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

150 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
philosophy. For teleological theories, what justice is follows from an
account of the good, and thus the account of justice depends on the
account of the social good itself. A criticism of teleological theories is that
they necessarily rely on an external source (to specify what ‘the good’ is),
such as utility, the natural law or God’s authority. Teleological accounts
of justice therefore necessarily depend on notions of the ultimate good.
However, in pluralistic societies characterised by a variety of religious
and non-religious worldviews, it is hard to see how justice can be
derived from notions of the good that are not endorsed by all. Many
contemporary political philosophers therefore argue that teleological
theories cannot be defended since people have competing ideas of the
good, and we cannot call upon a generally-accepted external source that
will tell us which idea of the good should be imposed on all.
The third and fourth schools of social justice, in comparison, share a
commitment to some form of liberalism that recognizes the diversity of
views of the good life, which a just society should respect. These schools
experienced a major revival after the publication of John Rawls’s A
Theory of Justice in 1971, which is generally regarded as the single most
important work on social justice written in the last century. 21 Rawls
turned to the social contract tradition, in which justice is understood as
the fair distribution of benefits of social cooperation. The core idea is
that rules of justice are ultimately more beneficial to everyone than if
each were to pursue their own advantage by themselves. Some of these
theories (though not Rawls’s!) take the relative power or bargaining
strength of every individual in society as given, and one may therefore
question whether in situations of unequal bargaining power, justice
will be done (Nussbaum 2006b). The other liberal school of justice is
egalitarian justice, which is premised on the idea that people should be
treated with equal respect and concern (Dworkin 2000). The most basic
claim of those theories is that people are morally equal: each person
should be treated as a being of equal moral worth. However, that
21 There is a large literature on the differences and complementarities between the
capability approach to justice (that is, capabilitarian theories of justice) and Rawls’s
theory of justice (see e.g. Sen 1980, 195–200; Rawls 1988; Sen 1992a, 82–83; Pogge
2002; Nussbaum 2006b; Robeyns 2008b, 2009; and the contributions to Brighouse
and Robeyns 2010).