Capabilities and Social Justice

Martha Nussbaum

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University of Chicago

Women in much of the world lack support for fundamental func-

tions of a human life. Unequal social and political circumstances
give women unequal human capabilities. This paper critiques
other approaches to these inequalities and offers a version of the
capabilities approach. The central question asked by the capa-
bilities approach is not, “How satisfied is this woman?” “How
much in the way of resources is she able to command?” It is,
instead, “What is she actually able to do and to be?” The core
idea seems to be that of the human being as a dignified free
being who shapes his or her own life, rather than being passively

Note: The present article is closely related to the arguments of my book Women
and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), Introduction and chapter 1, hereafter WHD. The
book also contains detailed discussion of Sen’s views and differences between his
version of the approach and my own. For earlier articulations of my views on capa-
bilities see the following: “Nature, Function, and Capability: Aristotle on Political
Distribution,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (Suppl.) (1988), pp. 145–184;
“Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in R. B. Douglass et al., eds., Liberalism and the
Good (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 203–252; “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristo-
telian Approach,” in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), hereafter QL; “Aristotle on Human Nature and the Founda-
tions of Ethics,” in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, eds., World, Mind and Ethics:
Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1995), pp. 86–131; “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense
of Aristotelian Essentialism,” Political Theory 20 (1992), pp. 202–246; “Human Capa-
bilities, Female Human Beings,” in M. Nussbaum and J. Glover, eds., Women, Culture,
and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 61–104, hereafter WCD; “The
Good as Discipline, the Good as Freedom,” in David A. Crocker and Toby Linden,
eds., Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Lan-
ham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), pp. 312– 411; “Women and Cultural Uni-
versals,” chapter 1 in Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 29–54, hereafter SSJ; and “Capabilities and Human Rights,” Fordham
Law Review 66 (1997), pp. 273–300.

© 2002 International Studies Association

Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.
124 Martha Nussbaum

shaped or pushed around by the world in the manner of a flock

or herd animal. The basic intuition from which the capabilities
approach begins, in the political arena, is that human abilities
exert a moral claim that they should be developed. Capability,

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not functioning, is the appropriate political goal.

It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political

economy come the rich human being and rich human need. The
rich human being is . . . the human being in need of a totality of
human life-activities.
—Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

I found myself beautiful as a free human mind.

—Mrinal, heroine of Rabindranath Tagore’s “Letter from a Wife”
(1914)

I. Development and Sex Equality

W
omen in much of the world lack support for fundamental functions
of a human life. They are less well nourished than men, less healthy,
more vulnerable to physical violence and sexual abuse. They are
much less likely than men to be literate, and still less likely to have preprofes-
sional or technical education. Should they attempt to enter the workplace, they
face greater obstacles, including intimidation from family or spouse, sex dis-
crimination in hiring and sexual harassment in the workplace—all, frequently,
without effective legal recourse. Similar obstacles often impede their effective
participation in political life. In many nations women are not full equals under
the law: they do not have the same property rights as men, the same rights to
make a contract, the same rights of association, mobility and religious liberty.1
Burdened, often, with the “double day” of taxing employment and full respon-
sibility for housework and child care, they lack opportunities for play and the
cultivation of their imaginative and cognitive faculties. All these factors take
their toll on emotional well-being: women have fewer opportunities than men
to live free from fear and to enjoy rewarding types of love—especially when,
as often, they are married without choice in childhood and have no recourse
from a bad marriage. In all these ways, unequal social and political circum-
stances give women unequal human capabilities.

1
For examples of these inequalities see WHD, chapter 3; and my “Religion and
Women’s Human Rights,” in Paul Weithman, ed., Religion and Contemporary Liberal-
ism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 93–137; also in SSJ.
 Capabilities and Social Justice 125

According to the Human Development Report 1999 of the United Nations

Development Programme (UNDP), there is no country that treats its women as
well as its men, in areas ranging from basic health and nutrition to political
participation and economic activity.

