SEVEN

From Cosmopolitanism to the Capabilities Approach

What constructive approach to global issues does the tradition suggest? In this chapter I juxtapose the tradition with the political approach I have long defended, a version of the “Capabilities Approach” (hereafter CA). I argue that in most respects my version of the CA fleshes out the insights of the tradition, with its emphasis on the priority of individual entitlements, each individual being an end and none a mere means to the ends of other; its strong defense of the moral importance of the nation; and its insistence that the international realm is richly moral. With regard to the problem we have traced throughout this book, the problem of material need, the CA goes to the heart of the matter, insisting that all entitlements have an economic and social aspect, and that there is no coherent way of separating duties of justice from duties of material aid. With respect to the issue of political liberalism, adumbrated by Grotius but undeveloped in the tradition, the CA also supplies what was missing, seeing political liberalism as appropriate both within each nation and in approaching global political morality. With respect to moral psychology, the CA leaves room for a reasonable political psychology that I have developed over the years in an attempt to supply what the tradition lacked.

In one respect, however, the CA departs very radically from the tradition. This departure cannot possibly be represented as a minor course correction, or a way of making the tradition the best it can be. For the tradition is relentlessly anthropocentric. Not only the dignity of the human being but also the alleged uniqueness of human capacities and the lowness of other species’ capacities are at the very heart of many of its arguments, as they are of Stoicism generally. This anthropocentrism needs a course correction to admit the equal dignity of human beings with severe cognitive disabilities. But it needs more than a course correction if we want to do justice to the claims of sentient beings of other species. Here the tradition must be rejected, and political thought must look for guidance, if it looks for historical guidance at all, to other schools in antiquity—Epicureanism, Neo-Platonism (the vegetarian works of Porphyry and Plutarch), in some ways Aristotle (although he did not develop the ethical implications of his view that all animals are wonderful), and perhaps the vague ideas of Diogenes the Cynic—that understood that many species are worthy of wonder and awe, and that this wonder generates moral claims.

The CA has many anthropocentrists among its defenders. Indeed its other name is the “Human Development Approach,” its international association the Human Development and Capability Association, and its journal the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. Anthropocentrists can still extend concern to other animals instrumentally. But in developing a version of the view in which non-human animals have intrinsic importance as ends, I am diverging from many of my colleagues.

I. The CA: Motivations and Claims

The CA was first advanced by Amartya Sen as a new account of the proper way to make comparisons of welfare among nations.¹ The standard measure had been gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Sen argued that this measure neglects distribution, giving high marks to nations that contain large inequalities (including inequalities correlated with race and gender). It also neglects the rich plurality of human life: the things human beings have reason to value are enormously plural, and not commensurable along a single metric. Moreover, their availability does not simply increase as a function of GDP. A nation may increase its GDP without doing anything for political rights and liberties, and it may also increase its GDP in ways not directly related to improvements in health and education. (Sen’s comparative field studies of the different Indian states showed this lack of correlation, since health and education are areas left by India’s constitution to the states, and they have adopted a range of different approaches—some focusing on increasing GDP, and some focusing, as well, on direct action in those two areas.)

Both Sen and I have also insisted that there are grave deficiencies in the other most common comparative metric for welfare, namely the satisfaction of preferences. That metric has the same two problems as GDP: for again, distribution is neglected; and preferences, properly understood, are plural and non-commensurable. But it has two additional problems. First, people who are deprived may adjust to their living standard and actually not want the things that life has put out of reach, exhibiting what the literature calls “adaptive preferences.” People don’t like too much unrealized longing, so they tailor their expectations to what they think they can reasonably hope to achieve. This is all the more true when people belong to a subordinated group for whom definite and limited expectations are decreed from birth: they may not protest the absence of equal conditions if they think that such demands are inappropriate for a “good woman,” and so on. Finally, satisfaction is a state of a person. It does not involve activity, and can be present even when the person is not doing anything active at all. Robert Nozick’s famous “experience machine” makes the point that we would all prefer to live and act ourselves, rather than to be plugged into a machine that merely gave the satisfactions associated with those doings.

Another common approach is based on the distribution of all-purpose resources such as income and wealth. As Sen has long emphasized, this approach may be somewhat better than the two I have just rejected, if the distribution is adequate, and in many contexts all-purpose resources such as income and wealth can be used by people to achieve many distinct things that they value. But the problem is that people have varying needs for resources if they are to come up to the same level of ability to function. A child needs more protein than an adult. A person belonging to a traditionally deprived group may need more expenditure of resources to achieve the same level of opportunity in a society that imposes obstacles. So while resource-based approaches have a pleasing appearance of neutrality, they bias the approach in favor of those already positioned to use resources without impediment.

