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

4. Critiques and Debates
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another, e.g. women and men (Kynch and Sen 1983; Nussbaum 2000;
Robeyns 2003, 2006a) or the disabled versus those without disabilities
(Kuklys 2005; Zaidi and Burchardt 2005). Capability theorists have
also written on the importance of groups for people’s wellbeing, like
Nussbaum’s discussion of women’s collectives in India. Several lists of
capabilities that have been proposed in the literature include capabilities
related to community membership: Nussbaum stresses affiliation as
an architectonic capability, Alkire (2002) discusses relationships and
participation, and in earlier work I have included social relationships
(Robeyns 2003). The UNDP (1995, 2004) has produced Human
Development Reports on both gender and culture, thus policy reports
based on the capability approach focus on groups.
The weaker claim states that the present state of the literature on the
capability approach does not pay sufficient attention to groups. I agree
that contemporary mainstream economics is very badly equipped to
account for group membership on people’s wellbeing. But is this also
the case for the capability approach? While some capability theorists
have a great faith in people’s abilities to be rational and to resist social
and moral pressure stemming from groups (e.g. Sen 1999b, 2009b),
other writers on the capability approach pay much more attention to
the influence of social norms and other group-based processes on our
choices and, ultimately, on our wellbeing (e.g. Alkire 2002; Nussbaum
2000; Iversen 2003; Robeyns 2003a). There is thus no reason why the
capability approach would not be able to take the normative and
constitutive importance of groups fully into account. Admittedly,
however, this is a theoretical choice that needs to be made when making
scholarly decisions in modules B3, B5 and C1, hence we may not agree
with the assumptions about groups in each and every capability theory.
If we return to the reasons Stewart gave for a focus on group
capabilities, we notice that the main reason stated is that analysis
of group capabilities is needed to understand outcomes. Yet that is
precisely what the just mentioned capability applications do (since
they do not only measure group inequalities in capabilities but also try
to understand them). Those applications also investigate how group
identities constrain groups to different degrees, or which privileges
they ensure for certain groups. In my reading of the literature, many