The Capability Approach: Influence of Technology on Human Capabilities, Study notes of Information and Communications Technology (ICT)

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POVERTY &

TECHNOLOGY

O N J U S T I C E , T E C H N O L O G Y &

H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T

Bernd Kottier University of Twente Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society

Cover photograph Children in Block E, Rehoboth, Namibia. August 2010.

Abstract

In this world, there are many people that live in poverty, while at the same time scientists and engineers create new technologies that solve problems that were too big to solve only decades ago. It would seem that if we did our best effort, a technological fix for poverty would be at our doorstep. Yet at the same time, could it not also be true that some new technology only increase poverty? The aim of this thesis is to investigate the relation between technologies and poverty, from the point of view of justice. The justice approach that I choose in this thesis is the Capability Approach, an approach that looks at what a person can truly do and be (his or her capabilities), instead of what he or she has or achieves. More specifically, the Capability Approach of Martha Nussbaum is used as a more concrete interpretation of the more general approach that Sen introduced. Based on this version of the Capability Approach, poverty is then defined as violation of the minimal right to vital security, or the hindrance of attaining social goods. A person’s (lack of) capabilities can be influenced by technologies either by directly introducing or prohibiting capabilities, or by influencing our perceived choices between capabilities, or by doing either one indirectly. Because of this, the introduction of a (new) technology in a society should include an assessment of how the technology influences capabilities. In this assessment, interplay between technology experts and local actors can provide valuable insights that can be beneficial for citizens, governments, and corporations.

Table of contents

• 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 Problem description................................................................
• 2 Justice and well-being
  • 2.1 Conceptualizing Justice
  • 2.2 Theories of justice: Rawls, Sen and Nussbaum
  • 2.3 Comparison
  • 2.4 Conclusion
• 3 Capability and poverty
  • 3.1 Capability deprivation
  • 3.2 Capability Levels
  • 3.3 Capability and Poverty
  • 3.4 Where are the poor?
  • 3.5 Conclusion
• 4 Technology and Capability
  • 4.1 Technology in the Capability Approach
  • 4.2 Influence of technology
  • 4.3 A dynamic view on technology and capability
  • 4.4 Conclusion
• 5 Justice, Technology & Development....................................
  • 5.1 Why to open the black box of technology?
  • 5.2 Capability Sensitive Design
  • 5.3 Act locally, think globally
  • 5.4 Conclusion
• Conclusion
  • 5.5 Evaluation & future research
• Bibliography

P O V E R T Y & T E C H N O L O G Y

basic level of welfare. As Nelson Mandela – among others – claimed, this is not an issue of charity, but an issue of justice. That claim gives the problem another dimension: a moral one. Not being charitable is not immoral, but being unjust is. So why is extreme poverty a problem of justice? Can justice really help solve the problem? And would everybody agree with that? Despite the attention that extreme poverty has received in the last decades, the results of fighting it are not impressive. There are of course the stories of some countries in Asia and South America that have seen a steady increase in economic growth, increasing the living conditions for many of their citizens, but for many other countries – especially in Africa – poverty proves to be difficult to eradicate. So why don’t we transfer the ‘proven’ principles? For the rich countries in the world, the road to wealth was paved with technology. Sanitation, medicine, the printing press, steam engines, motorized transport, and communication technologies are just a few of the technologies that have driven the welfare levels up, directly or indirectly. Can’t we use these technologies to justly improve the living conditions of people in less developed countries?

1.1 Problem description

The problem area that I have described has multiple aspects: justice, human development, and technology. Justice concerns the observation that many people live under conditions that are below our standards of human dignity, while at the same time others live in excessive wealth. Human development is in the list because we want people to develop their lives, not only accept that what is given out of charity. This is nicely described with the Chinese proverb “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime”. Technology has always been a driving force in human development and it may be put to use to advance human development. Together, these aspects form the parts of the main question that I will investigate:

I N T R O D U C T I O N

How can the lives of the poor be given attention and improved in a just way in the development of new technologies and the introduction of existing technologies?

