Development as Capability Expansion *

In his Grundlegung zur Metapbysik de Sitten , Immanuel Kant argues for the necessity of seeing human beings as ends in themselves, rather than as means to other ends: "So act as tc treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only".' This principle has importance in many contexts even in analysing poverty, pro­ gress an'd planning. Human beings are the agents, beneficiaries and adjudicators of progress, but they also happen to be directly or indirectly the primary means of all production. This dual role of human beings provides a rich ground for confu­ sion of ends and means in planning and policy. making. Indeed, it can and frequently does ­ take the form of focusing on production and pros­ perityas the essence of progress, treating people as the means through which that productive progress is brought about (rather than seeing the lives of people as the ultimate concern and treating pro­ duction and prosperity merely as means to those lives). Indeed, the widely prevalent concentration on the expansion of real income and on .econornic growth as the characteristics of successful devel­ opment can be precisely an aspect of the mistake against which Kant had warned. This problem is particularly pivotal in the assessment and planning of economic development. The problem does not, of course , lie in the fact that the pursuit of eco­ nomic prosperity is typically t3.ken to be a major goal of planning and policy-making. This need not be, in itself, unreasonable. The problem relates to the level at which this aim should be taken as a goal. Is it just an intermediate goal, the importance of which is contingent on what it ultimately con­ tributes to human lives? Or is it the object of the entire exercise? It is in the acceptance usually implicitly of the latter view that the ends-means confusion becomes significant indeed blatant. The problem might have been of no great practical interest if the achievement of economic prosperity were tightly linked in something like a one-to-one correspondence with that of en­ riching the lives of the people. If that were the case, then the pursuit of economic prosperity as an end in itself, while wrong in principle, might have been in effect, indistinguishable from pursuing it only'as a means to th~ end of enriching human lives. But that tight relation does not obtain. Coun­ tries with high GNP per capita can oeverthel~s have astonishingly low achievfmentsin the quality of life, with the bulk of the population being sub­ ject to premature mortality, escapable morbidity, overwhelming illiteracy and so 00. Just to illustrate an aspect of the problem, the GNP per capita of six countries is given in table 1.1.1, along with each country's respective level of life expectancy at birth. Acountry can be very rich in conventional economic terms (i.e., in terms of the value of com-