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

3. Clarifications
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general and abstract claim can be further developed in many different
ways, and it is in specifying these further details that philosophers
disagree. Distributive justice requires equality of something, but not
necessarily equality of outcome in material terms (in fact, plain equality
of resources is a claim very few theorists of justice would be willing
to defend, since people have different needs, are confronted with
different circumstances and, if given the same opportunities, are likely
to make different use of them). Hence, Rawls’s theory of justice can be
seen as an egalitarian theory of justice, but so are theories that come to
very different substantive conclusions, such as Robert Nozick’s (1974)
entitlement theory. Other major contemporary theorists of justice who
can be labelled ‘liberal egalitarian’ are Brian Barry (1995), Philippe Van
Parijs (1995), and Ronald Dworkin (2000), among many others.
Of those four schools, it is primarily liberal egalitarian theories that are
discussed in relation to the capability approach. While there is internal
diversity within this group of liberal egalitarian theories, these theories
share the commitment to the principle that there should be considerable
(although by no means absolute) scope for individuals to determine
their own life plan and notion of the good, as well as a commitment
to a notion of equal moral consideration, which is another way to put
the principle of each person as an end, or normative individualism (see
section 2.6.8).
Of the four schools of social justice, only the last two regard justice
and equality as being closely related values. Under conventionalism,
justice is guided by existing traditions, conventions and institutions,
even if those existing practices do not treat people as equals in a
plausible sense. Teleological theories also do not understand justice
as entailing some notion of equality; instead, the idea of the good is
more important, even if it implies that people are not treated as moral
equals. In some theories of conventionalism and teleology, social justice
could be consistent with a notion of equality, but this is not necessarily
the case for all these theories. The social contract tradition and liberal
egalitarianism, in contrast, derive their principles of social justice from
a fundamental idea of people as moral equals. However, the notion of
equal moral worth does not necessarily lead to the notion of equality of
resources or another type of equality of outcome, as will be explained