Capabilities and Social Justice

1. Capabilities and Social Justice Martha Nussbaum

2. The core question of the capabilities approach • According to Nussbaum the capabilities approach does not ask: • The utilitarian question, “How satisfied is person P?” • The resource theorist question, “How much resources does person P command? Instead • It asks the question, “What is person P actually able to do and to be?”

3. Why Preference Satisfaction Does not Matter • Preference satisfaction accounts of well-being must account for adaptive preferences. • Some adaptive preferences are morally bad. • So, fundamentally preference satisfaction accounts of well-being are inadequate. An adaptive preference occurs when a person adapts what they prefer to what is possible for them to acquire. Some of these cases are negative. For example, if a women prefers to stay at home with an abusive husband rather than starve on the street, we would not want to say that here preferences have been satisfied in a morally adequate way, even though in fact by staying at home her preferences are satisfied.

4. Why Resources Alone are Inadequate • Resources are means for achieving some valuable ways of being. • Equalizing resources alone without paying attention to the social and physical environment in which resources are used to achieve valuable ways of being is inadequate. • So paying attention only to the resources one has available is inadequate. Suppose A and B are equal in resources, but A lives in an area where women are discriminated against in the work place, while B does not, although they have the same resources, they don’t have the same capabilities of with respect to what they can do.

5. The Informational Inadequacy of GNP • Gross National Product (GNP) is a measure of the total goods and services produced in a country in a given year. • It is typical to rank countries, and determine the economic improvement of a country by measuring GNP and how much it increases or decreases from year to year. • However, it (GNP) does not tell us any of the following: • What the distribution of income in the country is. • How much corruption the country suffers from. • The wellbeing of the people in the country.

6. Human Dignity and Human Capabilities • There are certain functions that are particularly central in human life, in the sense that their presence or absence is typically understood to be a mark of the presence or absence of human life. • There is something that it is to do these functions in a truly human way, and not merely an animal way. • Human abilities exert a moral claim that they should be developed. • Human beings are creatures such that, provided with the right educational and material support, they can become fully capable of exercising these human functions.

7. Functioning and Capability • Functionings are ways people act and be, such as starving and being celibate. • Capabilities are possibilities for acting and being, such as having the opportunity to fast or engage in sexual expression. • The political goal of the capabilities approach is capability and not functioning. For example, a person that has the capability to fast is different from a person that is starving. While the starving person lacks the capability to nourish themselves, the person that fasts has the capability to nourish themselves, but they choose not to nourish themselves.

8. Capabilities Approach in Comparison • (CA) is better than GNP because it (a) treats each and every human being as an end, and (b) explicitly attends to the provision of well-being in a wide range of distinct areas of human function. • (CA) is better than resource-based approaches because it looks at the variable needs human beings have for resources and the social obstacles that stand between certain groups of people and the equal opportunity to function. • (CA) is better than preference-based approaches because it recognizes the creation of laws and institutions is partially based on preferences, but it refuses to hold human equality hostage to the status quo of what peoples preferences at a given time are.

9. The Ten Central Capabilities • Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living. • Bodily health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter. • Bodily integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.

10. The Ten Central Capabilities • Sense, imagination, and thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason –and to do these things in a “truly human” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain.

11. The Ten Central Capabilities • Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence, in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.) • Practical reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.

12. The Ten Central Capabilities • Affiliation. (A) being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and free speech.) (B) Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails provisions of non-discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.

13. The Ten Central Capabilities • Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature. • Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities. • Control over one’s environment. (A) Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association. (B) Material. Being able to hold property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

14. Understanding the Ten Capabilities • The capabilities are such that one cannot compensate for a depravation in one by an increase in another. More property rights cannot compensate for lack of the capability for play. • A fertile functioning is one that tends to promote other related capabilities. • A corrosive disadvantage is a depravation of a capability that tends to lead to other capability depravations. • One of the central issues facing the approach is how to set the threshold for all of the capabilities. Every one must have the capabilities to a sufficient degree.

15. Some critical questions for (CA) • Is (CA) compatible with liberal pluralism? How can the list be determined in a way that is not paternalistic? • How do we measure capabilities? How can we tell if a certain capability is present? • The capability approach aims to present an alternative to resource and welfare approaches. However, is the capability approach really distinct from both of these approaches? Can the capability approach be reduced to the resource approach? • What is the difference between human rights approaches and the capability approach?