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

182 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
better reached by a coordinated commitment to individual action or by
relying on market mechanisms. Adherents of public choice theory would
stress that giving the government the power to deliver those goods
will have many unintended but foreseeable negative consequences,
which are much more important than the positive contributions the
government could make. 3
A second reason why capabilitarian political theories may not
see the government as the only, or primary, agent of justice, relates
to the distinction between ideal theories of justice (which describe
those normative principles that would be met in a just world, and the
institutions that would meet those principles) versus non-ideal theory
(which describes what is needed to reduce injustices in the world in
which we live). 4 In several areas of the world, governmental agents
are involved in the creation of (severe) economic and social injustice,
either internationally or against some of its own minorities, or — in
highly repressive states — against the vast majority of the population
(e.g. Hochschild 1999; Roy 2014). The government is then more part of
the problem than part of the solution, and some would argue that it
is very naive to construct capabilitarian political theories that simply
assume that the government will be a force for the good (Menon 2002).
Similarly, some political philosophers have argued that in cases of
injustice in which the government doesn’t take sufficient action, as in
the case of harms done by climate change, duties fall on others who are
in a position to ‘take up the slack’ or make a difference (Karnein 2014;
Caney 2016).
The third reason why capabilitarian political theories may not see
the government as the only, or primary, agent of justice, relates to the
question of how we decide to allocate the responsibility for being the
agent of change. 5 As Monique Devaux points out, we can attribute
moral and political agency derived from our responsibility in creating
the injustice (a position advocated by Thomas Pogge (2008) in his work
on global poverty) or because of the greater capacities and powers that
3 For an introduction to the public choice literature, see Mueller (2003).
4 On the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theories of justice, see e.g. Swift
(2008); Stemplowska (2008); Robeyns (2008a); Valentini (2012).
5 The second and third reasons may sometimes both be at work in an argument to
attribute agency to a particular group or institutions.