From Capacities to Capabilities

The evolutionary, or evolutionary-relational, individual conception developed in the previous chapter explains how individuals and their forms of interaction coevolve according to a line of thinking that draws on Simon’s feedback idea, finds development in the context of markets in Smith, is explained in terms of human capacities by Binmore, and is applied across multiple interrelated sites of interaction by Arthur. I argued that this explanation relies on the view that human beings self-organize themselves through the exercise of certain basic capacities. However, it seems fair to say that people’s capacities are not given and unchanging, but they develop or coevolve together with their forms of interaction. How would this then affect this evolutionary understanding of individuals? I investigate this issue in this chapter, and to do so replace the concept of capacities with that of capabilities. I use the capabilities concept because representing individuals in terms of whole arrays of capabilities gives a thicker account of them in terms of what they are and what they can do, and because the capabilities concept has been developed more extensively in recent economics in connection with thinking about the nature of individuals, particularly by Amartya Sen in his effort to redevelop the foundations of normative evaluation in economics. Accordingly, whereas the previous chapter explained individuals’ makeup in terms of their having certain basic human capacities, this chapter explains their makeup in terms of their being able to develop whole sets of capabilities. Individuals are collections of capabilities. I label this the capabilities conception of the individual (cf. Davis 2009c) and evaluate it here as a further development of the evolutionary-relational individual conception.