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

86 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
considerations in its evaluations, which are ‘borrowed’ from other
approaches or theories. For example, the broader use of the capability
approach often pays attention to other normative considerations
and other values than only wellbeing, such as efficiency, agency, or
procedural fairness.
The broad view would, in most cases, have a more ambitious purpose
for its use of the capability approach, such as societal evaluation or policy
design. It would also have (either implicit or explicit) richer theories
of human diversity, agency and structural constraints, and — most
importantly — add several additional ontological and explanatory
theories (module C1) and additional normative principles (module C4).
The narrow view does not include modules C1 and C4, and this can
make a huge difference to the kind of capability theory that emerges.
An example of the broad view is David Crocker’s (2008) book on
development ethics, in which he has extended the capability approach
with accounts of agency, democratic deliberation and participation
into a more detailed account of development ethics. Yet Crocker
acknowledges that not all versions of the capability approach embrace
agency so explicitly. The capability approach proper need not endorse
a strong account of agency, but there are several scholars who have
developed particular capability theories and applications in which
agency plays a central role (e.g. Claassen and Düwell 2013; Claassen
2016; Trommlerová, Klasen and Leßmann 2015).
Why is this difference between the narrow and the broad uses of
the capability approach relevant and important? There are several
important reasons. First, to assess a critique of the capability approach,
we need to know whether the critique addresses the capability approach
in its narrow use, or rather a specific version of its broad use. Second, we
need to be clear that many of the additional normative commitments in
the broad use of the capability approach are not essential to the capability
approach: rather, they are optional choices made in modules B and,
especially, module C1 (additional ontological and explanatory theories)
and module C4 (additional normative principles and concerns). This
insight will also be important when we address the question, in section
4.9, of whether we can simply talk about ‘the capability approach’ and
‘the human development paradigm’ as the same thing.