Capabilities Approach to Distributive Justice

One of the central claims of the capabilities approach is that when people are situated differently and have different levels of needs and expectations, certain rights-claims can be better understood as claims regarding equal level of capabilities to function than simply, for example, the equal rights to resources, which may turn out to be unequal in real terms. Thus, one important idea of this approach to distributive justice is to enrich the discourse on equality by reframing the notion of human rights from being empty rhetoric of entitlements to ideas concerning institutional and material arrangements that are conducive to achieving a certain measure of a full human life. The approach has been developed by Harvard economist and philosopher Amartya Sen and later endorsed and expanded by the University of Chicago law professor and ethicist Martha Nussbaum. For Sen and Nussbaum, seeing rights as capabilities has some helpful advantages in that it indicates that all human rights have broader economic and social dimensions because the capabilities approach emphasizes the actual ability to do or to be. The rights talk in itself does not clarify what is needed to make those rights a reality unless they are understood as securing effective measures to make people capable of appropriate functioning in those areas involving needed material and institutional support. It is thus not helpful to rely on the usual distinction between political and civil rights on the one hand and economic and social rights on the other. Another advantage of the capabilities language over rights talk is that because functioning of the central human capabilities is culturally neutral and sufficiently universal, cross-cultural agreement on basic entitlements is easier to obtain than when the politically and culturally loaded concept of rights is used.

The capabilities approach agrees with John Rawls in not accepting the amount of material wealth for a country (the analog of the gross national product per capita as the model for a country's development or prosperity) or the utility principle for assessing quality of life or human development, as these measures fail to adequately account for the fairness issues in distributive justice. John Rawls, the Harvard political philosopher, is credited with the most influential formulation of the notion of distributive justice in recent times. Rawls defended liberal egalitarian principles of justice among fellow members of a single society as the social contract that would result from hypothetical deliberations in which members of a society assumed to be self-sufficient seek to pursue their individual interests in ignorance of the nature of their goals and resources. This conception of justice, known as justice as fairness in contemporary political philosophy, stipulates that in a just society people should have equal access to social advantages that, in Rawlsian terminology, are primary social goods such as liberty, opportunity, and wealth, unless an unequal access or distribution is to everyone's advantage. Because capabilities approach specifies that capabilities are integrated together for maximal human functioning, both Sen and Nussbaum claim that the Rawlsian primary goods should be understood in terms of central human capabilities. This way, it gives the Rawlsian conception the latitude it needs without making it too thin or abstract.

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