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One area of life that contributes especially greatly to women’s inequality is
the area of care. Women are the world’s primary, and usually only, caregivers
for people in a condition of extreme dependency: young children, the elderly,
those whose physical or mental handicaps make them incapable of the relative
(and often temporary) independence that characterizes so-called normal human
lives. Women perform this crucial work, often, without pay and without recog-
nition that it is work. At the same time, the fact that they need to spend long
hours caring for the physical needs of others makes it more difficult for them to
do what they want to do in other areas of life, including employment, citizen-
ship, play and self-expression.2
My aim in this brief presentation will be first to indicate why I believe other
approaches to these inequalities are not fully adequate and the capabilities
approach is needed. Then I shall mention some very general features of the
capabilities approach to show how it can handle the problems other approaches
fail to handle.

II. Deficiencies of Other Approaches

Prior to the shift in thinking that is associated with the work of Amartya Sen,3

2
See Eva Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New
York: Routledge, 1999); Nancy Folbre, “Care and the Global Economy,” background
paper for Human Development Report 1999; Mona Harrington, Care and Equality:
Inventing a New Family Politics (New York: Knopf, 1999); Joan Williams, Unbending
Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
3
The initial statement is in Sen, “Equality of What?” in S. McMurrin, ed., Tanner
Lectures on Human Values, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980),
reprinted in Sen, Choice, Welfare, and Measurement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell; and
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982); see also various essays by Sen in Resources,
Values, and Development (Oxford: Basil Blackwell; and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Black-
well and MIT Press, 1984); and Commodities and Capabilities (Amsterdam: North-
Holland, 1985); see also his “Well-Being, Agency, and Freedom,” The Dewey Lectures
1984, The Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985); “Capability and Well-Being,” in QL,
pp. 30–53; and “Gender Inequality and Theories of Justice,” in WCD, pp. 153–198;
also, his Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Clarendon Press; and Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1992). See also J. Drèze and A. Sen, Hunger and Public
Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and India: Economic Development and Social
Opportunity (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1995).
126 Martha Nussbaum

and with the Human Development Reports of the UNDP,4 the most prevalent
approach to measuring quality of life in a nation used to be simply to ask about
GNP per capita. This approach tries to weasel out of making any cross-cultural
claims about what has value—although, notice, it does assume the universal

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value of opulence. What it omits, however, is much more significant. We are
not even told about the distribution of wealth and income, and countries with
similar aggregate figures can exhibit great distributional variations. (Thus South
Africa always did very well among developing nations, despite its enormous
inequalities and violations of basic justice.) Circus girl Sissy Jupe, in Dickens’s
novel Hard Times, already saw the problem with this absence of normative
concern for distribution. She says that her economics lesson didn’t tell her
“who has got the money and whether any of it is mine.” 5 So too with women
around the world: the fact that one nation or region is in general more prosper-
ous than another is only a part of the story: it doesn’t tell us what government
has done for women in various social classes, or how they are doing. To know
that, we’d need to look at their lives. But then we need to specify, beyond
distribution of wealth and income itself, what parts of lives we ought to look
at—such as life expectancy, infant mortality, educational opportunities, health
care, employment opportunities, land rights, political liberties. Seeing what is
absent from the GNP account nudges us sharply in the direction of mapping out

4
Human Development Reports: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 (New York: United Nations
Development Programme). For related approaches in economics see Partha Dasgupta,
An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Bina
Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994); Sabina Alkire, Operationalizing Amartya Sen’s
Capability Approach to Human Development: A Framework for Identifying Valuable
Capabilities, D. Phil. Dissertation, Oxford University, 1999; S. Anand and C. Harris,
“Choosing a Welfare Indicator,” American Economic Association Papers and Proceed-
ings 84 (1993), pp. 226–249; Frances Stewart, “Basic Needs, Capabilities, and Human
Development,” in Avner Offer, ed., In Pursuit of the Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996); Prasanta Pattanaik, “Cultural Indicators of Well-Being: Some
Conceptual Issues,” in UNESCO, World Culture Report; Culture, Creativity, and Mar-
kets (Paris, UNESCO Publishing, 1998), pp. 333–339; Meghnad Desai, “ Poverty and
Capability: Towards an Empirically Implementable Measure,” Suntory-Toyota Inter-
national Centre Discussion Paper No. 27, London School of Economics Development
Economics Research Program, 1990; Achin Chakraborty, The Concept and Measure-
ment of the Standard of Living, Ph.D. Thesis, University of California at Riverside,
1996. For discussion of the approach see K. Aman, ed., Ethical Principles for Devel-
opment: Needs, Capabilities or Rights (Montclair, N.J.: Montclair State University
Press, 1991); K. Basu, P. Pattanaik, and K. Suzumura, eds., Choice, Welfare, and
Development: A Festschrift in Honour of Amartya K. Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995).
5
See the discussion of this example in Nussbaum and Sen’s “Introduction” to QL.
 Capabilities and Social Justice 127

