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

4. Critiques and Debates
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she is now, not just as a future adult. Clearly there is a different ideal of
education in these two school. The parents may sit down and write two
lists of the pros and cons of the different schools — and many items on
that list will be functionings or capabilities. Parents choosing between
these two schools will choose different future capability sets for their
children. Although the terminology may not be used, capabilities are at
work in this decision; yet very few people would argue that it is a task
for the government to decide whether children should be sent to schools
focussing on human capital training, or rather on human flourishing.
The scholarship focussing on curriculum design using the capability
approach, or on making us understand the difference between human
capital and human capabilities is doing precisely all of this (Brighouse
2006; Robeyns 2006c; Wigley and Akkoyunlu-Wigley 2006; Walker 2008,
2010, 2012b).
Of course, one could respond to these examples by saying that there
may be capability applications or theories that belong to the private
sphere and that therefore the government is not the (only) agent of
change — yet that capabilitarian political theories, such as theories of
justice, should address the government.
But this response will not do either. As several political theorists
have argued, the question of who should be the agents of justice is
one that needs to be properly discussed and analysed, and it is not
at all obvious that the primary or only agents of justice should be the
government (O. O’Neill 2001; Weinberg 2009; Deveaux 2015). There are
at least three reasons one could give for not giving the government the
main role as agent of change, or indeed any role at all. The first reason
is one’s general ideological commitment as regards political systems.
Anarchism and (right-)libertarian political theories would either give
the government no agency at all, or else only insofar as property rights
need to be protected (Nozick 1974). There is nothing in the structure of
anarchist or libertarian political theories that rules out their adoption
of functionings and capabilities as (part of) the metric of quality of life
that should guide the social and economic institutions that we choose
for our societies. People have very different views on the question of
what can realistically be expected from a government. Just as we need to
take people as they are, we should not work with an unrealistic utopian
account of government. It may be that the capabilitarian ideal society is