The freedom to lead different types of life is reflected in the person's capacity set. The capacity of a person depends on a variety of factors, including personal characteristics and social arrangements. A full accounting of individual freedom must, of course, go beyond the capacities of personal living and pay attention to the person's other objectives ( e.g. social goals not directly related to one's own life), but human capacities constitute an important part of individual freedom. Freedom, of course, is not an unproblematic concept. For example, if we do not have the courage to choose to live in a particular way, even though we could live that way if we so choose, can it be said that we do have the freedom to live that way, i.e. the correspondent capacity? It is not any purpose here to brush under the carpet difficult questions of this-and-other-type. In so far as there are genuine ambiguities in the concept of freedom, that should be reflected in corresponding ambiguities in the characterization of capacity. This relates to a methodological point, which I have tried to defend elsewhere, that if an underlying idea has an essential ambiguity, a precise formulation of that idea must try to capture that ambiguity rather than hide or eliminate it. Comparisons of freedom raise interesting issues of evaluation. The claim is sometimes made that freedom must be valued independently of the values and preferences of the person whose freedom is being assessed, since it concerns the 'range' of choice a person has--not how she values the elements in that range or what she chooses from it. I do not believe for an instant that this claim is sustainable (despite some superficial plausibility), but had it been correct, it would have been a rather momentous conclusion, driving a wedge between the evaluation of achievements and that of freedom. It would, in particular, be then possible to assess the freedom of a person independently of--or prior to--the assessment of the alternatives between which the person can choose. It is said in the passage that there are ambiguities in the characterization of capacity because ______.