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

4. Critiques and Debates
193
interests both scholars who work in the libertarian tradition, as well as
scholars who work in more critical traditions, illustrate this conclusion.
My own personal conviction is that there is ample reason why we
should not adopt a stripped-down view of the roles of social categories
and social structures, and hence include a rich account of power that
is supported by research in anthropology, sociology and other social
sciences. But for everyone advancing a capability theory or application,
it holds that they should defend their implicit social theories, and be
willing to scrutinize them critically.
the political economy?
Capability scholars have been criticised for having the wrong priorities:
by focusing so much on the metric of justice and on human diversity
in the conversion of resources into capabilities, their approach
draws attention away from huge inequalities in terms of resources
(income, wealth) and therefore helps to preserve the (unjust) status
quo. Thomas Pogge (2002) has specifically argued that the capability
approach — Sen’s work in particular — overemphasises the role of
national and local governments, thereby neglecting the huge injustices
created by the global economic system and its institutional structures,
such as global trade rules. Similarly, Alison Jaggar (2002, 2006) has
argued that western philosophers, and Martha Nussbaum’s work on
the capability approach in particular, should not prioritise the analysis
of cultural factors constraining poor women’s lives, or listing what an
ideal account of flourishing and justice would look like, but rather focus
on the global economic order and other processes by which the rich
countries are responsible for global poverty.
Pogge and Jaggar may have a point in their charge that capability
theorists have paid insufficient attention to these issues, which have
been discussed at length in the philosophical literature on global justice.
But one might also argue that this is orthogonal to the issues about which
the capability approach to social justice is most concerned, namely, how
to make interpersonal comparisons of advantage for the purposes of
social justice. One could, quite plausibly, hold the view that, since most
capability theorists are concerned with human wellbeing, they should