Azizjon Bagadirov

The problem of adaptive preferences (APs) played a central motivating role in the Capability Approach, since these internalised preferences were seen as one of the causes of the perpetuation of the unjust conditions that gave rise to them. A number of different theoretical frameworks were proposed to understand what unites such preferences and why they warrant our moral concern. Scholars are mostly divided between broadly “content-neutral” approaches that focus on the authenticity of the procedural formation of a preference, substantive approaches that apply normative restrictions on the content of the preference in relation to how it affects a person’s well-being, or a variation of a hybrid approach among them. In this article, I critically examine several recent accounts that incorporate substantive features into a content-neutral procedural framework; I argue that although they can successfully deal with certain pressing issues, they still face unresolved challenges. Building on a more substantive accounts, I propose to conceptualise APs as constraints on self-development, suggesting how we can understand the internal dynamic of such a deficient “constraining” relation to a self.

In contemporary debates on structural injustice, its harm is defined in terms of the inhibition of self-development. However, despite this normative centrality, there is no systematic discussion of what exactly self-development is and in what way structural injustice inhibits it. The purpose of this paper is to argue that thinking more carefully about this relation – often mentioned but rarely analysed in detail – will help us to understand better the normative content of the idea of structural constraint. I start with outlining a materialist theory of social structures that clarifies what is “structural” in structural injustice. I then provide a non-essentialist conception of self-development and suggest a theory of well-being that explains its prudential value. Finally, I discuss how self-development is inhibited by structural forms of oppression, proposing to understand this process in terms of what I call ‘developmental enclosure’, namely an internalisation of constraining effects that manifest in one’s habitus.