Position
Capability Deprivation
A social structure is unjust when it leaves people below a threshold level of the central human capabilities, whatever resources it distributes to them.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Political Philosophy
Overview
The capability account shifts the measure from what people are given to what they are actually able to do with it. Two people holding identical resources may be unequally placed to convert them into a life worth living, because of disability, social position, or the arrangement of the institutions around them.
Judging structures by resources alone therefore misses the injustice, and judging them by satisfaction misses it too, since people adapt their expectations downward to circumstances they cannot change. Sen's version of the account supplies that space of comparison without fixing a list; the answer given here is the stronger claim that there is a threshold of central capabilities a structure owes everyone, and that falling below it is what the injustice consists in.
Position on
References
- Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999), chs. 1 and 3, which assesses arrangements by the substantive freedoms people have rather than by the resources they hold
- Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011), ch. 2, listing the ten central capabilities
- Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000), ch. 1, arguing that social and political institutions should promote at least a threshold level of the central human capabilities as a decent social minimum