severity of their condition. The test applicable is what they can physically do by themselves- e.g. cook a meal safely. In the UK, 'Attendance Allowance' was introduced in 1970. In other words, the problem had already been solved before Sen started talking bollocks about 'functionings' and 'capabilities'. Indeed, there were people at the LSE who had worked on schemes of this sort decades previously.
There is no real comparison with the "plover's egg" fan. The primary feature of well-being can be seen in terms of how a person can "function," taking that term in a very broad sense.
No. Benefits for Disabled people have very narrowly defined 'functionings'. If they were 'broad' everybody would be eligible.
The primary feature of a person's well-being is
their being well.
the functioning vector that he or she achieves.
No. There can be high functioning people who suffer chronic pain.
The functioning vectors can be ranked and partially ordered in line with some common valuations, or in the light of what Scanlon calls "urgency," or some other acceptable criterion.
No. We are unable to ascertain the functioning vector of ourselves or any other person. What can be done is to pay Sickness or Disability allowance to those with impaired functioning of a very narrowly defined type. Sadly, if too many are found to be eligible or if the country goes off a fiscal cliff, this entitlement may be curtailed or may collapse altogether.
This, then, is the secondary representation, in the form of the place of a functioning vector in a partial order of such vectors. If the ordering is complete, we should be able to get. even a real-numbered "index" of well-being (in the absence of some technical peculiarities in that ordering).
No. Why? Impredicativity. Some functionings are determined by other functionings which are themselves determined by those very functionings. This means there is no 'vector', there is no 'set', there is no 'function'. There is nothing here which can have a mathematical representation. This is just the intensional fallacy writ large.
In fact, even a partial order will typically have numerical representation with some "transparency" properties.
No. You can give an arbitrary partial order but then you can also arbitrarily state that your cat is also a dog.
The "natural" form of well-being ranking
there is no 'natural' as opposed to wholly arbitrary form. Naturality in category theory is, alas!, far to seek.
is indeed that of a partial, incomplete order. It would be just as extraordinary if every possible pair of functioning vectors could be compared in terms of over-all well-being, as it would be if none of them could be.
There is nothing extraordinary in arbitrarily claiming any bollocks whatsoever. What matters is whether it is useful to do so.
There will, of course, be many agreed valuations, and many decisive judgments, and the clarity of these cases is not compromised by the muddiness of others.
What compromises this bollocks is that it is wholly useless. You may say 'but Sen-tentious bollocks is necessary to prevent Modi or Trump coming to power.' The problem here is that anybody at all, not just Professors of useless shite, can tell stupid lies. If you bang on about DEI, Vivek Ramaswamy can bang on about how DEI is destroying the economy and enabling China to overtake 'the Free World' in all sorts of vital technologies.
A person's capability set can be defined as the set of functioning vectors within his or her reach.
There can be no such set because we don't know 'functionings' more particularly those which a person is capable of but has never actually performed. How many people knew Trump was capable of becoming President not once but twice? I thought Hilary was very capable. I could not believe that a young guy, whose name sounded like a mixture of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, was capable of beating her in 2008 or that an elderly billionaire with bizarre hair could beat her in 2016.
In examining the well-being aspect of a person, attention can legitimately be paid to the capability set of the person
If so, you can destroy that person's well-being. If you tell me I am physically capable of becoming a Beyonce impersonator and earning lots of money, I will become very discontented with my current lot in life.
and not just to the chosen functioning vector. This has the effect of taking note of the positive freedoms in a general sense (the freedom "to do this," or "to be that") that a person has.
None of us know what 'positive freedoms' we have. On the other hand, if a guy says to me 'I bought you at the slave auction. You must do what I tell you.' I have the 'negative freedom' of refusing to obey his orders. Instead, I call the police and get the man arrested.
Importance may well be attached to checking whether one person did have the opportunity of achieving the functioning vector that another actually achieved.
This is impossible to do. Maybe I had the opportunity of becoming a Hollywood movie star. I missed this opportunity because I didn't audition for a role in my High School play which may have led to a scholarship to RADA. Had I gone for that audition, it might have been me, not Julia Roberts, who got to star in 'Pretty Woman'.
This involves comparison of actual opportunities that different persons have. If one person could have achieved all the relevant functioning vectors that the other could, then in some important sense the first person had at least as much freedom to live well.
But whether this is so would only be known to God.
The general idea of the freedom to achieve well-being can be called well-being freedom.
while the general idea of the freedom to achieve freedom can be called freedom freedom.
To illustrate, consider two persons with identical actual functioning vectors, including- as it happens- both of them starving. Person A is starving because she is very poor and lacks the means to command food. Person B is starving out of choice, because of his religious beliefs, which have made him decide to starve and undergo the consequent suffering.
Then, they don't have the same 'functioning vector'. B is functioning at a high Soteriological level. A is not. Hopefully, A will cook and eat B. This is a Pareto improvement.
In terms of the misery caused by the starvation, we learn that there is no difference between A's experience and B's.
B experiences exaltation by starving. Sen comes from a country where Jain monks- often from very rich families- gain Moksha through 'sallekhana'.
Even if it were plausible to say that A and B both have the same level of well-being, in terms of being undernourished, miserable, etc. (that complex issue will be examined presently), there would nevertheless remain an important difference between the two cases, viz., B could have in a straightforward sense, chosen an alternative life style which A could not have chosen.
No. Even now, A could convert to a religious creed which enables her to see herself as achieving 'sallekhana' and thus gaining Kevalya after death.
The plain fact is, functioning, capability, freedom, utility, etc. can be given very narrow interpretations for useful purposes. Thus the disabled can be given entitlements on the basis of narrow eligibility criteria re. functioning of an objective type. We can also usefully speak of the capability of a student or an employee. This one has the potential to do great things. That other is as stupid as Sen. Freedoms are always 'Hohfeldian immunities'. If there is an incentive compatible remedy under a bond of law for their violation, then a particular freedom is effective. Sadly, it is expensive to maintain such remedies. Moreover, they may disappear just when most needed. This is an ideographic, not a nomothetic, matter.
Ukraine's 'wellbeing freedom' depends on killing the invader. It must be said, the capability that ordinary Ukrainians showed in this regard took the whole world by surprise.
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