these and other basic goods in a universal way, so that we can use the list of
basic goods to compare quality of life across societies.
A further problem with all resource-based approaches, even those that are
sensitive to distribution, is that individuals vary in their ability to convert

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resources into functionings. (This is the problem that has been stressed for
some time by Amartya Sen in his writings about the capabilities approach.)
Some of these differences are straightforwardly physical. Nutritional needs vary
with age, occupation and sex. A pregnant or lactating woman needs more nutri-
ents than a nonpregnant woman. A child needs more protein than an adult. A
person whose limbs work well needs few resources to be mobile, whereas a
person with paralyzed limbs needs many more resources to achieve the same
level of mobility. Many such variations can escape our notice if we live in a
prosperous nation that can afford to bring all individuals to a high level of
physical attainment; in the developing world we must be highly alert to these
variations in need. Again, some of the pertinent variations are social, connected
with traditional hierarchies. If we wish to bring all citizens of a nation to the
same level of educational attainment, we will need to devote more resources to
those who encounter obstacles from traditional hierarchy or prejudice: thus
women’s literacy will prove more expensive than men’s literacy in many parts
of the world. If we operate only with an index of resources, we will frequently
reinforce inequalities that are highly relevant to well-being. As my examples
suggest, women’s lives are especially likely to raise these problems: therefore,
any approach that is to deal adequately with women’s issues must be able to
deal well with these variations.
If we turn from resource-based approaches to preference-based approaches,
we encounter another set of difficulties.6 Such approaches have one salient
advantage over the GNP approach: they look at people, and assess the role of
resources as they figure in improving actual people’s lives. But users of such
approaches typically assume without argument that the way to assess the role of
resources in people’s lives is simply to ask them about their satisfaction with
their current preferences. The problem with this idea is that preferences are not
exogenous, given independently of economic and social conditions. They are at
least in part constructed by those conditions. Women often have no preference
for economic independence before they learn about avenues through which
women like them might pursue this goal; nor do they think of themselves as
citizens with rights that were being ignored, before they learn of their rights and

6
Chapter 2 of WHD gives an extensive account of economic preference-based
approaches, arguing that they are defective without reliance on a substantive list of
goals such as that provided by the capabilities approach. Again, this is a theme that has
repeatedly been stressed by Sen in his writings on the topic (see note 3.)
128 Martha Nussbaum

are encouraged to believe in their equal worth. All of these ideas, and the pref-
erences based on them, frequently take shape for women in programs of edu-
cation sponsored by women’s organizations of various types. Men’s preferences,
too, are socially shaped and often misshaped. Men frequently have a strong

