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

212 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
capability approach clearly lays out the properties that every capability
theory, application or analysis should meet, and thereby provides a
powerful response to the risk of the inflation of the term ‘capability
theory’.
Having sorted all of this out, we are free to put the capability approach
to good use. It is impossible for one person to know all the interesting
paths that the capability approach should take (even if that one person
benefited from comments and many helpful discussions with others).
But as a start, let me just mention some lines of further thinking, research
and interventions that would be interesting to explore.
First, within the disciplines in which the capability has been discussed
and developed, there are plenty of opportunities to see what difference
it can make if pushed all the way to its limits. In some fields, such as
educational studies, the capability approach is well-developed and
widely applied. But there are others in which the capability approach
has so far merely been introduced, rather than being used to develop
mature and complete theories. One question, which remains unanswered
after our discussion in section 4.10, is whether the capability approach
can provide an equally powerful alternative to utility-based welfare
economics. In the literature on theories of justice, which we discussed
in section 3.13, the capability approach is widely debated, but there
are hardly any fully developed capabilitarian theories of justice, apart
from Nussbaum’s (2006b) and the theory of disadvantage by Wolff
and De-Shalit (2007). We need book-length accounts of capabilitarian
theories of justice, capabilitarian theories of institutional evaluation,
capabilitarian theories of welfare economics, and so forth.
Second, the capability approach is, so far, almost exclusively used
for evaluative and normative purposes — such as studies evaluating
whether certain people are better off than others, studies trying to
propose a certain policy or institution (for the effect it has on people’s
functionings and capabilities) rather than others, or studies arguing
for justice in terms of people’s capabilities. But one could also use
the capability approach for explanatory studies, e.g. to examine which
institutions or policies foster certain capabilities, or using the notions of
functionings and capabilities in the analysis of people’s behaviour and
decision making. For example, labour economists model the decision
about a person’s labour supply — how many hours she would be