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

2. Core Ideas and the Framework
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Capabilities are real freedoms or real opportunities, which do
not refer to access to resources or opportunities for certain levels of
satisfaction. Examples of ‘beings’ are being well-nourished, being
undernourished, being sheltered and housed in a decent house, being
educated, being illiterate, being part of a supportive social network;
these also include very different beings such as being part of a criminal
network and being depressed. Examples of the ‘doings’ are travelling,
caring for a child, voting in an election, taking part in a debate, taking
drugs, killing animals, eating animals, consuming great amounts of fuel
in order to heat one’s house, and donating money to charity.
Capabilities are a person’s real freedoms or opportunities to achieve
functionings. 19 Thus, while travelling is a functioning, the real
opportunity to travel is the corresponding capability. A person who
does not travel may or may not be free and able to travel; the notion
of capability seeks to capture precisely the fact of whether the person
could travel if she wanted to. The distinction between functionings
and capabilities is between the realized and the effectively possible, in
other words, between achievements, on the one hand, and freedoms or
opportunities from which one can choose, on the other.
Functionings are constitutive of human life. At least, this is a
widespread view, certainly in the social sciences, policy studies, and
in a significant part of philosophy — and I think it is a view that is
helpful for the interdisciplinary, practical orientation that the vast
majority of capability research has. 20 That means one cannot be a human
being without having at least a range of functionings; they make the
lives of human beings both lives (as opposed to the existence of innate
objects) and human (in contrast to the lives of trees or animals). Human
functionings are those beings and doings that constitute human life and
that are central to our understandings of ourselves as human beings.
It is hard to think of any phenomenological account of the lives of
19 See also section 3.3 which discusses in more depth the kind of freedoms or
opportunities that capabilities are.
20 The exceptions are those philosophers who want to develop normative theories
while steering away from any metaphysical claims (that is, claims about how things
are when we try to uncover their essential nature). I agree that the description of
‘functionings’ and ‘capabilities’ in this section makes metaphysical claims, but I
think they are very ‘minimal’ (in the sense that they are not wildly implausible, and
still leave open a wide variety of theories to be developed) and hence we should not
be troubled by these metaphysical assumptions.