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preference that their wives should do all the child care and all the housework—
often in addition to working an eight-hour day. Such preferences, too, are not
fixed in the nature of things: they are constructed by social traditions of privi-
lege and subordination. Thus a preference-based approach typically will reinforce
inequalities: especially those inequalities that are entrenched enough to have
crept into people’s very desires. Once again, although this is a fully general
problem, it has special pertinence to women’s lives. Women have especially
often been deprived of education and information, which are necessary, if by no
means sufficient, to make preferences a reliable indicator of what public policy
should pursue. They have also often been socialized to believe that a lower
living standard is what is right and fitting for them, and that some great human
goods (for example, education, political participation) are not for them at all.
They may be under considerable social pressure to say they are satisfied with-
out such things, and yet we should not hastily conclude that public policy should
not work to extend these functions to women. In short, looking at women’s
lives helps us see the inadequacy of traditional approaches; and the urgency of
women’s problems gives us a very strong motivation to prefer a nontraditional
approach.
Finally, let us consider the influential human rights approach. This approach
has a great deal to say about these inequalities, and the language of rights has
proven enormously valuable for women, both in articulating their demands for
justice and in linking those demands to the earlier demands of other subordi-
nated groups. And yet the rights framework is shaky in several respects. First,
it is intellectually contested: there are many different conceptions of what rights
are, and what it means to secure a right to someone. (Are rights prepolitical, or
artifacts of laws and institutions? Do they belong to individual persons only, or
also to groups? Are they always correlated with duties, and who has the duties
correlated with human rights? And what are human rights rights to? Freedom
from state interference primarily, or also a certain positive level of well-being
and opportunity?) Thus to use the language of rights all by itself is not very
helpful: it just invites a host of further questions about what is being recom-
mended. Second, the language of rights has been associated historically with
political and civil liberties, and only more recently with economic and social
entitlements. But the two are not only of comparable importance in human
lives, they are also thoroughly intertwined: the liberties of speech and associ-
ation, for example, have material prerequisites. A woman who has no opportu-
nities to work outside the home does not have the same freedom of association
as one who does. Women deprived of education are also deprived of much
 Capabilities and Social Justice 129

meaningful participation in politics and speech. Third, the human rights approach
has typically ignored urgent claims of women to protection from domestic vio-
lence and other abuses of their bodily integrity. It has also typically ignored
urgent issues of justice within the family: its distribution of resources and oppor-

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tunities among its members, the recognition of women’s work as work. This
neglect is not accidental, because the rights approach is linked with the tradi-
tion of liberal political philosophy that typically recognizes a distinction between
the public and the private realms, and puts the family off-limits for purposes of
state action. Fourth and finally, the rights approach is often linked with the idea
of negative liberty, and with the idea of protecting the individual from state
action. Although rights of course need not be understood in this way, their
history, at least in the Lockean tradition, does lend itself to that sort of inter-
pretation, and the focus on such areas of negative liberty has been a persistent
obstacle to making progress for women in areas ranging from compulsory edu-
cation to the reform of marriage.

III. Human Dignity and Human Capabilities

I shall now argue that a reasonable answer to all these concerns—capable of
giving good guidance to governments establishing basic constitutional princi-
ples and to international agencies assessing the quality of life—is given by a
version of the capabilities approach.
The central question asked by the capabilities approach is not, “How satis-
fied is this woman?” or even “How much in the way of resources is she able to
command?” It is, instead, “What is she actually able to do and to be?” Taking a
stand for political purposes on a working list of functions that would appear to
be of central importance in human life, users of this approach ask, Is the person
capable of this, or not? They ask not only about the person’s satisfaction with
what she does, but about what she does, and what she is in a position to do
(what her opportunities and liberties are). They ask not just about the resources
that are present, but about how those do or do not go to work, enabling the
woman to function.
To introduce the intuitive idea behind the approach, it is useful to start from
this passage of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written
at a time when he was reading Aristotle and was profoundly influenced by
Aristotelian ideas of human capability and functioning:
It is obvious that the human eye gratifies itself in a way different from the
crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc. . . . .
The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the
starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract
being as food; it could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be
impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals.
130 Martha Nussbaum

Marx here singles out certain human functions—eating and the use of the senses,
which seem to have a particular centrality in any life one might live. He then
claims that there is something that it is to be able to perform these activities in
a fully human way—by which he means a way infused by reasoning and socia-

