Abstract
Why were the sisters unable to receive public assistance? The ward office's answer to this question was quite simple. “Because they didn’t show the will to do so.” Chapter 7 discussed the problem of securing the substantive value of freedom, from the two angles of agency freedom and well-being freedom, by looking at a case that recently occurred in Japan. Sen's social choice theory focuses mainly on agency freedom in helping us analyze what is meant by the statement “She didn’t show her will to apply,” whereas the capability approach looks at the issue in terms of well-being freedom represented by her capability for “decent living” and “self-respect.” We sought a logic that enables us to respect individual autonomy and justify providing general public assistance to any person including one who is not usually regarded as deserving to receive specific allowances.
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Notes
- 1.
The “principle of application” is legislated in Article 7.1 of the Public Assistance Act: “Public assistance has to be provided only after an application is made by someone in need of protection, his or her supporter, or his or her family member living with him or her. However, it can be provided without application when he or she is in a critical and urgent situation” (emphasis added by the author).
- 2.
Japanese Constitution, Articles 12 and 13.
- 3.
See Gotoh (2016a) for details.
- 4.
Unrestricted Domain implies that the rule must work for every logically possible profiles of individual preferences. The Pareto Principle implies that if everyone prefers x to y, society must also prefer x to y. Independence of irrelevant alternatives implies that social choice over a set of alternatives must depend on the rankings of the individuals only over the set of alternatives. Non-dictatorship implies that there should be no individual such that whenever he prefers x to y, society must prefer x to y, irrespective of the preference of everyone else (Sen 1970a/2017).
- 5.
As for the normative characteristics of Japan's public assistance system, see Gotoh (2009, 2016b).
- 6.
This is closer to the concept of “freedom to choose one's own strategies,” formulated in game form in Gaertner et al. (1992), for example, as the result of choice is not yet socially realized. However, if an individual chooses a particular strategy and its consequence constitutes part of the corresponding social state as it is, her strategy set itself can be regarded as something over which she has the “individual right”.
- 7.
In Arrow’s framework, the condition of Unrestricted Domain is supposed to capture, above all, the universal nature of the decision rule, i.e., social decision procedures must be defined over all logically possible preference profiles. In addition, Arrow also assumes a requirement of universality that they have to bring a non-empty set of social alternatives from any subset of the set of all logically possible alternatives. For details, see Chap. 9.
- 8.
More precisely, it implies “an individual right to rejection decisiveness”.
- 9.
It is known that Unrestricted domain, Pareto Indifference condition, and Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives are equivalent to the Neutrality condition. Sen criticized this Neutrality condition in the name of Welfarism (Sen 1979a/1997a). Note that Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives as well as Anonymity has some affinity with a political or philosophical idea called the Neutrality of the Good. The naming of “positional independence” here owes to the concept of “positional objectivity” (Sen 1993a/2002a).
- 10.
Sen proved his own Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal by using the universality of the domain to show the existence of a preference profile where individual rights and the Pareto principle are not compatible.
- 11.
See Sen (1966a, 1967a) for his skepticism about rational universalizability of morality.
- 12.
Majority rules are a good example of the universal rule. Note Sen’s following remark, for example. “Majority rules have a political limitation of being unable to adjust different freedoms.” (Maskin and Sen 2014, 40).
- 13.
Individual preferences do not satisfy completeness and transitivity but they satisfy acyclicity, which guarantees that no choice set is empty (Sen 1970a/2017, 1970b).
- 14.
“Social choice function” defined here is a version of “the functional collective choice rule (FCCR)” as its domain is a set of individual preference profiles and its range is a set of subsets of the universal set. However, it is different from a standard FCCR because it does not require completeness of corresponding individual preferences nor consistency among alternative sets (Sen 1970a, 2002a, Chap. 3).
- 15.
We assume that Apply and Seek are different, independent alternatives. For example, the former can use public assistance and the latter can use the “Job seeker’s support system,” which we discuss later.
- 16.
“The job seeker's assistance system” is a system under which people who are not qualified to receive employment insurance aim to find a job earlier by improving their skills through job training. Such people may receive “training in support of job seekers” or “public job training” for free in principle. “Hello Work” will support such people in a positive manner during the training period and after the end of the training period. To people who meet certain requirements of income and assets, etc., “benefits for receiving job training” are provided during the training period. See “Law on support of employment of specified job seekers through implementation of job training, etc.” (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor 2011, no. 93).
- 17.
In the standard interpretation, individual rights are confined to individual private spheres, i.e., where one's action does not affect the others. This chapter does not adopt the “private sphere” interpretation as we focus on conflicts among individual decisive powers. Rather, we assume there are some social norms that determine individual “private sphere,” on which an individual can have a decisive power.
- 18.
According to Kant, “communal senses (sensus communis)” implies the idea of social conscience (gemainshaftlicher Sinn), i.e., “to reflect on and care about (a priori) how all other people are represented within oneself.” It occurs by “cross-checking human reason in general and one's own judgements.” Its purpose is “to avoid illusions that might poorly influence one’s judgements based on some individual subjective conditions that can easily be regarded as objective.” (Kant 1999, 180–181).
- 19.
See Scanlon (1982).
- 20.
This is based on a judgement that individuals are free to apply or not, as long as they do job hunting. Adding another pair (Not Seek and Apply, Not Seek and Not Apply) to her individual decisive power will not change the result.
- 21.
Note that the Japanese public assistance system established the “Independence Support Program” in 2005 and the “Independence Support System for the Needy” in 2013, both of which aim at promoting labor supply, but the former is for current recipients to exit the public assistance system, while the latter is for current non-recipients not to enter the public assistance system. Actually, there is no scheme that promotes getting a job with an income support.
- 22.
These assumptions are sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the optimal point.
- 23.
This means that they do not have to be cardinally comparable.
- 24.
Here we exclude an uncertain possibility of Apply but Do Not Receive. However, we can examine the case of Apply but Do Not Receive as resulting in point c which is dominated by point b in both “self-respect” and “decent living”.
- 25.
See Rawls (1971a), Kant (1785 = 1972, 243n).
- 26.
Here the relative price of income and assets is the price to exchange them in the universal market. A decrease of the asset value due to depreciation is regarded as a decrease of the amount of the assets.
- 27.
In the analysis below we assume that receiving no public assistance results in the older sister’s lower income and decreased relative price of assets over income (due to the effects of selling off assets) whereas receiving public assistance will not change the relative price because the effects of selling off assets are offset by decreased demand for assets.
- 28.
In the analysis below we assume that receiving no public assistance results in her lower income and decreased relative price of assets over income (due to effects of selling off assets) whereas receiving public assistance will not change the relative price because effects of selling off assets are offset by decreased demand for assets.
- 29.
From Vital Statistics 2011, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan.
- 30.
Tachikawa City’s “List of incidents of solitary death reported to the city,” September 2012, Special Accounts Committee.
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Gotoh, R. (2021). Freedom and Death: Why Did She Not Apply for Public Assistance?. In: The Ethics and Economics of the Capability Approach. Hitotsubashi University IER Economic Research Series, vol 46. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5140-6_7
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