Given all this, we have proposed that the best approach focuses on people’s substantial freedoms to choose things that they value. The right question to ask is, “What are you able to do and be, in areas of importance in your life?” and the answer to that question is the account of that person’s “capabilities.” As I recorded in Chapter 3, I have distinguished three different types of capabilities. First, there are basic capabilities, the innate equipment that is the basis for further development. Second are internal capabilities, abilities of a person developed through care and nurture. Developing internal capabilities already requires social resources. But a person might have these inside, so to speak, and still not be fully capable of choice and action: might, for example, be capable of political speech but denied the chance to act politically. So, the really important type of capability for a decent society is what I call combined capabilities, internal capabilities plus external conditions that make choice available.

Thus far, capabilities specify a space of comparison, and that is the main use of the approach in Sen’s work, as in the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme of which he was a leading architect. But in keeping with my interest in theories of justice and in constitution-making, I have gone further, using the idea of capabilities to describe a partial approach to basic justice. For that purpose, of course, we must get definite about content—as users of the approach comparatively do already in their choice of examples. I have proposed a list of ten capabilities that must be secured up to a minimum threshold level, if a nation is to have any claim to justice:

The Central Human Capabilities

• 1. LIFE. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.
• 2. BODILY HEALTH. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.
• 3. BODILY INTEGRITY. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.
• 4. SENSES, IMAGINATION, AND THOUGHT. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a “truly human” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain.
• 5. EMOTIONS. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger.² Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.)
• 6. PRACTICAL REASON. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)
• 7. AFFILIATION.

A. Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.)

B. Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails provisions of non-discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.

• 8. OTHER SPECIES. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.
• 9. PLAY. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.
• 10. CONTROL OVER ONE’S ENVIRONMENT.

A. Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association.

B. Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

This list, humble and revisable, is an abstract template that can be further specified in accordance with a particular nation’s history and material circumstances. It was formulated in part by studying the constitutions of nations such as India and South Africa that have focused intensely on human dignity, and it can be used similarly to ground projects of constitution-making or basic legislation. Thresholds will rightly be set aspirationally, but not so as to demand the impossible. I have also argued, however, that the global community has obligations to help poorer nations meet their capability demands in whatever way is feasible. (Chapter 6 shows how difficult it is to figure this out.)

The threshold for some capabilities (political speech, participation, and so on) is already unitary across the world, in the sense that there is an evolving shared understanding of what these capabilities require. It is to be hoped that the threshold for the more circumstance-dependent ones, such as education and health, can in due course converge, since all are held to be entitlements inherent in the notion of a life worthy of human dignity.

The CA is described as a partial approach to justice both because it is silent about other things a nation needs (national defense and security, for example, and reasonable freedom from corruption), and because it makes no commitments about how inequalities above the (high) threshold will be treated. (Where some capabilities are concerned, the right threshold already requires equality: voting rights, religious liberty, and so forth. Where others are concerned, to aim at complete equality seems to me to fetishize material goods too much, and a generous threshold seems a reasonable target; but we may still feel the need to say more in due course about over-threshold inequalities.³)

Taking a cue from both Aristotle and Grotius, I argue that practical reason and affiliation are especially central, both pervading and organizing all the others. Thus an adequate diet or health-care system will be one designed to respect choice and the needs of human sociability.

II. Justice and Material Aid: No Bifurcation

One of the CA’s most central contentions is that material entitlements—to education, to health care, to bodily integrity—are every bit as important for a life commensurate with human dignity as are the entitlements typically covered under the “duties of justice”: rights to freedom of speech, conscience, and association, as well as rights of political participation. The capabilities list mingles the two (alleged) types, making no bifurcation. Thus, although the CA is closely linked to the international human rights movement, it refuses as ill-conceived that tradition’s division of entitlements into “civil and political rights” and “economic and social rights,” with the former figuring as “first-generation rights,” the latter as rights of the “second generation.” This bifurcation may betray the residual influence of the less salutary parts of our tradition. Adam Smith already used the language of capabilities to describe the material basis of a flourishing human life, and contemporary capability theorists can draw on his rich insights.

But the CA goes yet further, insisting that all entitlements cost money to convey and protect, and that this dependence upon money renders all entitlements “economic and social.” We have to tax people to have a system of liberties, a system of contracts, courts that vindicate freedoms of many sorts. As we’ve seen, Cicero already insisted that inaction did not fulfill the duties of justice—so he was implicitly authorizing a large money-raising enterprise, although he did not comment on how this enterprise would be carried out. All human functions inherent in the idea of a life commensurate with human dignity cost money. The only question is how to raise the funds fairly, and how to allocate them fairly.

