Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
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34 <strong>Wellbeing</strong>, <strong>Freedom</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Social</strong> <strong>Justice</strong><br />
a prescriptive analysis. Similarly, Nussbaum’s (2000) book Women <strong>and</strong><br />
Human Development is primarily normative <strong>and</strong> philosophical, but<br />
also includes thick descriptions of how institutions enable or hamper<br />
people’s capabilities, by focussing on the lives of particular women.<br />
What is the value of distinguishing between different uses of<br />
the capability approach? It is important because functionings <strong>and</strong><br />
capabilities — the core concepts in the capability approach — play<br />
different roles in each type of analysis. In quality of life measurement,<br />
the functionings <strong>and</strong> capabilities are the social indicators that reflect a<br />
person’s quality of life. In thick descriptions <strong>and</strong> descriptive analysis, the<br />
functionings <strong>and</strong> capabilities form part of the narrative. This narrative<br />
can aim to reflect the quality of life, but it can also aim to underst<strong>and</strong><br />
some other aspect of people’s lives, such as by explaining behaviour<br />
that might appear irrational according to traditional economic analysis,<br />
or revealing layers of complexities that a quantitative analysis can rarely<br />
capture. In philosophical reasoning, the functionings <strong>and</strong> capabilities<br />
play yet another role, as they are often part of the foundations of a<br />
utopian account of a just society or of the goals that morally sound<br />
policies should pursue.<br />
<strong>The</strong> flexibility of functionings <strong>and</strong> capabilities, which can be applied<br />
in different ways within different types of capability analysis, means that<br />
there are no hard <strong>and</strong> fast rules that govern how to select the relevant<br />
capabilities. Each type of analysis, with its particular goals, will require<br />
its own answer to this question. <strong>The</strong> different roles that functionings<br />
<strong>and</strong> capabilities can play in different types of capability analyses have<br />
important implications for the question of how to select the relevant<br />
capabilities: each type of analysis, with its particular goals, will require<br />
its own answer to this question. <strong>The</strong> selection of capabilities as social<br />
indicators of the quality of life is a very different undertaking from<br />
the selection of capabilities for a utopian theory of justice: the quality<br />
st<strong>and</strong>ards for research <strong>and</strong> scholarship are different, the epistemic<br />
constraints of the research are different, the best available practices in<br />
the field are different. Moral philosophers, quantitative social scientists,<br />
<strong>and</strong> qualitative social scientists have each signed up to a different set<br />
of meta-theoretical assumptions, <strong>and</strong> find different academic practices