In this book, Binder shows that at the heart of the most prominent arguments in favour of value-neutral approaches to overall freedom lies the value freedom has for human agency and development. Far from leading to the adoption of a value-neutral approach, however, ascribing importance to freedom¿s agency value requires one to adopt a refined value-based approach. Binder employs an axiomatic framework in order to develop such an approach. She shows that a focus on freedom¿s agency value has far reaching consequences for existing results in the freedom ranking literature: it requires one to move beyond a person¿s given all-things-considered preferences to the values underlying a person¿s preference formation. Furthermore, it requires, as Binder argues, one to account (only) for those differences between choice options which really matter to people. Binder illustrates the implications of her analysis for the evaluation of public policy and human development with the capabilityapproach: only if sufficient importance is ascribed to freedom¿s agency value can the capability approach keep its promises. ¿

highlights the essential role of freedom's agency value in political and moral philosophy contains a new and surprising argument for a value-based approach to overall freedom based on problems usually raised against it brings together the depth of philosophical insights on overall freedom with the rigour of axiomatic analysis reveals hidden assumptions in the literature on freedom rankings and rational choice theory shows important implications of agency for the evaluation of human development with the capability approach ¿

1 Introduction.- 1.1 Philosophical Literature on (Overall) Freedom.- 1.2 Freedom Ranking Literature.- 1.3 The Capability Approach.- 1.4 Outline of the Thesis.- 2 Freedom's Agency Value.- 2.1 Overall Freedom.- 2.2 Desire Dependencies.- 2.3 The Impossibility of Paternalism.- 2.4 The Non-specific Value Neglect.- 2.5 Agency and the Importance of Values.- 2.6 The Necessity of a Value-Based Approach.- 2.7 Conclusion.- 3 Diversity Revealed.- 3.1 The Freedom Ranking Literature.- 3.2 Diversity of Options and Freedom Rankings.- 3.3 Definitions.- 3.4 Similarity Relation.- 3.5 Diversity Measure.- 3.6 Weitzman and a Restricted Domain.- 3.7 Diversity and Cardinality of Alternatives.- 3.8 Conclusion.- 4 Plural Identities and Preference Formation.- 4.1 Agency, Plural Identities and Rational Choice Theory.- 4.2 Intra-personal Aggregation.- 4.3 Identity Formalised.- 4.4 Conditions.- 4.5 Transitivity.- 4.6 Acyclicity.- 4.7 Identity Dissonance and a Domain Restriction.- 4.8 Conclusion.- 5 Freedom Rankingsand Freedom's Agency Value.- 5.1 Freedom Rankings and the Value of Alternatives.- 5.2 Freedom Rankings between Scylla and Charybdis.- 5.3 Freedom's Agency Value and Preference-based Approaches.- 5.4 Identity and Procedural Reasonableness.- 5.5 Desire Dependency and the Impossibility of Paternalism, Reconsidered.- 5.6 Conclusion.- 6 Cultural Diversity and the Capability Approach.- 6.1 The Capability Approach.- 6.2 Culture and the Construction of Capability Sets.- 6.3 Culture and the Ranking of Capability Sets.- 6.4 Norms and the Value of Functionings.- 6.5 Context Dependency of Valuable Functionings.- 6.6 Limits of Capability- and Freedom-Rankings.- 6.7 Conclusion.- 7 Conclusion.- 7.1 Review of the Chapters.- 7.2 Open Questions.- Appendix 1 Diversity.- Appendix 2 Identity and Preference.- Appendix 3 Eligibility.- Bibliography.- Index¿