Mark Hopwood

speaker

1,269 appearances 31 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2009 last heard Sep 2014

Mark Hopwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 41: David Enoch discusses metaethics · 9 Nov 2012 podcast

Maybe it's different from science in that way. voice-verified

Elucidations · Episode 35: Martha Nussbaum discusses the capabilities approach · 7 May 2012 podcast

And I'm Mark Hopwood. matched

So that's a lot of different approaches. matched

So to summarize, I guess what we're interested in is development, how well a nation or particularly its people are doing, whether the nation and the other people are flourishing. matched

And you've talked about the ways in which very basic quantifiable economic measures don't seem to work for tracking that. matched

So there are ways in which nations can be doing well in GDP. matched

They can be doing well in more sensitive metrics like household income. matched

and still be doing poorly in other areas, health and education were two that you mentioned, that we think are important for a flourishing country or flourishing people. matched

But then the bare idea of just doing well, if we consider that in terms of the satisfaction of people's preferences, also doesn't seem to be a great metric. matched

We have the problem there of adaptive preferences. matched

People just get used to a bad state of things. matched

So all of that leads us fairly neatly to the approach that Amartya Sen in particular and yourself put forward, the capabilities approach. matched

One thing that you mentioned earlier was the range of different things that we might be aiming at when we're thinking about a nation or people doing well, that there are these things. matched

very different scales on which we can be doing well it's not obvious that they can all be boiled down to one and it seems like this idea of a kind of irreducible diversity in different ways in which we can be doing well is central to the capabilities approach so maybe you could talk a little bit about that matched

A nice example of what you're talking about there is one you've used yourself, which is the idea of someone fasting. matched

So we might say, well, for someone to be flourishing is for them to be eating the right amount for a human being. matched

And clearly some people do not eat the right amount for a human being for a particular period. matched

But that doesn't mean they lack the capability to do so. matched

It means they're not doing it right at that moment. matched

So that's the distinction that you refer to as the distinction between capability and functioning. matched

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