Wherever we end up with respect to global duties of material aid—and Chapter 6 has argued that this is a complicated issue, given problems of paternalism and inefficacy—we must not approach these issues with the erroneous bifurcation of duties. If we follow the CA, we will not do so.

III. The Nation and International Society

The CA is understood to be a template for constitution-making, or for fundamental legislation in nations that lack a written constitution. It prescribes entitlements that are argued to be inherent in the very idea of a life commensurate with human dignity, and it suggests that if the arguments are found sound, every single nation has a reason to implement the list in some form. It is designed to be implemented somewhat differently in different places, in accordance with their histories and economic realities. But at some level, the arguments are about what human dignity requires, and those arguments do not apply more or less in one place or another.

National autonomy is protected primarily by making the implementation of the list a matter of sovereign national choice. The space between nations is full of moral arguments, and the arguments backing the CA are certainly by now prominent in that space; they ought to influence nations, above all through the work of their own citizens. If citizens can be helped in their efforts by pointing to an emerging international consensus, so much the better, as with the international women’s movement, discussed in Chapter 6. We may also point out that lots of room is left for nations to specify an abstract capability somewhat differently, and, naturally, to add things that are not on the list. Furthermore, the fact that the list centrally commends the freedoms of speech, conscience, and association gives reason for confidence that the autonomy of citizens making and choosing their own laws will not be eroded by the persuasive power of the approach. Thus it cannot plausibly be described as a paternalistic imposition.

In international society, the CA favors debate and persuasion and opposes paternalistic intervention into the politics of sovereign nations, where these meet a minimum threshold of legitimacy. It thus seeks a Grotian type of international society, in which there is a role for some enforceable agreements, but far more room for moral argument and persuasion, directed at mobilizing citizens to strive internally for justice. The Human Development and Capability Association, which publishes the journal mentioned earlier and holds annual meetings, each year in a different region of the world, is designed as a public forum for persuasive argument on all issues connected to the CA, including refining and contesting it.

IV. Political Liberalism at Home and Abroad

My version of the CA is formulated in terms of political liberalism: it is a partial conception of human welfare, endorsed for political purposes, not a comprehensive doctrine of the good human life.⁴ The hope is that in due course the political doctrine can command an overlapping consensus of the many reasonable comprehensive doctrines.

My arguments in favor of political liberalism are a very important part of my overall argument for the CA, since only those arguments will show that the CA can show respect for reasonable citizens, by respecting the space within which they express and live by their comprehensive doctrines, religious or secular.⁵

John Rawls made the case for political liberalism as a good choice for the nations of Europe and North America, since they endured the wars of religion. His hope for an eventual overlapping consensus made reference to this historical specificity. I have argued, however, that the same facts that make political liberalism an attractive choice for Europe and North America also commend it to all nations, since all nations of the world today contain basically the same number and even the same list of comprehensive doctrines that a single large Western nation such as the United States does today. At the margins there may be some differences: thus there might be nations that contain no Jains or Parsis, for example. But since any individual might conceivably migrate to any country, we cannot assume that the parties to the overlapping consensus are different even in these unusual cases. And the very same facts that lead Rawls to commend political liberalism for Europe pertain to non-Western nations as well. All have seen that in the absence of brutal repression many different religious and secular comprehensive doctrines will emerge, and not collapse (as was once envisaged) into a single doctrine. So there is nothing about India or Argentina that makes the arguments for political liberalism work differently from the way they work in Germany or Spain.⁶

When we reach global international society, the same facts hold, and even more so, since global society contains, in addition to the many religious and secular comprehensive doctrines, a plurality of national cultures. So it would be right, for similar reasons, to formulate the operative principles of international society in the free-standing way chosen by Grotius, and later by the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—not grounding the moral principles in any single comprehensive doctrine, but justifying them internally, from moral premises implicit in the shared global culture, principles that can in principle command, over time, an overlapping consensus. Grotius already saw how crucial this was, and the framers of the Universal Declaration agreed. This abstemiousness is all the more important, given the central role of the nation in our international global conception. Nations must retain political autonomy and self-determination. They may be asked to converge on some essentials of what it takes to respect human dignity—as the international human rights movement does. But the list should remain thin, and, as I argued in Chapter 6, its implementation must belong almost entirely to the nations themselves. The CA is out there in international society, and it can direct persuasive and solidaristic movements aiming at political change. But it would be utterly wrong to use it as a weapon to dragoon recalcitrant nations into obedience—except in the rare Grotian cases of genocide, torture, and gross crimes against humanity.

