ABSTRACT

This paper addresses one of the most fundamental, but least considered, questions in housing research: how should we ultimately evaluate housing outcomes? Rejecting the fact vs value dichotomy so dominant in the social sciences, this paper draws on the work of Amartya Sen and Hilary Putnam to critically assess the ethical assumptions behind three commonly adopted “informational spaces” for evaluating housing outcomes: economic, subjective and “objective” metrics. It argues that all three fail to account for the plurality of goods that individuals have reason to value and the fallibility of human judgement. As an alternative, it proposes that housing outcomes should be ultimately evaluated in terms of people’s “housing capabilities” - the effective freedoms that people have in their homes and neighbourhoods to do and feel the things they have reason to value – which should generally be determined through a bottom-up process of democratic deliberation involving critical and expert perspectives.

摘要

本文探讨了住房研究中最基本，但考虑最少的问题之一：我们最终应如何评估住房结果？拒绝了在社会科学中占主导地位的事实与价值二分法，本文借鉴了阿玛蒂亚·森（Amartya Sen）和希拉里·普特南（Hilary Putnam）的工作，对三个普遍采用的“信息空间”来评估住房结果背后的伦理假设进行批判性评估：经济，主观和“客观” ”指标。它认为，这三者都无法解释个人有理由重视的多种商品和人类判断的谬误。作为备选，