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bility. But human beings don’t automatically have the opportunity to perform
their human functions in a fully human way. Some conditions in which people
live—conditions of starvation, or of educational deprivation—bring it about
that a being who is human has to live in an animal way. Of course what he is
saying is that these conditions are unacceptable, and should be changed.
Similarly, the intuitive idea behind my version of the capabilities approach
is twofold: first, that there are certain functions that are particularly central in
human life, in the sense that their presence or absence is typically understood to
be a mark of the presence or absence of human life. Second, and this is what
Marx found in Aristotle, that there is something that it is to do these functions
in a truly human way, not a merely animal way. We judge, frequently enough,
that a life has been so impoverished that it is not worthy of the dignity of the
human being, that it is a life in which one goes on living, but more or less like
an animal, not being able to develop and exercise one’s human powers. In
Marx’s example, a starving person just grabs at the food in order to survive, and
the many social and rational ingredients of human feeding can’t make their
appearance. Similarly, the senses of a human being can operate at a merely
animal level—if they are not cultivated by appropriate education, by leisure for
play and self-expression, by valuable associations with others; and we should
add to the list some items that Marx probably would not endorse, such as expres-
sive and associational liberty, and the freedom of worship. The core idea seems
to be that of the human being as a dignified free being who shapes his or her
own life, rather than being passively shaped or pushed around by the world in
the manner of a flock or herd animal.
At one extreme, we may judge that the absence of capability for a central
function is so acute that the person isn’t really a human being at all, or any
longer—as in the case of certain very severe forms of mental disability, or
senile dementia. But I am less interested in that boundary (important though it
is for medical ethics) than in a higher one, the level at which a person’s capa-
bility is “truly human,” that is, worthy of a human being. The idea thus contains
a notion of human worth or dignity.
Notice that the approach makes each person a bearer of value, and an end.
Marx, like his bourgeois forebears, holds that it is profoundly wrong to sub-
ordinate the ends of some individuals to those of others. That is at the core of
what exploitation is, to treat a person as a mere object for the use of others.
What this approach is after is a society in which individuals are treated as each
worthy of regard, and in which each has been put in a position to live really
humanly.
 Capabilities and Social Justice 131

I think we can produce an account of these necessary elements of truly

human functioning that commands a broad cross-cultural consensus, a list that
can be endorsed for political purposes by people who otherwise have very
different views of what a complete good life for a human being would be. The

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list is supposed to provide a focus for quality of life assessment and for political
planning, and it aims to select capabilities that are of central importance, what-
ever else the person pursues. They therefore have a special claim to be sup-
ported for political purposes in a pluralistic society.7
The list is, emphatically, a list of separate components. We cannot satisfy
the need for one of them by giving people a larger amount of another one. All
are of central importance and all are distinct in quality. The irreducible plurality
of the list limits the trade-offs that it will be reasonable to make, and thus limits
the applicability of quantitative cost-benefit analysis.
The basic intuition from which the capability approach begins, in the polit-
ical arena, is that human abilities exert a moral claim that they should be devel-
oped. Human beings are creatures such that, provided with the right educational
and material support, they can become fully capable of these human functions.
That is, they are creatures with certain lower-level capabilities (which I call
“basic capabilities” 8 ) to perform the functions in question. When these capa-
bilities are deprived of the nourishment that would transform them into the
high-level capabilities that figure on my list, they are fruitless, cut off, in some
way but a shadow of themselves. If a turtle were given a life that afforded a
merely animal level of functioning, we would have no indignation, no sense of
waste and tragedy. When a human being is given a life that blights powers of
human action and expression, that does give us a sense of waste and tragedy—
the tragedy expressed, for example, in the statement made by Tagore’s heroine
to her husband, when she says, “I am not one to die easily.” In her view, a life
without dignity and choice, a life in which she can be no more than an append-
age, was a type of death of her humanity.

IV. Functioning and Capability

I have spoken both of functioning and of capability. How are they related?
Getting clear about this is crucial in defining the relation of the “capabilities
approach” to our concerns about paternalism and pluralism. For if we were to

7
Obviously, I am thinking of the political more broadly than do many theorists in
the Western liberal tradition, for whom the nation-state remains the basic unit. I am
envisaging not only domestic deliberations but also cross-cultural quality of life assess-
ments and other forms of international deliberation and planning.
8
See the fuller discussion in WHD, chapter 1.
132 Martha Nussbaum

take functioning itself as the goal of public policy, a liberal pluralist would
rightly judge that we were precluding many choices that citizens may make in
accordance with their own conceptions of the good. A deeply religious person
may prefer not to be well-nourished, but to engage in strenuous fasting. Whether

