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

40 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
humans — either an account given by a human being herself, or an
account from a third-person perspective — which does not include a
description of a range of human functionings. Yet, not all beings and
doings are functionings; for example, flying like a bird or living for two
hundred years like an oak tree are not human functionings.
In addition, some human beings or doings may not be constitutive
but rather contingent upon our social institutions; these, arguably,
should not qualify as ‘universal functionings’ — that is, functionings
no matter the social circumstances in which one lives — but are rather
‘context-dependent functionings’, functionings that are to a significant
extent dependent on the existing social structures. For example, ‘owning
a house’ is not a universal functioning, yet ‘being sheltered in a safe way
and protected from the elements’ is a universal functioning. One can also
include the capability of being sheltered in government-funded housing
or by a rental market for family houses, which is regulated in such a
way that it does not endanger important aspects of that capability.
Note that many features of a person could be described either as a
being or as a doing: we can say that a person is housed in a pleasantly
warm dwelling, or that this person does consume lots of energy to keep her
house warm. Yet other functionings are much more straightforwardly
described as either a being or a doing, for example ‘being healthy’ (a
being) or ‘killing animals’ (a doing).
A final remark. Acknowledging that functionings and capabilities
are the core concepts of the capability approach generates some further
conceptual questions, which have not all been sufficiently addressed in
the literature. An important question is whether additional structural
requirements that apply to the relations between various capabilities
should be imposed on the capability approach in general (not merely
as a particular choice for a specific capability theory). Relatively little
work has been done on the question of the conceptual properties
of capabilities understood as freedoms or opportunities and on the
question of the minimum requirements of the opportunity set that
make up these various capabilities. But it is clear that more needs to
be said about which properties we want functionings, capabilities, and
capability sets to meet. One important property has been pointed out
by Kaushik Basu (1987), who argued that the moral relevance lies not in
the various capabilities each taken by themselves and only considering