Short Abstract:

Below, I examine the roles that social practices play regarding the concept and purpose of human capabilities; utilise social practices and human needs to argue for individual and collective human capabilities; and review these capability insights for their potential to shed further light on the concept of social practice as well as the distinction between individual and collective human needs.

Long Abstract:

It is no accident that many academic disciplines (eg, sociology, marketing, international relations, organisation studies) have been subject to their version of the ‘social practice turn’ in recent years. After all, social practices – conceptualised here separately, though with crucial interconnections, at both the levels of individual practitioner and practice community (details below) – provide an essential link between two types of ontological entities that many scholars, especially in Western academic traditions, regard as being opposed to each other: the individual performer and the community of which she is a member. In fact, the concept explains why and how the two are mutually dependent. Firstly, without individual performers who, through recurring activities, carry forth the social practices they enact, these practices – and, logically, practice communities – would cease to exist. Secondly, without being immersed in practice communities (eg, throughout childhood), the individual would fail to become practically socialised and thus fail to turn into a competent human being (forever lacking practical competence in numerous activity patterns that we expect typical adults around us to possess, and hence also the ability to comprehend, anticipate, and explain what others do).

Traditionally, human needs have been conceptualised as qualities of the individual. For example, basic needs have been construed as things that any human individual requires to survive, avoid (serious) harm, or achieve minimum flourishing. By contrast, the view that (at least some) human needs are qualities of the collective remains unpopular. However, social practices demonstrate why such a position is untenable. If we go beyond the elemental requirements represented by basic needs and construe human needs more broadly as things that are necessary to secure human flourishing to any degree, then it is rather uncontroversially true that a human individual requires social practices to live well (at basic, middling, and high degrees): without access to social practices (eg, during childhood) and becoming a competent practitioner, human flourishing to degrees that exceed mere biological survival is impossible.

Yet, as social practices represent attributes not just of the individual practitioner but also of her practice community, it is no less true that human communities need social practices as well. After all, the persistence of these communities depends on the persistence of the patterns we call ‘social practices’. In fact, how well a human community does in the long run depends on the quality of its communal practice portfolio (with practices that pertain to climate change mitigation and adaptation being merely one of the more contemporary examples).

Yet, if we can use social practices to argue for the existence of individual and collective human needs, the same can plausibly be done with regard to individual and collective human capabilities as well (despite objections by Sen and others). After all needs and capabilities resemble each other in multiple ways and have been used to play similar functions in social, political, and moral philosophy. In this paper, I will therefore proceed in three main steps. Firstly, I examine the important roles that social practices play regarding the philosophical concept and purpose of human capabilities in general. Secondly, I utilise social practices and human needs to argue for individual and collective human capabilities more specifically. And thirdly, I retrospectively review these capability insights for their potential to shed further light on the concept of social practice as well as the distinction between individual and collective human needs.

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Definitions:

At the level of the practitioner, a practice is a series of habitualised individual activities that are dispersed across time, properly causally related, and subject to norms. Each practice is constituted by behaviour patterns that represent specific combinations of mental and bodily performances (doings), physical and mental attributes (beings), and person-external resources utilised by the individual throughout (havings).

At the level of the community, a practice is a class of habitualised activities that are dispersed across time, space, and individuals; that are properly causally related; and that are subject to norms. Each practice incorporates similar combinations of the three interconnected elements of doings, beings, and havings. Thus, any individual’s performance pattern is also part of a social practice if it is sufficiently similar to the performance patterns of others and causally related to them in relevant ways.

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Selected References:

Doyal & Gough (1991). A Theory of Human Needs. London: Macmillan.

Evans (2002). Collective Capabilities, Culture and Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom. Studies in Comparative International Development, 37(2), 54-60.

Fardell (2020). Conceptualising Capabilities and Dimensions of Advantage as Needs. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 21(3), 263-276.

Grix & McKibbin (2015). Needs and Well-Being. In Fletcher (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being (pp. 292-306). London: Routledge.

Grix (2019). The Ethics and Politics of Consumption (Doctoral Thesis). Auckland: University of Auckland.

Grix & Watene (2022). Communities and Climate Change: Why Practices and Practitioners Matter. Ethics & International Affairs, 36(2), 215-230.

Grix (forthcoming). Social Practices, Practice Communities, and Climate Justice. Journal of Global Ethics, Taylor & Francis.

Grix & Watene (forthcoming). Global Justice and Practice-Centred Thought. In Ackerly, Johnson, … Wiener (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grounded and Engaged Normative Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ibrahim (2020). Individualism and the Capability Approach: The Role of Collectivities in Expanding Human Capabilities. In Chiappero-Martinetti, Osmani, & Qizilbash (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach (pp. 206-226). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MacIntyre (2007). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3rd ed.). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Reckwitz (2002). Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243-263.

Robeyns (2017). Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

Schatzki (1996). Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sen (2002). Response to Commentaries. Studies in Comparative International Development, 37(2), 78-86.

Sen (2009). The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wiggins (1998). Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (3rd ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.