Chapter 5 of Severine Deneulin's book, Wellbeing, Justice and Development Ethics, has the title "The Forming and Speaking of the Language".  It is clear from her book that Dr. Deneulin is not primarily concerned with the words we use.  She (and the school of thought called the "capability approach") is concerned with what we regard as important in our own lives and in the lives of the people around us.  What Deneulin and Amartya Sen and the followers of the capability approach see as important is "what we have reason to want to do and be".  What Deneulin is saying is actually unfamiliar to most of us.  Although with varying degrees of success we may try to "live as Christ calls us to live", most of us - perhaps unconsciously - rule our lives by a concern for

and for some these two may amount to the same thing.

"The Lonely Crowd"

In the 1950s you did not have to be living in Levittown or in other New York suburbs to hear cocktail party conversation about national character and about conformity and individuality.  David Reisman, a Harvard University sociologist, generated a lot of that conversation with the publication of his book (with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny), The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950).

 
After World War II, many educated people became interested in questions about conformity and whether you could generalize about a national character, whether, for example, the German people tended toward authoritarian personalities.  David Reisman tried to describe changes in the American character that paralleled the larger changes in mass culture and in an increasingly urban, industrial society.  He made a distinction between three types of personalities: the tradition directed, the inner directed, and the other directed personality. Tradition-directed people tend to obey ancient rules and and seldom thrive in a modern, fast changing society. Most of Reisman's attention focused on the juxtaposition of the inner v other directed personality types. Inner-directed people tended to be more rigid and confident; they embodied certain Protestant ethic values and were motivated by individual aspiration and ambitions. The other-directed personality type aspired to be loved rather than esteemed. They wanted to feel in harmony with the opinions around them.  They fit into a world where large-scale organizations and bureaucracies were becoming commonplace.  The other directed person was largely conditioned by what he thought other people would think of him.
         Copied from "The Lonely Crowd" of the University-Discoveries.com website

Social Status

An article Romoving Barriers of Status in the February 28, 2013, issue of this newsletter dealt with Social Status at some length.  To a large extent a person's social status is equivalent to income level, which determines where one can afford to live, what car(s) one owns, what clothes one wears and where one vacations.  These things are important to most of us.

An Aristotelian and Christian Perspective

Aristotelian ethics upholds acting nobly, being virtuous, doing things well that are worth doing, and giving attention to practical decision-making.  Christianity preaches "losing oneself" to serve God and to serve others.  This involves becoming less self-centered and developing a concern for others.  In a book called Concern for Others Tom Kitwood (now deceased) says we can develop a concern for others by having people around us who show us respect, empathy, concern, and "reliable provision" - meaning a willingness to provide for our needs whenever we need help.  To the extent that we have such people around us (and partially to the extent that we live in a society that displays these characteristics) we acquire these qualities ourselves develop relationships with others accordingly.

Adopting the Capability Approach Through Our Relationships

Deneulin says, "...the capability approach does not give a blueprint for how best to expand capabilities, for how best to provide opportunities for people to be or do what they have reason to value, for how best to define the valuable beings and doings to be given opportunities for.  That human beings are agents of their own lives and shape, through free action, their lives and the world around them is the most basic characteristic trait [being advocated].  But agency does not come out of nowhere.  One is not born an agent.  One becomes an agent through interaction with others.  It is through processes of recognition by others that one acquires the necessary conditions to become an agent of change in one's own life and in the natural world."

Public Reasoning

One of the key concepts of the capability approach is public reasoning, which Deneulin defines as "Processes of dialogue and discussion for deciding courses of action, and in which listening to divergent points of view and seeing the world from another person's perspective are essential"

Deneulin cites another author as saying that "it is impossible for people to engage in public reasoning processes, that is, to argue a position on the grounds of reasons, make claims or disagree with others, without [oneself] having self-trust, self-esteem, and self-respect which can only be acquired through interactions with others."

All of this is crucial to our engagement with the world around us and to promoting social justice.