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

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4. Critiques and Debates In chapter 2 I gave an account of the capability approach that gave us a better sense of its necessary core and its scope, as well as describing the structure of a capability theory or capability analysis. While that account has aimed to be precise and comprehensive, it nevertheless raises some further issues. Hence, this chapter is focussed on investigating those further questions and debates. We will look into the following issues. Section 4.2 asks whether everything that has been called a capability in the literature is genuinely so. Section 4.3 addresses a dispute that has kept capability theorists busy for quite a while over the last two decades, namely whether a capability theorist should endorse a specific list of capabilities. For many years, this was debated under the banner ‘the question of the list’ and was seen as the major criticism that Martha Nussbaum had of Amartya Sen’s work on the capability approach. Section 4.4 investigates the relationship between the basic needs approach and philosophical theories of needs, and argues that the capability scholars may be able to engage more fruitfully with theories of needs. Section 4.5 asks whether, as Nussbaum suggests, we should understand the capability approach as a theory that addresses the government; I will argue that we should reject that suggestion and also take other ‘agents of change’ into account. Section 4.6 analyses a debate that has generated much controversy, namely whether the capability approach can be said to be too individualistic. The next section, 4.7, focuses on a closely related issue: the scope © 2017 Ingrid Robeyns, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0130.04
170 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice for the inclusion of ‘power’ into the capability approach. Should the capability approach pay much more attention to political economy? Section 4.8 asks whether the capability approach is a liberal theory, and whether it can be anything other than a liberal theory. Section 4.9 argues that, despite the many references to ‘the human development and capability approaches’, these are not the same thing. Finally, section 4.10 discusses the potential and problems of a capabilitarian welfare economics. genuinely a capability? Since this chapter is the place to collect critiques and debates, let me start with a very basic point of criticism: not everything that is called ‘a capability’ in the capability literature is, upon closer examination, genuinely a capability. The main criticism that I want to offer in this brief section is that we should be very careful in our choices of terms and concepts: not everything that is important is a capability, and it is conceptually confusing (and hence wrong) to call everything that is important a capability. As an interdisciplinary language used in many different disciplines, the capability approach already suffers from sloppy use of terms because of interdisciplinary differences in their usage, and we should avoid contributing to this conceptual confusion. Let me give one example to illustrate the critique. In her book Allocating the Earth as well as in earlier work, Breena Holland (2008, 2014) argues that the role of the environment in making capabilities possible is so important and central that we should conceptualize environmental ecological functioning (that is, the ecosystem services that the environment offers to human beings) as a meta-capability that underlies all other capabilities. As Holland puts it, “the environment’s ecological functioning is a meta-capability in the sense that it is a precondition of all the capabilities that Nussbaum defines as necessary for living a good human life” (2014, 112). By using this terminology, Holland wants to stress that protecting the ecosystem is not just one way among many equally good ways to contribute to human wellbeing — rather, it is a crucial and nonsubstitutable precondition for living. Yet one could question whether conceptualizing it as a “meta-capability” is correct. As I have argued
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Contents Acknowledgements 3 1. Intr
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3. Clarifications 89 3.1 Introducti
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4.7 What about power and political
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Acknowledgements In 1998, when I st
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Acknowledgements 5 the capability a
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1. Introduction Many people who en
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1. Introduction 9 capability approa
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1. Introduction 11 Moreover, it bri
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1. Introduction 13 Countries Outsi
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1. Introduction 15 capabilities of
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1. Introduction 17 their collaborat
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1. Introduction 19 This book has a
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2. Core Ideas and the Framework Th
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Index abortion 15, 145 advantage 25
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Index 253 Fleurbaey, Marc 154 flour
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Index 255 political institutions 14
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Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

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