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

62 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
may be constrained by a method of moral justification for categorically
binding principles, which is much more demanding than a method
that justifies principles we offer to each other as rationally defensible
proposals in the public realm. At the empirical and policy level, similar
questions arise. For example, one could take the international human
rights treaties as reflecting a given political consensus, and use those to
select capabilities (Vizard 2007). Or, one’s main goal may be to analyse
what difference the capability approach makes for poverty or inequality
analysis in comparison with income metrics, in which case one may opt
for a method that makes the normativity explicit but nevertheless stays
close to existing practices in the social sciences, assuming the epistemic
validity of those practices (Robeyns 2003).
The second factor determining which selection procedure is suitable
is the set of constraints one takes as given in the normative analysis one is
making. In an ideal world, there would always be cooperation between
scholars with different disciplinary expertise, who would understand
each other well, and who would be able to speak the language of the
other disciplines involved in developing the capability theory. In an
ideal world, there would also be no time constraints on the amount of
time one has to develop a capability theory, and no financial constraints
on the data gathering, or social, psychological or political constraints
on the types of question one can ask when conducting a survey. One
would be able always to conduct one’s own fieldwork if one wanted,
one would have access to all the empirical knowledge one needed, and
one would not be constrained in gathering the information one wanted
to gather. Clearly, the methods for such an ideal world would be very
different from the methods that are used in practice — where databasedriven
selection may be the best one can do.
Still, whichever method one uses, what always remains important,
and very much in the spirit of the capability approach, is not to act in a
mechanical way, or to see the question of the selection of dimensions as
a technocratic exercise. Even if one cannot, for example, collect certain
data, one could nevertheless still mention the dimensions that one would
have wanted to include if it had been possible, and perhaps provide
some reasonable informed guess of what difference the inclusion of that
dimension would have made.