V. Challenging the Basis: Many Beings, Many Types of Dignity

The tradition is relentlessly anthropocentric, and it typically locates the core of dignity in the possession of moral reasoning and the capacity for choice. These two commitments were connected, since it was the high valuation of moral reasoning power as the key value, and source of the rational order of the universe, that led to the singling out of human beings as the only beings who have this power inside themselves. No doubt it was also special pleading on behalf of humanity that led to the emphasis on moral reasoning, since that seemed to be the distinctive trait of humans.

I have suggested that we need not make this connection, and should not. We may value humanity as an end while not locating all worth in the power of moral reasoning, but instead seeing dignity in a wide range of human abilities and human lives. Since we do not accept Stoic metaphysics, according to which the entire universe is animated by moral choice, we have no metaphysical reason to give that ability priority over others, and we have strong moral reasons not to, in a commitment to respect the dignity, and equal dignity, of people with severe cognitive disabilities. We may conclude, as I do, that at least some human capacities must be present in order for a being to be treated as equal—thus a person in a persistent vegetative state, or perhaps an anencephalic child, would not count. But perception, emotional capacities, and the ability to move are all human capacities, and some cluster of them is sufficient for equal respect.

Thus far, the tradition must be revised but need not be rejected—although respecting the equal dignity of people with disabilities will lead us, as we develop the CA in that direction, to reject some standard approaches rooted in the classical social contract tradition.⁷

Beyond this point, however, we must do more than correcting—at least if we wish to take the CA in the direction in which I have been pushing it.⁸ I have argued that dignity can be found in many different varieties.⁹ All sentient beings strive to flourish, and all these forms of striving inspire wonder, respect, and awe. Although dignity is, as I believe, a very vague notion, it is closely connected to these moral responses, and it has the vague content of being an end, not a mere means for the ends of others. It seems wrong to see dignity in our own particular type of animal life-form and not in those of other animals. What could the possible basis be for such a judgment? Humans are better at some things, but certainly not at all things. Many animals are stronger and swifter; many have superior vision, hearing, and smell; some have spatial perception vastly superior to our own. There are certainly other creatures who exhibit altruism and even culture. If humans do seem capable of some types of moral evaluation that other creatures don’t share, we also commit hideous wrongs against our own kind (war, slavery, systematic rape and torture) in a way unparalleled in the other species. So as far as I can see, if humans have dignity it is in virtue of having complicated capacities for a sentient life that strives for flourishing. But that is true of other animals as well.

The idea of justice thus becomes, so to speak, not just horizontal, extending over the entire globe, but also, so to speak, vertical (though this is something of a misnomer, since no animals are lower or higher than others in the evaluative sense), extending into the depths of the oceans and high up into the air, and embracing many different creatures. The challenge of refashioning justice with the whole world of sentient beings in view is a difficult one, and it takes us away, for the most part, from the Stoics—who thought of animals as “brute beasts”¹⁰—and toward other schools of thought in antiquity, if we want to search for ancient Greek and Roman sources. The late Platonists developed an elaborate account of our ethical duties to animals, and the De Abstinentia ab esu animalium (On abstaining from animal flesh) of Porphyry and the vegetarian works of Plutarch still offer very rich guidance in this area. Another type of guidance is offered by Aristotle, who does not have an account of our ethical duties to animals, but who was one of history’s greatest biologists, and who does position humans as a type of animal alongside other animals, sharing with other end-directed creatures a “common explanation” of motion through desire and cognition.¹¹ His instruction to his students to react with wonder to the complex ordering of all animal lives is the start of my ethical project in the CA.¹² Another fruitful source is the Epicurean tradition, which sees the locus of value as the sentient body, and emphasizes the kinship of all bodies. This tradition did not have an ethics of vegetarianism or good animal treatment, but it did ultimately inspire the first modern advocate of animal rights in the Western tradition, Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

And once again the eclectic philosopher Cicero stands out for his insight and good sense: for he strenuously objected to gladiatorial games employing elephants, approving of and joining a popular protest on the grounds that elephants have a commonality (societas) with the human species.¹³ Here as elsewhere, Cicero’s Stoic affiliations did not stop him from grasping something true; perhaps his allegiance to the Platonic academy, rather than the Stoic school, gave him the requisite freedom of ethical judgment.

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Obviously enough, a tradition is a good guide to philosophers of today only if we are alert to its weaknesses and deficiencies. We learn by grappling with it and finding it wanting, as well as by appreciating the insights it continues to offer. I have written this book to try to bring forward the tradition’s valuable insights as well as to illustrate its shortcomings. Now, armed with what we have learned, we need to approach the imperiled world of nature with scientific fact and philosophical imagination, and continue our work. The gates of the cosmic city must open to all.