Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

94 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
What Nussbaum calls ‘combined capabilities’ could then simply be
called ‘human capabilities’, which consist of the presence of those skills,
talents, character traits and abilities, together with suitable external
conditions and circumstances. Second, Nussbaum uses the term ‘basic
capability’ after it had already been used in two other different ways,
as the next section will show. Why not simply call these ‘innate human
characteristics’?
The way readers from different disciplines use terminology in particular
ways is clearly exemplified by the various interpretations of the term
‘basic capabilities’.
One interpretation is Nussbaum’s. As was mentioned before,
Nussbaum (2000, 84) uses the term ‘basic capabilities’ to refer to “the
innate equipment of individuals that is necessary for developing the
more advanced capabilities”, such as the capability of speech and
language, which is present in a new-born but needs to be fostered. Yet
of the four ways in which the term ‘basic capabilities’ is used in the
literature, this one may be the least prevalent.
Sen (1980) mentioned the term ‘basic capability’ as his first rough
attempt to answer the ‘equality of what?’ question, but changed his
terminology in subsequent work (what he called ‘basic capability’
would later become ‘capability’). 2 In his later writings, Sen reserved
the term ‘basic capabilities’ to refer to a threshold level for the relevant
capabilities. A basic capability is “the ability to satisfy certain elementary
and crucially important functionings up to certain levels” (Sen 1992a, 45
fn 19). Basic capabilities refer to the freedom to do some basic things
considered necessary for survival and to avoid or escape poverty or
other serious deprivations. The relevance of basic capabilities is “not so
much in ranking living standards, but in deciding on a cut-off point for
the purpose of assessing poverty and deprivation” (Sen 1987, 109).
2 The ‘equality of what?’ debate was prompted by Sen’s Tanner lecture with the same
title (Sen 1980a), in which he argued that almost any theory of distributive justice is
egalitarian, in the sense that they all advocate equality of something. The question
to pose to a theory of distributive justice is therefore not whether it is egalitarian or
not, but what is its answer to the ‘equality of what?’ question.