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

2. Core Ideas and the Framework
53
time. The capability approach could thus also be used by a single person
in her deliberate decision-making or evaluation processes, but these
uses of the capability approach are much less prevalent in the scholarly
literature. Yet all these normative exercises share the property that they
use functionings and capabilities as the evaluative space — the space
in which personal evaluations or interpersonal comparisons are made.
However, this brings us straight to another core property of module
A, namely that functionings and/or capabilities are not necessarily the
only elements of ultimate value. Capabilitarian theories might endorse
functionings and/or capabilities as their account of ultimate value but
may add other elements of ultimate value, such as procedural fairness.
Other factors may also matter normatively, and in most capability
theories these other principles or objects of evaluation will play a role.
This implies that the capability approach is, in itself, incomplete as an
account of the good since it may have to be supplemented with other
values or principles. 30 Sen has been a strong defender of this claim,
for example, in his argument that capabilities capture the opportunity
aspect of freedom but not the process aspect of freedom, which is also
important (e.g. Sen 2002a, 583–622). 31
At this point, it may be useful to reflect on a suggestion made by
Henry Richardson (2015) to drop the use of the word ‘intrinsic’ when
describing the value of functionings and capabilities — as is often
done in the capability literature. For non-philosophers, saying that
something has ‘intrinsic value’ is a way to say that something is much
more important than something else, or it is used to say that we don’t
need to investigate what the effects of this object are on another object.
If we think that something doesn’t have intrinsic value, we would hold
that it is desirable if it expands functionings and capabilities; economic
30 For example, if Henry Richardson (2007) is right in arguing that the idea of
capabilities cannot capture basic liberties, then one need not reject the capability
approach, but instead could add an insistence on basic liberties to one’s capability
theory, as Richardson (2007, 394) rightly points out.
31 This distinction, and its relevance, will be discussed in more detail in section 3.3.