The aim of my research, and the type of answer I hope to give, is to describe a process that will lead to technologies that can fulfill the goal of improving the lives of the poor in a just way. How these technologies should actually be designed is outside the scope of this paper, though it will sometimes be touched upon. To find the answer to the main question, I will first discuss three issues that are important in the question. First, I will elaborate on the idea of justice that I will use, after that I will look into poverty, followed by an account of the influence of technology. In the end, these three sub-questions will form the basis for answering the main question concerning the development of new and the introduction of existing technologies. The first main topic that I will discuss (Chapter 2) is justice, more precisely its distributive part: justice that deals with what people are entitled to. Part of the discussion of justice will be about what counts a good life. The topic of the next chapter will be poverty (Chapter 3), in which I will use the earlier conception of justice to discuss when people can be considered to be poor. The third topic will be what the influence of technology can be on human lives (Chapter 4): how, if at all, could technology actually influence the lives of people? Finally, given these definitions of justice and poverty, and the description of the role of technology on human lives, I will discuss (Chapter 5) how the creation and introduction of technologies can take place so that the improvement of the lives of the poor is taken into account.

2 JUS T I CE A ND W E L L - BE I NG

“But in this new century, millions of people in the world’s poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved, and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.” (Mandela

The words of Nelson Mandela sound true, at least to me: it does not feel right that so many people are starving, while so many others live in excessive wealth. But is the current distribution of standards of living in the world merely uncomforting or can we really call it unjust?^2 When it is the former, we cannot put any strong demands on those who have a high standard of living to help those who have a much lower standard. When we want to demand action, then we should argue that there is an injustice in the world: that those who

(^2) In Kantian terms, are we talking about duties of virtue (virtutis) or duties of rights (juris)?

P O V E R T Y & T E C H N O L O G Y

cannot live a decent life have a claim on the more fortunate to do them justice. My goal for this chapter is therefore to formulate a theory of justice focused on poverty that I can use in further chapters. First, I will introduce the term justice, to clarify the further discussion. Next, I will look at the theories of justice of three modern philosophers: John Rawls, who has written the most influential book on justice of the last century; Amartya Sen, who has described a new approach to look at poverty and justice; and finally Martha Nussbaum, who has built further on the work of Sen, but has given more attention to how his ideas can be put into practice by governments. I will analyze these three views to come to a theory of justice that will be used throughout the rest of this thesis.

2.1 Conceptualizing Justice

As we shall see, there are many different variations of the idea of justice. In very broad terms, justice is about “giving people what is due to them” (Swift 2006), as can be also read in the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle (350BC). It is not about what would be nice or good for people to have (giving that would be charity or virtue), but what they have a right to^3. To which things and how much thereof people have a right, and how we make sure people get what is due to them, are issues on which the different conceptions^4 of justice vary among each other. Often we cannot simply say that these conceptions are right or wrong and there may be no other choice than to agree to disagree. The different conceptions of the concept of justice must be seen as the result of different goals, and contexts, and different starting

(^3) For a good explanation of how to interpret rights in the light of this chapter, see (Nussbaum 2000). 4 “The ‘concept’ is the general structure, or perhaps the grammar, of a term…. A ‘conception’ is the particular specification of that ‘concept’, obtained by filling out some of the detail”(Swift 2006, p. 11).

P O V E R T Y & T E C H N O L O G Y

interference’ and that of ‘really being able to do something’. Two examples to clarify this distinction: consider that you are walking in a city and see a man begging for money. You only have a one euro coin, but you feel empathy for him and you have decided that when you reach him, you will give him that euro. But when you reach him, he suddenly pulls forth a knife and demands that you give him one euro. Frightened, you give him the euro and quickly walk away. The result would have been equal whether he had threatened you or not, but what about your freedom? Next, you are walking past an election location and you see a woman, who has the freedom to vote, ready to make her voice heard. But at the bottom of the stairs before the entrance, she looks up helplessly from her wheelchair. Nobody stops her from voting, but does she really have the freedom to vote?

2.1.3 EQUALITY

Equality is a less difficult concept, but there needs to be some caution about how the term is used. In its most strict (mathematical) form, equality means that two things are exactly the same. In the justice debates, however, a softer definition of equality is at play. This conception does not demand absolute equality on every point, but equality on points that are relevant. Thus when we are talking about equality, we must always give the characteristic(s) that the equality is based on, or otherwise it must mean the hard definition of total equality^5. This means that we must always, as Amartya Sen puts it, ask ourselves: equality of what?

(^5) Claiming that all people should be equal is thus arguing for a world of clones, whereas claiming that all people should be equal in the rights they have is a more common stance.

