Short Abstract:

How should we think about collectives? This presentation builds from the contention that discussions of “collective capabilities” would benefit from a further exploration of how we answer this question. In particular, by widening our understanding of how we ought to characterise collectives, we generate insights into how we might understand capabilities in this regard, too.

Long Abstract:

How should we think about collectives? This presentation builds from the contention that discussions of “collective capabilities” would benefit from a further exploration of how we answer this question. In particular, by widening our understanding of how we ought to characterise collectives, we generate insights into how we might understand capabilities in this regard, too.

In the first part of the paper, I begin with an overview of how collectives have so far been framed in the capability approach (CA). Here, I take my lead from the influential work of Solava Ibrahim and Ingrid Robeyns. Ibrahim argues that some capabilities can be realised only with others or through collaboration, such as friendship and political assembly (Ibrahim 2020, 210). Grappling with the individualistic focus of the CA, which tends to prioritise the conversion of resources into individual functionings, Ibrahim claims that some of the capabilities we have reason to value are collective by nature.

Looking to clarify the role of collectives, Ingrid Robeyns distinguishes ethical or normative individualism from ontological or methodological individualism. According to Robeyns, CA is committed to the former: “that individuals, and only individuals, are the units of ultimate moral concern” (Robeyns 2017, 184). This commitment to ethical individualism does, however, recognise the importance of the latter – that collectives and social connections can have a bearing on how individuals realise those capabilities. Borrowing from Sen (2002), Robeyns cautions against conflating “collective” with “socially dependent individual capabilities”, such as when someone depends on others to learn a foreign language (Robeyns 2023). She also cautions against confusing individual capabilities and “capability determinants” – social structures, social norms, institutions, etc. that shape individual capabilities.

Offering another way of thinking about the proper place of collective capabilities in the CA, I explore the relevance of aesthetics in the second part of this paper. In particular, I take seriously how individuals think about and value their collective identities in aesthetic terms – through practices such as story-telling and symbolic representations. (From Martha C. Nussbaum’s list of capabilities, we might encompass as part of the aesthetic dimension “senses, imagination and thought”, “emotions”, and “play”.) An aesthetic focus on collectivities might help us see the significance of their role in the CA.

We might generate at least two insights for the CA when we broaden our frame for making sense of collectives. Firstly, the aesthetic dimension helps us to see the interplay between collective capabilities, socially dependent individual capabilities, and capability determinants. Stories and representations that help to constitute a collective can influence and even shape individuals’ agency goals. Based upon the value individuals place in their collective identity – or “shared ethical self-understanding”, where communities ask themselves who they are and would like to be – individuals will choose specific capabilities to pursue and certain ways of exercising agency. Some of these capabilities will, by their very nature, be collective.

Secondly, the aesthetic dimension can help us see what is valuable and destructive about collectives. Taking an example of the latter, we can better understand how capability deprivations are perpetuated internally and externally to a group. Internally, we might make sense of the appeal of hierarchically organised authoritarian-populist movements to their most underprivileged members. Even as being subjected to the power-over of others might deprive an individual of their capabilities – e.g., tacit threats or sanctions for defection, such as loss of a livelihood – it is empowering in another sense, insofar as an individual becomes a member of a collective with increased collective power. Externally, dominant collectivities based upon essentialist and exclusionary conceptions may exacerbate capability deprivations for those demarcated as “the other” – rendered as a threat to the composition of the group – or who might otherwise be invisible to the dominant.

It matters how we think about collectivities and the ways we aesthetically constitute them. More broadly, we should like accounts of peoplehood that can help us to address the fraying of the social fabric that ties a polity in bonds of solidarity. Indeed, contemporary scenes of ascendent authoritarian-populist movements evidence a disaffection and fraying solidarity – leaving the social bonds of the political community in disrepair and shrinking the ability to cooperate and make decisions for the good of society as a whole. Such crises reveal an underlying weakness in our conceptions of collectivities and, thus, a weakening in our capabilities, too. By rethinking how we characterise collectives and their roles in the CA, we can get closer to understanding the role the CA might play in rebuilding them.