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Suffering as Capability Deprivation: A Capabilities-Based Sociological Perspective
Spiros Gangas
1.INTRODUCTION
Sociology’s normative focus has been confirmed at several turns of the discipline. The Marxist
school, as well as normative functionalism, has set the parameters for an identification of
sociology with key normative issues and concerns (Strasser 1976). Mills’ (1959) clarion call for
‘sociological imagination’ has inspired many current sociologists to regenerate this committed
focus (Burawoy 2005). Thus social problems are now addressed in ways that address the social
causes of diverse forms of suffering, with a view to understand such painful realities and to
contribute to possible repairs and therapies.
Latest innovations in the discipline emerge from reclaiming ‘suffering’ and ‘evil’ as topical areas
of sociological focus (Alexander 2013; Pía 2001; Wilkinson 2005). If sociology is drawn, as
much of its history and contemporary efforts illustrate, to the plight of many of our fellows, then
this shift towards suffering raises issues of categorial and explanatory adequacy. Without
wishing to challenge the achievements of sociology in this mission (see, for instance, Wilkinson
and Pickett 2010), I shall argue that in order to accomplish this goal sociologists need to revisit
some of their central categories.
‘Agency’ is one of these categories and it seems to be normatively truncated through discourses
that play up meta-theoretical problems and antinomies (Archer 2000; Holmwood and Stewart
1991). Whilst such debates are worthy at the epistemological level they often assume esoteric
conceptual juggling and thus push the discipline away from a major goal of its mission, namely
the practical engagement with social institutions, processes and actions in terms of normative
validity. My working hypothesis thus is that this normative deficit can be revoked if sociology
becomes attentive to the ‘capabilities approach’.
In order to defend this claim, I will, briefly, advance the following theses:
(1)Sociology’s current notions of agency are normatively wanting.
(2)The meaning of suffering can be theorized more fruitfully if sociology addresses capabilities.
And,
(3) Sen’s notion of ‘capability deprivation’ improves our understanding of actual sufferings in
society.
2. SOCIOLOGY, AGENCY AND SUFFERING
Sociology’s heritage, particularly the normative functionalism of Durkheim and Parsons,
envelops agency in institutional arrangements which are held to provide normative templates for
mitigating suffering. Whilst these traditions have been much contested, their fundamental
premise, namely the imperative of building morally infused institutions, is hard to discard.1 This
important insight can be supplemented by a new notion of agency and the normative foundations
which fortify it against suffering. If, for example, we locate suffering as a deprivation of agents’
ability to make valued choices, or even of their cognitive capabilities (learning opportunities,
education, access to information), we can provide a new twist to agency. This new twist can take
many forms, but two which are important, even if they appear at first glance mutually exclusive,
pertain to the ‘ethical institution’ thesis advocated (the ‘Hegel-Durkheim-Parsons’ paradigm),
and at the other end to the concrete patterns of choice that enable the agent to minimize suffering
and the social scientist to offer relevant problem-solving aid in a piecemeal and corrigible
fashion. The latter normative standpoint is based also on pragmatism’s influence on sociology
and it already constitutes an emerging strand in linking capabilities to sociology (Zimmerman
2006; Holmwood 2013).
Without wishing to underestimate the considerable strengths of the latter position, I propose
instead that for ‘capabilities’ to become operative in sociology we need to trace the areas where
capabilities converge with agency. One way to achieve this partnership is to conceptualize
suffering as a deprivation of basic capacities for agency. To be sure, this is not the place to
embark on a review and reconstruction of sociological theories of agency. We need, however, to
recall that ‘the capacity to act’ had always played a major role in the formation of sociology and
still constitutes an opportunity for further theory-building. I will thus briefly mention only one
instance of sociology’s concern with ‘capabilities’, although others may be mustered (e.g.
Giddens 1984).
