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

3. Clarifications
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A third way in which the term ‘basic capabilities’ can be used is,
as in analytical political philosophy, to refer to essential (moral and/
or political) entitlements that signify a higher level of moral urgency,
according to the philosopher’s own normative commitments. For
example, Rutger Claassen, who has been developing an agency-based
capability theory of justice, has been using the term ‘basic’ in that sense
(Claassen 2016).
A fourth way to use the term ‘basic capability’ has been proposed
by Bernard Williams. Yet this has, to the best of my knowledge, not
been taken up by anyone. Williams has argued that it is important to
distinguish between the capability to choose yet another new brand
of washing powder from, say, Adam Smith’s often-cited capability to
appear in public without shame. Williams rightly notes that “what you
need, in order to appear without shame in public, differs depending on
where you are, but there is an invariant capability here, namely that of
appearing in public without shame. This underlying capability is more
basic” (Williams 1987, 101). I agree with the need for the distinction that
Williams makes, but I would rather call these underlying capabilities
the general capabilities, so as to avoid confusion with Sen’s use of basic
capabilities. I will turn to the discussion of general versus specific
capabilities in section 3.2.4, but first I want to ask the question: how
should we interpret the term ‘basic capability’?
My reading is that, within the capability literature, the most
widespread (and hence dominant) use of ‘basic capabilities’ is Sen’s
use, referring to poverty or deprivation. Hence, while the notion
of capabilities refers to a very broad range of opportunities, ‘basic
capabilities’ refers to the real opportunity to avoid poverty or to meet
or exceed a threshold of wellbeing. By focusing on ‘basic’ capabilities,
we are limiting the set of all capabilities in two ways: first, by having a
selection of capabilities (i.e. those that are key to capturing wellbeing,
and those that are centrally important), and second, by imposing a
threshold at which those capabilities will be evaluated (i.e. at a low or
poverty-like level).
Basic capabilities are thus crucial for poverty analysis and in general
for studying the wellbeing of large sections of the population in poor
countries, or for theories of justice that endorse sufficiency as their
distributive rule. In affluent countries, by contrast, wellbeing analysis