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

3. Clarifications
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this may explain why most capability scholars endorse rich accounts of
such diversity.
A strong acknowledgement of human diversity has therefore become
a hallmark of the capability approach as that literature has developed.
Its criticism of other normative approaches is often fuelled by, and based
on, the claim that human diversity is insufficiently acknowledged in
many normative frameworks and theories. This also explains why the
capability approach is often favourably regarded by feminist scholars,
and by academics concerned with global justice, race or class relations, or
care and disability issues. One of the main complaints of these scholars
about mainstream philosophy and economics has been precisely this
issue: the relative invisibility of the fate of those people whose lives do
not correspond to that of an able-bodied, non-dependent, caregivingfree
individual who belongs to the dominant ethnic, racial and religious
groups.
Several scholars have proposed the introduction of a category of
‘collective capabilities’ or ‘community capabilities’ (Evans 2002; Ibrahim
2006, 2009, 2017; Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Murphy 2014). The
idea of ‘collective capabilities’ is used in different ways in the literature,
and not always spelled out very carefully. I will try to reconstruct what
‘collective capabilities’ could mean, and then discuss to what extent
these are different from human capabilities tout court.
It is instructive, first, to see in which contexts different authors
introduce the idea of ‘collective capability’. Here are a few typical
examples from the literature. Solava Ibrahim (2006, 2009, 2017) argues
for the importance of collective capabilities from the perspective of the
work done by self-help groups of poor people fighting to overcome
their poverty, which is an issue also discussed by Stewart (2005). 9 David
Schlosberg and David Carruthers (2010) argue for the importance of the
idea of collective capabilities to understand the struggles of indigenous
peoples for ecological justice. And Michael Murphy (2014) argues
9 Self-help groups are “any informal income-generating or social activity initiated
by a poor community to achieve permanent improvements in their individual and
communal wellbeings” (Ibrahim 2006, 398–399).