One such case is the use of the notion of ‘capacity’ in the normative functionalism of Talcott
Parsons. The term ‘capacity’ ranges from cybernetic and systemic usages but it ultimately leads
to the agent and her normative uplifting via ethical institutions. For instance, Parsons writes that
social rights do not “concern the opportunity to express and implement the rights derived from
the societal values so much as the resources and capacities necessary for this implementation. In
this connection the societal community defines and presents standards for the allocation of
resources to the community as a whole and to its various subsectors. The obverse of this
allocative function, is the definition of the terms on which capacities, as matched with
opportunities, can be involved in the process of inclusion” (1969: 260). A clarification is
necessary at this stage. It concerns the transition from the idea of ‘capacity’ to the more
normatively loaded idea of ‘capability’. Moral philosopher Alan Gewirth warrants this transition
claiming that, capabilities denote ‘capacity-fulfillment’ (1998: 119), a nuance neutralized in the
anthropological and formal notion of ‘capacity’. Moreover, capability conveys basic values of
humanness and is thus better suited to be retranslated to actual functionings in society (1998: 63,
n.5)
The normative thrust of Parsons’ concept is directed also at his critique of utilitarianism and is
evident when he connects it to discussions about social rights. However, the concept’s force is
compromised given its placement in Parsons’ analytical scheme of society as a social system,
which prevents it from addressing adequately instances of concrete deprivation and suffering.
Despite his formalism, Parsons adds to ‘capacity’ an intriguing dimension when he connects it to
suffering and evil. He writes: “If the problem of suffering comes to focus in human exposure to
the impact of deprivation independent of individual agency, and that of evil, in exposure to that
of consequences independent of active intentions, that of capacity focuses on the fact that,
however much we may want to do something, we may be prevented to incapacity from actually
doing it” (Parsons 1978: 79).
This is a powerful intuition on Parsons’ part that sets the stage for sustaining the ‘capacity’ –
‘capability’ transition in sociology.
3.THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE ‘CAPABILITIES APPROACH’: SUFFERING AS
‘CAPABILITY DEPRIVATION’.
In an important attempt to systematize suffering from a sociological standpoint and to offer
plausible grounds for inter-disciplinary linkages, Wilkinson (2005) makes only passing reference
to the capabilities approach. He refers selectively to Nussbaum’s views on compassion in orderto
gather further evidence for the thesis he proposes, namely that there is always a residual and
recalcitrant dimension to suffering that eschews rationalization. This view captures indeed a
major difficulty with regard to explaining evil and suffering, let alone mitigating it. Yet,
Wilkinson fails to do justice to the reverse standpoint shared by the advocates of the capabilities
approach. This is no other than the belief that much suffering can be comprehended rationally,
and addressed with adequate theoretical and policy tools. Wilkinson thus locates the promise of a
sociological response to human suffering to the following requirement: “that we amplify
unsettling questions of meaning and morality, that we work to expose the apparent senselessness
of the experience of injustice, violence and oppression, and that we make abundantly clear the
terminal failure of understanding that takes place under the attempt to render the cultural
grammar of suffering accountable to the rationality of scientific analysis” (Wilkinson 2005: 45).
Wilkinson’s thesis certainly raises important questions about the adequacy of current notions of
suffering and the tensions in our theoretical categories. What remains doubtful, however, is
whether Wilkinson has exhausted the potential of the available tools that make us comprehend
suffering and work towards its therapy. The capabilities approach is virtually ignored by
Wilkinson and thus, as I argue, its claims to offer a diverse inventory of concepts and policies
that mitigate suffering, becomes neutralized.
But what are the main tenets of the capabilities approach?
Briefly put, the capabilities approach puts to the fore the agent’s ability to have the ‘substantive
freedom’ to achieve ‘various lifestyles’ (Sen 1999: 75). ‘Capability’ thus conveys the freedom
that the agent has to achieve alternative functional combinations (. Sen expands the notion of
capability and supplants it with the normative and empirical idea of ‘agency’. ‘Agency’ permits
Sen to conceptualize action within a wider set of institutional arrangements contrary to rationalchoice theory. Sen writes:
I am using the term ‘agent’ […] in its older-and “grander”-sense as
someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can
be judged in terms of some external criteria as well. This work is
particularly concerned with the agency role of the individual as a member
of the public and as a participant in economic, social and political actions
(varying from taking part in the market to being involved, directly or
indirectly, in individual or joint activities in political and other spheres).
(Sen 1999: 19).
What is clear from this indicative statement is that agency’s empowerment is premised on the
realization of basic capabilities. The set of basic ‘capabilities’, which signal achievable
benchmarks on the basis of which communities and individuals canreflect and pursue the lifechoicesthey have reason to value, include the capabilities of: 1. Life; 2. Bodily Health; 3. Bodily
Integrity; 4. Senses, Imagination, and Thought; 5.Emotions; 6. Practical Reason; 7. Affiliation; 8.
Other Species; 9. Play; 10. Political and Material Control over one’s Environment (see, for
example, Nussbaum 1992: 216-223; 2000: 78-80).
