individual freedom as social product

 I would like first to elaborate on the conversation between Blackburn and Sen, and then offer some elaboration on Sen’s arguments.

1. individual freedom not as a fundamental right but a social product: The evaluation position that evaluates the success of a society in terms of the substantive freedoms that the members of that society enjoy resonates with Blackburn’s argument that winning the empirical games depends on understanding the interpreted game, especially the interpreted choices/options that the opponent holds dear (pg. 18). Sen also took an “informational” focus than normative approaches, which focus on other variables such as utility, procedural liberty, or real income (pg. 18). But Sen’s second point on why individual freedom is important to development puzzled me. He argues that “greater freedom enhances the ability of people to help themselves and also to influence the world”, or the so-called “agency aspect” - when individual freedom is expanded or optimally substantialized, individual freedom serves not a primary end, but a principle means to development. Individuals have more means to personal success, and more individual success contributes to more social effectiveness. I find Sen neglecting a problem that I find in Blackburn’s arguments. Blackburn identifies the dependency of empirical wins in understanding yourself and the opponent’s interpreted game. If we apply this method of winning to social situations where individuals are too disparately distributed with resources to understand each other's interpreted preference to the same degree, it would be even less likely for agents to take initiative in cooperating as Blackburn worries. For example, suppose the same prisoners’ dilemma case, but with one player who is borne with tremendous generational wealth and the other from a low-income family. The wealthy player can hire better lawyers and even bribe the system to learn that the opponent comes from a less advantaged background, while the poor player does not share this advantage and can’t learn about the opponent’s wealthy background. Thus, the disparity in resources that the players own upon entering the game will heighten non-cooperation: the poor player will play safe and confess as aforementioned, while the wealthy player, knowing that poverty which the player suffers might suggest them to play safe, will choose not to confess to serve 0 sentences. If this outcome is projected to a societal level, the gap between socioeconomic statuses will widen by the wealthy usurping the poor to further their ends, and the polarizing distrust between socioeconomic classes nowadays will continue to exacerbate. The same worry applies to Sen. When individual freedom can be used as a means to foster social effectiveness, it is easily exploitative by public policies to favor those that are more naturally privileged in their games, and allocate more resources to expand their substantial freedom. Sen emphasizes that, for example, a denial of opportunities of transactions in markets through arbitrary controls would be a form of unfreedom that should be removed to enhance development “in terms of removing the unfreedoms from which the members of the society may suffer” (pg. 33). But in the example of a market, under the circumstance or premise that resources are scarce, isn’t Sen’s argument leaving wiggle room for the rich who has more ability to capitalize on the resources they have to expand their individual freedom and usurp the less rich population, in name of contributing to social effectiveness?
2. Chinese authoritarianism & public policies: wow finally an East Asian example that I grew up with! I would like to elaborate on Sen’s illustration of China. Disclaimer: not advocating for authoritarian control here, hear me out. Earlier in 2021, China’s government announced that it had eradicated absolute poverty, measured against a standard equivalent to $2.30 per person per day applied to rural areas. Normatively, this undermines Sen’s argument, since China is still undemocratic as it is, but the poor people are substantially not so poor anymore. What’s more, their rights to participate in public life have substantially increased as well. Government has to remove them from their ghettos and place them into new homes with large amounts of subsidies. One of my personal friend’s family was lifted out of poverty and literally made a fortune through the house that the government assigned them, largely enhancing their chance to more fairly participate in public life. It is exactly because of the government subsidy and manipulation that chimes in which lifted poverty. The same dynamic happened during COVID. China has built so many hospitals, nursing centers, and testing facilities overnight to combat the virus. China mandated very strict mask and quarantine requirements, and limited public interaction as much as possible but maintained people’s access to buying necessities. China doesn’t allow opposing voices to the validity of COVID as a pandemic and imposed strict rules to eradicate the virus as soon as possible. The outcome is tremendous, as before this recent outbreak, public life has returned to normal almost completely and the total case number is almost at 0. However, like many other policies, in both cases, China is taking a very aggressive top-down approach here, which is vulnerable to corruption and often more focused on meeting a target deadline instead of meeting the specific needs of its people. For example, in the recent outbreak of COVID cases in Shanghai, hospitals set up an extremely strict procedure to get treatment due to the hospital being one of the hotspots of spreading covid. However, it saddened me when I see hospitals rejecting patients with other diseases like cancer just so they can follow the covid protocols. A news story is particularly evocative: a Shanghainese felt extremely ill one day as he just received treatment for his cancer. When he went to the hospital, the nurses asked him to get tested first before receiving treatment, which in China, takes multiple hours to obtain results. He passed away, waiting for his COVID results??! The nurses had to comply with the covid protocols because otherwise, it would cause them to lose their jobs. But I am so aggrieved to see the proliferation of China’s top-down approach: even though we are economically growing so rapidly and our lives have improved so much as a nation, the fundamental respect for our LIVES is still missing. Here, it seems to invalidate Sen’s argument in the sense that economic development might not come from substantial growth in individual freedom - in this case - the other way around. But I think Sen’s argument can be modified to fit China’s case: even if our economy is booming and our society’s quality of life has increased as a whole, it doesn’t guarantee or means that our individual freedom has substantially been expanded. Sometimes economic development can come at the expense of usurping individual freedom, which also resonates with my first point aforementioned. But, I also agree with Sen in the sense that individual freedom shouldn’t be understood in its normative means - such as Chinese people suffering from less poverty. Even though the basic necessities of living are secured, those that are lifted out of poverty still live in the plight of not fitting in the mainstream society - for example, city segregation and discrimination is very severe in China. Kids born in families that are just raised out of poverty can never have the same educational resources as kids born in bigger metropolitan cities like Beijing and Shanghai.