6.3 Capability approach  (Page 5/6)

Vi. two aristotelian notions

• Practical reason infuses all the activities or functions humans share with other things. Thus Aristotle argues that living, eating, growing, reproducing, and perceiving—activities shared with other beings—are made peculiarly human by being integrated throughout with practical reason (phronesis).
• Sociability and responsiveness refer to the Aristotelian doctrine that the human is the political animal. This means that it is in the nature of humans to make and live within social communities referred to by the Greek word, polis. Translating ‘polis’ as city state is as good as any translation but the terms city and state refer to entities that did not exist separately in Aristotle’s Greece. The polis is a self-governing community that provides an environment where humans realize key potentialities (such as affiliation, emotion, and sense/imagination/thought). This doctrine is opposed to the radical individualism of Hobbes and Locke referred by MacPearson as “possessive individualism.” (It is also opposed to Homo Economicus as described by Ghoshal and discussed briefly above.)

Vii. limitations of utilitarianism from the capabilities approach perspective

• “[U]tilitarianism tends to think of the social total, or average, as an aggregate, neglecting the salience of the boundaries between individual lives.”
• “A second problem with utilitarianism is its commitment to the commensurability of value, the concern to measure the good in terms of a single metric and thus to deny that there are irreducibly plural goods that figure in a human life.”
• Preferences, especially those forming the basis of preference utilitarianism, are notoriously subject to deformation that comes about when those deprived of preference satisfactions adjust their desires accordingly lower to meet what is possible.
• (These objections to utilitarianism are set forth in HTR, 281-282.)

Viii. human capabilities and human rights

• Rights are combined capabilities. These are “internal capabilities combined with suitable external conditions for the exercise of the function.” 290 This sense of rights does not capture all senses but those versions which emphasize the correlativity of rights and duties do a good job of spelling out those individuals and social conditions that are necessary for the full exercise of a human right.
• “Rights can be prior to capabilities and a ground for the securing of a capability.” This claims assumes that a right is an “untrained power…that demands or calls for support from the world.” These powers generally sort out into two: “moral reasoning” and “power of moral choice.” So exercising a right assumes a certain set of capabilities like sense/imagination/thought, practical reasoning, and affiliation.
• Nussbaum also talks of rights as if they were basic and combined capabilities. This emphasis material rights to resources or utilities.
• Finally, Nussbaum points out certain important functions carried out by rights language (296). They “remind us that people have justified and urgent claims.” A right “tells people…that we are dealing with an especially urgent set of functions” that belongs to “all humans by virtue of their being human.” Rights language “emphasizes people’s choice and autonomy.” Finally, “Rights talk preserves a sense of the terrain of agreement.”
• These quotations are taken from Martha Nussbaum's article, "Capabilities and Human Rights." Martha C. Nussbaum, Capabilities and Human Rights, 66 Fordham L. Rev. 273 (1997). Available at: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol66/iss2/2