Can Sen's and Nussbaum's capabilities approach be justified as an approach to social justice?

• Main Author: Chen, X.
• Published: University of Cambridge 2011
• Subjects: 100
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.597514

My thesis offers an internal critique of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s versions of the capabilities approach (CA hereafter) as an approach to social justice. First, I examine the justifications that Sen and Nussbaum provide for their approaches to justice. I argue that neither Sen nor Nussbaum succeeds in providing a successful justification. Their approaches fail to make a good case for certain departures from or kinship with Rawls’ theory. Their justificatory strategies rely on some deficient conception of public reason (or lack thereof). Second, I try to defend a conception of public reason that can provide reasoned justification, which does not assume unjustified boundaries. I examine two dominant models of public reason (i.e., the political liberal model and deliberative model) in contemporary political philosophy and argue that neither can provide reasoned justification for CA. They either assume a very restricted conception of <i>public</i> or fail to give any account of <i>reason-giving</i>. Instead, I argue that a version of Kant’s conception of public reason – which requires that principles that <i>cannot</i> be universalised <i>must </i>be rejected – has the potential to reach the public in the world at large and sets requirements on what counts as reasoned. As such, it may be suitable to provide a reasoned justification for CA that aspires to a cosmopolitan scope. Third, I argue that although Kant’s conception of public reason has only thin modal requirement, it can have substantive implications for social justice. The modal requirement states that a justifiable approach to justice <i>must</i> reject principles that <i>can </i>destroy normative agency – understood as the capacity to choose and pursue a conception of worthwhile life – because they cannot be principles for all. Then, I sketch a vulnerability approach to social justice, which is anchored in protection of normative agency. Finally, I argue that a focus on vulnerabilities tells us more sharply about what social justice requires than Sen’s and Nussbaum’s versions of CA do. The latter suffer from fatal problems and are not adequate approaches to social justice. By contrast, my vulnerabilities approach under the constraints of Kant’s conception of public reason can avoid these problems. It also retains the most important insight of CA (i.e. its focus on the real possibilities for human action) and redirects CA’s philosophical focus on issues of <i>basic</i> justice that Sen vigorously argues for from the very beginning. I conclude that Sen’s and Nussbaum’s versions of CA contain unjustifiable claims of social justice and that my vulnerability approach is a more defensible version of CA.