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for religious or for other reasons, a person may prefer a celibate life to one
containing sexual expression. A person may prefer to work with an intense
dedication that precludes recreation and play. Am I declaring, by my very use
of the list, that these are not fully human or flourishing lives? And am I instruct-
ing government to nudge or push people into functioning of the requisite sort,
no matter what they prefer?
It is important that the answer to this question is no. Capability, not func-
tioning, is the appropriate political goal. This is so because of the very great
importance the approach attaches to practical reason, as a good that both suf-
fuses all the other functions, making them fully human, and also figures, itself,
as a central function on the list. The person with plenty of food may always
choose to fast, but there is a great difference between fasting and starving, and
it is this difference that we wish to capture. Again, the person who has normal
opportunities for sexual satisfaction can always choose a life of celibacy, and
the approach says nothing against this. What it does speak against (for exam-
ple) is the practice of female genital mutilation, which deprives individuals of
the opportunity to choose sexual functioning (and indeed, the opportunity to
choose celibacy as well).9 A person who has opportunities for play can always
choose a workaholic life; again, there is a great difference between that chosen
life and a life constrained by insufficient maximum-hour protections and/or the
“double day” that makes women unable to play in many parts of the world.
Once again, we must stress that the objective is to be understood in terms of
combined capabilities. To secure a capability to a person it is not sufficient to
produce good internal states of readiness to act. It is necessary, as well, to
prepare the material and institutional environment so that people are actually
able to function. Women burdened by the “double day” may be internally inca-
pable of play—if, for example, they have been kept indoors and zealously
guarded since infancy, married at age six, and forbidden to engage in the kind
of imaginative exploration of the environment that male children standardly
enjoy. Young girls in poor areas of rural Rajasthan, India, for example, have
great difficulty learning to play in an educational program run by local activists—
because their capacity for play has not been nourished early in childhood. On
the other hand, there are also many women in the world who are perfectly
capable of play in the internal sense, but who are unable to play because of the
crushing demands of the “double day.” Such a woman does not have the com-

9
See SSJ, chapters 3 and 4.
 Capabilities and Social Justice 133

bined capability for play in the sense intended by the list. Capability is thus a
demanding notion. In its focus on the environment of choice, it is highly atten-
tive to the goal of functioning, and instructs governments to keep it always in
view. On the other hand, it does not push people into functioning: once the

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stage is fully set, the choice is theirs.
One might worry that any approach as committed as is the capabilities
approach to identifying a number of substantive areas of state action, and urg-
ing the state to promote capability in all of these areas by affirmative and not
just negative measures, would ride roughshod over citizens’ liberties and pref-
erences, and thus become ultimately an illiberal approach. There are several
distinct ways in which my version of the capabilities approach tries to meet this
concern. One way is by specifying the capabilities at a high level of generality
and allowing a lot of latitude for different interpretations of a capability that
suit the history and traditions of the nation in question. A free speech right that
works well for the U.S. may not be right for Germany, which has expressed a
commitment to the prohibition of anti-Semitic literature and expression that
seems entirely appropriate, given its history. A second way, as this example
shows, is that the standard political and civil liberties figure prominently within
the content of the capabilities list. But the most important way in which the
approach protects diversity and pluralism, or so it seems to me, is that it aims at
capability rather than actual functioning, at the empowering of citizens rather
than at dragooning them into one total mode of life.

V. Capabilities and Care

Let me now return to the other approaches and briefly indicate how the capabil-
ities approach goes beyond them. It appears superior to the focus on opulence and
GNP, because it (a) treats each and every human being as an end, and (b) explic-
itly attends to the provision of well-being in a wide range of distinct areas of hu-
man functioning. It appears superior to resource-based approaches because it looks
at the variable needs human beings have for resources and the social obstacles that
stand between certain groups of people and the equal opportunity to function. It
provides a rationale for affirmative measures addressing those discrepancies. It
appears superior to preference-based approaches because it recognizes that pref-
erences are endogenous, the creation of laws and institutions and traditions, and
refuses to hold human equality hostage to the status quo. Finally, the approach is
a close ally of the human rights approach and is complementary with some ver-
sions of it. But it has, I believe, a superior clarity in the way in which it defines
both the goal of political action and its rationale. And it makes fully clear the fact
that the state has not done its job if it simply fails to intervene with human func-
tioning: affirmative shaping of the material and social environment is required to
bring all citizens up to the threshold level of capability.
134 Martha Nussbaum

