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

4. Critiques and Debates
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agents have, as Onora O’Neill (2001) has advocated. Devaux (2015,
127–28) argues that in the case of justice related to global poverty,
the moral agency of the poor stems from their experience of living in
poverty. This may not only make them more effective as political agents
in some contexts, but it might also lead to the poor endorsing a different
political agenda, often focussing on empowerment, rather than merely
reducing poverty understood in material terms. This is in tune with the
earlier-mentioned research by Ibrahim (2006, 2009) and Conradie (2013)
on self-organisation by the poor.
It has not been my aim in this section to defend a particular way to
answer the question of who should be the agent(s) of justice. Rather,
my goal has been much more limited — namely, to show that it is not
at all self-evident that a capabilitarian political theory, let alone another
type of capabilitarian theory or application, would always posit the
government as the only agent of change, or the primary agent of change.
Pace what Nussbaum (2011) claims on this issue, there is no reason
why this should be the case, and there are many good reasons why we
should regard our answer to this question as one that requires careful
reasoning and consideration — and ultimately a choice that is made in
module B and module C, rather than a fixed given in module A.
At the beginning of this century, an often-heard critique at academic
meetings on the capability approach was that “the capability approach
is too individualistic”. This critique has been especially widespread
among those who endorse communitarian philosophies, or social
scientists who argue that neoclassical economics is too individualistic,
and believe that the same applies to the capability approach (e.g. Gore
1997; Evans 2002; Deneulin and Stewart 2002; Stewart 2005). The main
claim would be that any theory should regard individuals as part of
their social environment, and hence agents should be recognised
as socially embedded and connected to others, and not as atomised
individuals. Very few scholars have directly argued that the capability
approach is too individualistic, but a few have stated it explicitly.
Séverine Deneulin and Frances Stewart (2002, 66) write that “the
[capability] approach is an example of methodological individualism”