J U S T I C E A N D W E L L - B E I N G

2.1.4 FREEDOM AND EQUALITY

Though freedom and equality are sometimes thought to be fighting for the priority in theories of justice, Sen shows that this is a categorical mistake. Theories of justice, he explains, can be analyzed in terms of two different categories. The first category is that of the relevant personal features , and the second that of the combining characteristics. The personal features can be e.g. happiness, rights, resources or freedom and the combining characteristics can be e.g. summation, maximal minimum or equality. When we consider for example the standard utilitarian approach (which says that we should aim for the greatest utility) the relevant personal feature is happiness and the combining characteristic is summation (Sen 1995). In discussing theories about justice, we thus need to look at (at least) three aspects: the goal of the theory, what it is that we should look at to evaluate the position of a person, and how we want that evaluation to take place. With these three points in mind, I will now discuss three influential modern theories of justice.

2.2 Theories of justice: Rawls, Sen and Nussbaum

After the Second World War, welfare steadily increased in the Western world but so did the social and economic inequalities. In many European countries, these inequalities were dampened by extensive social welfare systems, but less so in e.g. the United States (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2007). The problem of how to deal with these inequalities led to a new attention to justice. In this section I will give an overview of three different conceptions of justice. The first is John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness. His theory has been very influential in this field and no work on justice can do without either stating how it is influenced by Rawls or where it differs from Rawls’ theory. The second and third theories are two versions of what is called the Capability Approach. This approach is often used in theoretical as well as empirical discussions about poverty and

J U S T I C E A N D W E L L - B E I N G

Because Rawls is not in the original position, there are some assumptions that he implicitly makes. These include that people need incentives to do extra effort and that people would prefer a higher chance of living a life as good as they can get above a small chance of living a life in wealth. Furthermore, he assumes that liberty is considered as something that is valued or at least something that is a necessary means for achieving things that are valued. According to Rawls, there can be two sets of principles coming out of this experiment, depending on the circumstances in society. When there are not enough resources to assure that every person has at least enough to maintain himself, the only principle is that all social goods should be distributed so that inequalities benefit those who are worst- off. More well-known is the other set of principles that should be in place when everyone’s basic needs can be met. The first (and dominating) principle is then that basic liberties should be distributed so that everybody has a fully adequate system of basic liberty, compatible with similar systems for all. The second principle concerns the distribution system of social and economic goods (excluding liberty). The system should be such that inequalities are “attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” and “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society” (Rawls 1993, p. 6). The goods that are to be distributed according to this theory of justice are called the primary goods, and these include income, wealth, opportunities, and the social bases of self-respect. These primary goods are considered to be useful in the pursuit of the many different conceptions of a valuable life; they are thus valued as a means for an end. They are “things that every rational man is presumed to want” (Rawls 2005, p. 62).

2.2.2 CAPABILITY APPROACH: SEN

Amartya Sen was born in 1933, in what is now Bangladesh. His original field of expertise is (welfare) economics, and in 1998 he

P O V E R T Y & T E C H N O L O G Y

received the Nobel Prize for his work in that field. He is currently a professor at Harvard University, where he worked together with Rawls. About a decade after the publication of Rawls’ book, Sen started publishing about what he calls the Capability Approach. With the Capability Approach, he provides an alternative way of looking at and measuring poverty, which he has explained in several essays and books. Most of his ideas are brought together in his book The Idea of Justice (2009). In his own field, the dominating view was that poverty can be described by factors relating only to resources, like the Gross National Product, which sums up the economic value of activities in a country. Sen argues that there are problems with relying exclusively on such aggregated, resource-based indicators. In the first place, aggregated numbers, like the Gross National Product give no information about the distribution among the people. The 80-20 ‘rule’ illustrates this problem: the distribution of resources within (poor) countries often comes close to the situation in which 20% of the population holds 80% of the resources. And even when we look at the household level, there can be big differences in the shares of different family member (Sen 2001). Sums are therefore not very suitable for assessing poverty of individuals. In the second place, people can be deprived in other ways than in terms of resources. Though resources surely help in attaining well- being and there is a correlation between higher income and better health and higher education, there are other important factors that contribute to well-being. Take, for example, Aung San Suu Kyi. She left her home and family in England and went back to her native Myanmar (Burma) to fight for the rights of her people. Though she won elections, the military junta stayed in control and placed her under house arrest. Even though she has quite some resources, especially compared with other people in Myanmar, she was deprived