Finally, there is one salient issue on which, or so it seems to me, the capa-
bilities approach goes well beyond all other approaches stemming from the
liberal tradition: this is the issue of care and our need both to receive care and
to give it. All human beings begin their lives as helpless children; if they live

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long enough, they are likely to end their lives in helplessness, whether physical
or also mental. During the prime of life, most human beings encounter periods
of extreme dependency; and some human beings remain dependent on the daily
bodily care of others throughout their lives. Of course putting it this way sug-
gests, absurdly, that “normal” human beings do not depend on others for bodily
care and survival; but political thought should recognize that some phases of
life, and some lives, generate more profound dependency than others.
The capabilities approach, more Aristotelian than Kantian, sees human beings
from the first as animal beings whose lives are characterized by profound need-
iness as well as by dignity. It addresses the issue of care in many ways: under
“life” it is stressed that people should be enabled to complete a “normal” human
life span; under “health” and “bodily integrity” the needs of different phases of
life are implicitly recognized; “sense,” “emotions” and “affiliation” also target
needs that vary with the stage of life. “Affiliation” is of particular importance,
since it mentions the need for both compassion and self-respect, and it also
mentions nondiscrimination. What we see, then, is that care must be provided
in such a way that the capability for self-respect of the receiver is not injured,
and also in such a way that the caregiver is not exploited and discriminated
against on account of performing that role. In other words, a good society must
arrange to provide care for those in a condition of extreme dependency, without
exploiting women as they have traditionally been exploited, and thus depriving
them of other important capabilities. This huge problem will rightly shape the
way states think about all the other capabilities.10
The capabilities approach has a great advantage in this area over traditional
liberal approaches that use the idea of a social contract. Such approaches typ-
ically generate basic political principles from a hypothetical contract situation
in which all participants are independent adults. John Rawls, for example, uses
the phrase “fully cooperating members of society over a complete life.” 11 But
of course no human being is that. And the fiction distorts the choice of princi-

10
See the various proposals in the works cited in the note on the first page of this
article. See also my “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,” a Presidential Address to the
Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, April 22, 2000, to be
published in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.
11
A frequent phrase. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993). For detailed discussion of Rawls’s views on this question see
my “Rawls and Feminism,” Samuel Freeman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rawls,
forthcoming; also, my “The Future of Feminist Liberalism.”
 Capabilities and Social Justice 135

ples in a central way, effacing the issue of extreme dependency and care from
the agenda of the contracting parties, when they choose the principles that
shape society’s basic structure. And yet such a fundamental issue cannot well
be postponed for later consideration, since it profoundly shapes the way social

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institutions will be designed.12 The capabilities approach, using a different con-
cept of the human being, one that builds in need and dependency into the first
phases of political thinking, is better suited to good deliberation on this urgent
set of issues.
The capabilities approach may seem to have one disadvantage, in compar-
ison to some other approaches: it seems difficulty to measure human capabili-
ties. If this difficulty arises already when we think about such obvious issues as
health and mobility, it most surely arises in a perplexing form for my own list,
which has added so many apparently intangible items, such as development of
the imagination, and the conditions of emotional health. We know, however,
that anything worth measuring, in human quality of life, is difficult to measure.
Resource-based approaches simply substitute something easy to measure for
what really ought to be measured, a heap of stuff for the richness of human
functioning. Preference-based approaches do even worse, because they not only
don’t measure what ought to be measured, they also get into quagmires of their
own, concerning how to aggregate preferences—and whether there is any way
of doing that task that does not run afoul of the difficulties shown in the social
choice literature. The capabilities approach as so far developed in the Human
Development Reports is admittedly not perfect: years of schooling, everyone
would admit, are an imperfect proxy for education. We may expect that any
proxies we find as we include more capabilities in the study will be highly
imperfect also—especially if it is data supplied by the nations that we need to
rely on. On the other hand, we are at least working in the right place and
looking at the right thing; and over time, as data-gathering responds to our
concerns, we may expect increasingly adequate information, and better ways of
aggregating that information. As has already happened with human rights
approaches, we need to rely on the ingenuity of those who suffer from depri-
vation: they will help us find ways to describe, and even to quantify, their
predicament.

12
See the excellent argument in Kittay, Love’s Labor.