CONCEPT
The Capability Approach
Sen's framework that redefines human welfare as the substantive freedom to achieve functionings one has reason to value — the evaluative instrument this book applies to AI.
The capability approach is Amartya Sen's alternative to utilitarian and income-based measures of human welfare. Developed across four decades of work and operationalized through collaboration with Martha Nussbaum, it evaluates human lives not by what people produce, earn, or consume, but by the substantive freedoms they possess — the real opportunities to achieve functionings they have reason to value. The approach distinguishes sharply between means and ends: income, tools, and access are means; capabilities are the ends that means either do or do not convert into. Applied to artificial intelligence, the framework asks whether a technology expands or contracts the range of genuinely achievable functionings from which people are free to choose — a question that output metrics systematically fail to answer.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The approach emerged from Sen's dissatisfaction with the dominant traditions of welfare economics. Utilitarianism measured welfare by preference satisfaction, which Sen demonstrated could be distorted by adaptive preferences — the mechanism by which the deprived cease to