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

2. Core Ideas and the Framework
79
rather defend that everyone should have a genuine opportunity to
live a decent life, but still attribute some responsibility to all persons
for realising that life. Let us call these theorists the O-theorists (O for
opportunity). Both the S-theorists and the O-theorists can agree that
we should understand people’s wellbeing in terms of functionings and
capabilities. The S-theorists and the O-theorists are both capabilitarians.
They have to acknowledge that the other group’s theory is a capability
theory, without having to endorse the other theory. In other words, a
capability theorist can agree that the normative position or theory that
someone else is defending is a capability theory, without having to
endorse that specific theory. There is absolutely no inconsistency in this
situation.
Thirdly, the modular view of the capability approach endorses
the view that Martha Nussbaum’s work on the capability approach
should be understood as a capability theory, that is, a theory in
which specific choices are made regarding the modules. It is not, as
Nussbaum (2011) suggests in her Creating Capabilities, a version of
the capability approach structurally on a par with Sen’s more general
capability approach. What Sen has tried to do in his work on the
capability approach, is to carve out the general capability approach, as
well as to give some more specific capability applications. Admittedly,
Sen’s work on the capability approach (rather than his work on a
variety of capability applications) would have benefited from a more
systematic description of how he saw the anatomy of the capability
approach. To my mind, that has been missing from his work, and that
is what I have tried to develop here and in an earlier paper (Robeyns
2016b). Yet everything put together, I agree with the understanding
of Mozaffar Qizilbash, who concludes an analysis of the difference
between Nussbaum’s and Sen’s work on the capability approach by
saying that “On this reading […] Nussbaum’s capabilities approach
emerges as one particular application or development of Sen’s original
formulation of the approach” (Qizilbash 2013, 38).
It is a mistake to understand the capability literature as a field
with two major thinkers who have each proposed one version
of the capability approach, which have then inspired the work by
many other scholars. Rather, there is only one capability approach