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The capabilities approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, evaluates justice and well-being not by income, utility, or resources, but by what people are actually able to do and become — their real freedoms to achieve valuable functionings. Sen leaves the list of relevant capabilities deliberately open, to be determined through democratic deliberation, while Nussbaum proposes a specific list of ten central capabilities (life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses/imagination/thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, control over one's environment) that any just society must guarantee above a threshold. The framework reframes distributive justice from 'what do people have?' to 'what can people actually do and be?'
Compare the capabilities approach to resource-based (Dworkin) and welfare-based (utilitarian) metrics of justice using a concrete case — e.g., two people with identical incomes but different disabilities. Then examine why Sen and Nussbaum diverge on whether to specify a definitive list of capabilities, and what hangs on that choice.
From your study of distributive justice you know the major frameworks: utilitarians maximize aggregate welfare, Rawlsians maximize the minimum share of primary goods, and libertarians protect entitlements regardless of outcomes. The capabilities approach challenges all of these at the level of metric — what is the right currency for measuring how well off a person is? Sen's central insight is that income, wealth, and even subjective welfare all fail to track what actually matters: whether people have real opportunities to live decent human lives.
The key distinction is between resources and capabilities. Give two people identical incomes — one able-bodied, one wheelchair-dependent. They do not have equal opportunities to achieve valuable activities like moving around freely, working, or participating in civic life. The person with a disability requires more resources to achieve equivalent capabilities. Conversely, a person who has been conditioned by social deprivation to desire very little may report high subjective welfare despite objectively poor circumstances — the adaptive preferences problem. Sen argues this makes welfare an unreliable metric: people adapt their desires to their opportunities, so measuring satisfaction systematically undercounts the injustice of deprivation.
A capability in Sen's technical sense is a real freedom — the genuine ability to achieve a valuable functioning (a doing or being: working, being well-nourished, participating politically, enjoying social connections). The distinction between capability and functioning is politically critical. The goal is to secure capabilities, not to require that people exercise them. A fasting person and a starving person may have identical states of nourishment, but one has the capability to eat and chooses not to; the other lacks it. Justice demands securing the capability; it does not prescribe what people do with it.
Nussbaum takes the framework further by proposing ten central capabilities as the content of a minimum floor of justice: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; relationship to other species; play; and control over one's political and material environment. These are non-negotiable minimums — what any just society must guarantee above a threshold — not a complete account of the good life. The list is grounded in an Aristotelian notion of human dignity: these are the capabilities without which a life cannot be recognizably and fully human. Sen deliberately avoids specifying such a list, arguing that the appropriate set of capabilities should be determined through democratic deliberation in each society, preserving political pluralism.
The capabilities approach has been influential in development economics (it underpins the UN Human Development Index) and in theorizing disability, gender inequality, and global justice. Its chief limitation is measurement: capabilities are harder to quantify than income, and identifying what counts as "genuine" capability requires normative judgments that critics argue make the framework indeterminate. But proponents argue this honest complexity is preferable to the false precision of income-based metrics that miss what matters.
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