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

3. Clarifications
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philosopher, there is therefore less reason to be worried about being
misunderstood when referring to capabilities as option freedoms, or as
opportunity freedoms.
We now move to examine the issue that is central to module B6: should
we, when developing a capability analysis or capability theory, focus on
functionings, capabilities, or a mixture of both? After all, this question
is not settled. It is one of the core features of the capability approach
that it uses ‘functionings’ and ‘capabilities’ as core notions (property
A1, as discussed in 2.6.1) and that every capability analysis endorses
the claim that functionings and/or capabilities form the evaluative space
(property A5, as discussed in 2.6.5). But this still leaves the question
unanswered whether we should focus on functionings, or on capabilities
or on a combination of functionings and capabilities. Perhaps we have
good reasons sometimes to focus on functionings, and sometimes
on capabilities, for example for different types of applications, or for
different groups of people?
Luckily, this question is not new to the capability literature, and
there is by now a lively debate with many different types of arguments
about whether the appropriate wellbeing metric should be capabilities
or functionings, hence opportunities or achievements. What reasons or
considerations have been argued to be relevant for this choice? 7
The first consideration concerns anti-paternalism. It is a normative
consideration: by focusing on capabilities rather than functionings, we
do not force people into a particular account of good lives but instead
aim at a range of possible ways of life from which each person can
choose. Thus, it is the liberal nature of the capability approach, or an
anti-paternalist commitment, that motivates a principled choice of
capabilities rather than functionings. Obviously, the strength of this
argument depends on how bad one takes paternalism to be. There may
be good reasons to believe that some paternalism is unavoidable, or
even desired (Nussbaum 2000, 51–56; Robeyns 2016b). Moreover, some
7 General discussions surveying different reasons to choose for functionings,
capabilities or both, can also be found in Robeyns and Van der Veen (2007, 45–99,
76–78), Hick and Burchardt (2016, 79–82) and Robeyns (2016b).