It is important to stress at this stage that although capabilities may raise the normative bar too
high (a source of dispute between Sen and Nussbaum), even if we take this assumption, we need
to point out that its approach to combating suffering and deprivations is a modest one, but not for
the reasons Wilkinson advocates. Rather, the ‘modesty’ of this research program stems from
affirming both the complexity and the indeterminacy of certain contexts where policies become
an urgency and duty, as well, from an imperative to secure the voices of those who suffer from
calamities, famines and other evils. Whilst this may not always be possible, the focus on
capability-empowerment constitutes a core value of the program. Thus it preserves some of the
‘recalcitrance’ of suffering that Wilkinson recognizes, but is free of the quietism that less
generous critics may see lurking in his approach to suffering.
That Sen’s approach is animated by a passion to contribute to combating diverse sources of
suffering in society is nothing novel. What, however, is not immediately obvious is the source
for this normative passion. Because Sen’s intellectual backdrop stems primarily from economics,
the ‘scientific’ outlook of the capabilities approach provides few opportunities for giving to
suffering per se amajor role. Yet, suffering retains a prominent position in his writings in at least
two major ways.
The first seems to fulfill a trope that plays up lived experience linking the man to his ideas,
supplanting Sen’s scientific prose with an evocative and moving autobiographical icon. This is
no other than the recurring story of Kader Mia, a daily laborer, who had come to Dhaka to seek
work and a bit of earning to feed his family. Although warned by his wife not to seek work in a
Hindu area, particularly dangerous then due to communal riots between Hindus and Muslims,
Kader Mia had no alternative but to take that risk. Chased by communal thugs he was eventually
stabbed, in front of Amartya Sen’s eyes who was ten at the time, and died later in the hospital
(Sen 1999: 8). In another book that deals more directly with suffering, Sen invokes this
episodeagain and confesses that “the terrible connection between economic poverty and
comprehensive unfreedom (even the lack of freedom to live) was a profoundly shocking
realization that hit my young mind with overpowering force” (2006: 173). Through this personal
recollection Sen infuses his programme with one of the countless disturbing images of suffering
that many have encountered. He manages, however, to connect economic unfreedom with
political deprivations that stem from all sorts of identity-particularisms and nominal affirmations
of collective and group identity. Such vivid imagery is theorized by a neighboring voice,
economist Vivian Walsh (1961), who is among the first to connect evil and suffering to the
problem of scarcity. Inspired by an episode from D.H. Lawrence’s The First Lady Chatterley,
Walsh confesses: “to see someone dying slowly for want, as it were, of some constituent of the
air a human being needs to breathe […]; to watch helplessly the slow dying of such an expiring
spirit is to be acquainted with scarcity. Once seen, it is never forgotten” (1961: 31). Marx, for his
part, presents the case of Mary Anne Walkley who having “worked uninterruptedly for 26½
hours, with sixty other girls” in factory rooms which provided “only ⅓ of the necessary quantity
of air, measured in cubic feet” died of apoplexy from overwork in crowded and poorly ventilated
rooms (Marx [1867] 1990: 364-365). Wilkinson proposes “that we take the ongoing difficulty of
‘making sense’ of human suffering not as an indication of the requirement for a more coherent
rationalization of the specific components of this experience, but rather as an involvement with
what suffering ‘is’ in human experience” (2005: 44). Unlike him, but in the spirit of Marx and
Walsh, Sen refused to see in Kader Mia’s death the ‘inexplicable’ essence of suffering that
sociologists, like Wilkinson, render an aporia that may keep social science active in combating
‘suffering’.
The second suffering motif turns such episodes into a narrative and a category wide enough to
encompass normative justification, explanatory force and policy relevance. ‘Capability
deprivation’ captures suffering in terms of scarcity and want; however, its function in Sen’s
program is not confined only to the domain of identifying and combating major deprivations. It
also contains an enabling dimension that addresses human potentialities and thus bears direct
relevance to Marx’s defense of species-being potential against alienation (Bull 2007; Dean 2009,
Gangas 2014; Nussbaum 1990). Suffering conceived as capability deprivation ‘tweaks’ the
murky notion of alienation and clarifies much of what was latent in Marx but was compromised
from the moment the suffering from alienation became a grand-narrative for modernity’s
pathologies; a notable case in point is the Frankfurt School’s tendency to subsume agency under
the grip of instrumental rationality (e.g. Horkheimer 1974). Instead of getting trapped in the
‘system’-‘anti-system’ logic of total alienation and radical resistance, Sen opts for a research
programme that openly confronting sufferings of all kinds, responding to local, regional, national
and global challenges. Its ‘radical’ reformism bears on dissociating policies for capabilityempowerment from prevalent binary logics.
