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Brooks on the Capabilities Approach to Distributive Justice

By Lawrence Solum

Thom Brooks (Newcastle University - Newcastle Law School) has posted A New Problem with the Capabilities Approach on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Martha Nussbaum?s influential capabilities approach offers us a powerful, universal standard of justice. The approach builds off of pioneering work by Amartya Sen into economic development. Much of the contemporary interest in the capabilities approach has focussed upon how we might spell out a list of precisely which capabilities must be made universally available and protected, a list that Sen has not provided himself. Nussbaum?s list of capabilities is arguably the most successful attempt at defining these capabilities. In this paper, I will argue for a new problem with the approach that raises new questions about the capabilities approach more generally.

And from the paper:

Yet, if our focus is on the implementation of the capabilities approach in practice, then we may run into a problem of where theory meets practice. It may be that there are no trade-offs between capabilities, but there is the problem of potential with trade-offs concerning resources: no community has infinite wealth and scarce resources must be spent wisely. It remains unclear how we should balance scare resources with maintaining possibilities for capability satisfaction. It may be true that capabilities are noncompetitive, but they may not be noncompetitive from the perspective of public policy decisions. For example, how much should a community spend on a library that no one uses in order to ensure the possibility for capability satisfaction remains open, even if not chosen? How much resource should be spent on a new baseball stadium or cricket grounds that would create widespread enjoyment of the capability to play; but, if erected, it would limit the community?s ability to financially pursue the possibility of other capabilities for its citizens? The response might be that ideally public policy makers should not be forced to choose between how different capabilities are protected, but we live in a non-ideal world. A further response may be that even if we live in a world of scarce resources where choices must be made, the capabilities approach offers us an ideal by which we might measure our progress against such an ideal. However, we might reply that the promise of the approach is often paraded as its sensitivity to actual conditions and its practical utility. These examples again highlight the need to separate less sharply between actual functioning and capability for actual functioning, as well as raising questions anew about the approach?s applicability.

Short & recommended!

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 28, 2010 (boomark / email).