Practical Reason in Hard Times: The Effects of Economic Crisis on the Kinds of Lives People in the UK Have Reason to Value

Abstract

The capabilities approach (CA) was developed partly in response to the problem of adaptive preferences, which is considered by many to be a fatal flaw in utilitarian approaches to well-being. However, an important critique of the CA is that it is subject to an analogous problem of adaptation to deprivation: if well-being is defined as the capability to live the kind of life one has reason to value, but conceptions of value are conditioned by external circumstances or subject to adaptation, evaluations of well-being in the capability space may suffer similar distortions. This paper investigates the effects of the recent economic crisis in the UK on practical reasoning—on people's conceptions of the good and their freedom to deliberate about the planning of their lives. Using data from the European Social Survey and an Exploratory Structural Equation Modelling approach, it is shown that hard economic times did cause adaptation in conceptions of value, with particularly large effects among the economically vulnerable and the youngest generation. It is concluded that conceptions of value should be included in the definition of capability, and that this strategy can enhance the analytical power of the CA.