4. CONCLUSION
In this paper I have tried to create some space for introducing the research programme of
‘capabilities’ in sociological theory through the discourse on suffering. I defended the position
that this discourse, which under the umbrella of suffering includes inequality, injustice and all
sorts of deprivations–relative and absolute–, is part and parcel with the capabilities approach. But
as the recent turn of sociology to ‘public’ sociology demonstrates, what animates such a trend
reveals an endemic concern with normative issues many of which bear on suffering.
In this call for a capabilities-based approach to suffering, I part with grand narratives of
modernity’s pathogenies (Alexander 2013, Mann 2004), although I acknowledge their force and
appeal. The problem with such approaches is that they reify contradiction. Jeffrey Alexander’s
claims, for instance, that ‘the values of civil society are as bad as they are good’ (2013: 111)
sanctioning simultaneously integration and exclusion (hence, yielding inevitable suffering for
some), is a case in point. If this is the case then one can expect suffering to reemerge from any
sort of social arrangements, which seem to have inbuilt and insurmountable antinomies.
Regardless of the validity of such approaches to modernity, a capabilities-based approach in
sociology would be geared towards mitigating suffering, empowering the agent’s ability to make
valued choices across fields that remain obfuscated by the so-called ‘discontents’ of modernity
thesis. Repairing suffering is a feasible undertaking via capabilities because focusing on what a
person can actually achieve in specific contexts and arrangements generates policies that
improve people’s lives without being based on some algorithm solution that precedes the
application of policy, thus taking place exclusively behind the back of the people involved.
Moreover, such correctives and ameliorations to suffering run the risk, for the advocates of
radical politics, of being seen as ‘reformist’ since they cannot penetrate into the heart of
capitalism’s crisis, of fundamentalism’s Manichean world-view or of the deeper reasons that
cause the depletion of the planet (for a ‘crisis-running-berserk’ critique of most ‘systemic’ flaws
in the current politico-economic order, see Beck 2012).
This short presentation suggested that a shift towards capabilities has the advantage of attaching
to various sufferings an explanation which tends to give a voice to the suffering person, rather
than filtering this voice through ideological codes (i.e. ‘progressive-conservative’, ‘radicalreformist’, ‘capitalist-socialist’, ‘libertarian-communitarian’ among others)2 which often
perpetuate the very false-consciousness of the suffering agent whose potentialities they wish to
restore. The capabilities approach does not uphold such facile utopianism. Avoiding doing so, it
approaches suffering with weapons gathered from an open-ended inventory of diverse agents,
groups, collectivities and organizations.3
Notes
1
Hegel remains the exemplar of this paradigm basically through his assumption and systematic analysis of ‘suffering from
indeterminacy’. This pathology stems when the moral point of view, already within the matrix of ethical modern
institutions, becomes detached from its wider moral network of social relations and thus, as Honneth argues, leads to ‘an
inability to act’ (Honneth 2010: 41-2), damaging the cognitive and moral capacities of social actors. The corrective that
Hegel offers can lead to a theory of intersubjectivity, in line with Sen (see Allen 2006).
2
A forceful critic of such stringent codes is Luhmann (1982: 166-189). Luhmann, however, works his theory of society
through the antinomic codes that are also palatable to Alexander (2013: 125). In an essay on barbarism, Luhmann at his
most normative, and scarce, moments, mocks attempts at ‘all-inclusion’ of the causes of suffering and cautions the
‘defender’ of existences ‘reduced to the bodily’ of smuggling ‘bourgeois’ codes (capabilities perhaps?) to those who are by
definition excluded from ‘bourgeois’ values (Luhmann 1999: 269-70). This criticism could have the capabilities approach
as its target; what Luhmann seem to bracket is the fact that within the capabilities approach the transpositional scrutiny of
one’s precarious and damaged life is, has indeed, been possible (the Kader Mia incident is a familiar confirming instance of
countless that can be mustered).
3
This is a modification of Feyerabend’s (1978) epistemological position of ‘anything goes’. Seeking synergies may not
involve an indeterminate range of allies: fascists, communist tyranny sympathizers, fundamentalists cannot, by definition,
be considered as ‘allies’ in this effort to strengthen capabilities and these categories would, in all likelihood, be omitted in
Feyerabend’s call to openness. So my invocation of Feyerabend has little, if anything, to do with endorsing epistemological
or moral relativism.
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