Martha Nussbaum and the Capacities Approach to Social Justice

Martha Nussbaum: Recognized Thinker and the Problem of Social Justice

• Distinguishing the Philosopher: It is often difficult to distinguish the genuine philosopher from the sophist.
      * Marx's Notion of the Ideologue: Refers not to a philosopher, but to an intellectual who fights for revolution in the field of ideas.
      * Gramsci's Notion of the Organic Intellectual: Refers to ideologues who fight not for revolution, but against it, in defense of current power structures.
      * Current Perspective: It is hard to determine which contemporary authors will remain as the most prominent thinkers of our time, as we lack perspective.
• Martha C. Nussbaum ($1947$): A New Yorker thinker currently recognized internationally. Being Anglo-Saxon is relevant: her theoretical position is an heir to the liberal tradition, reformulated through an Aristotelian reading.
• Current Global Context: After the fall of the Berlin Wall in $1989$, the Anglo-Saxon mentality has imposed itself globally.
      * Current Doctrines: Animalism (Peter Singer), Antispecism (Richard Ryder), Antihumanism / Emolivists (David Benatar), Queer Theory (Judith Butler / Michel Foucault).
      * Postmodernity vs. Nussbaum: These doctrines often represent a rupture with the Enlightenment project. Nussbaum, however, maintains the liberal tradition's claim that theory can illuminate action within certain limits.

Biographical Sketch and Academic Influence

• Early Life and Education: Born in NYC to a wealthy Protestant family as Martha Craven.
      * Studied Theater and Classics at NYU.
      * Doctorate in Law and Ethics from Harvard in $1975$.
• Personal Life: Married linguist Alan Nussbaum in $1969$ (divorced $1987$); they had one daughter. She converted to Judaism during these years.
• Activism: Her civil rights activism in her youth led to clashes with her conservative father.
• Academic Success: Taught at Harvard, Brown, Oxford, and Chicago.
      * The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy: Reclaims Aristotle's superiority over Plato's idealism due to Aristotle's consideration of human fragility/vulnerability.
• Collaborations: In the $1980s$, she began working with Indian economist Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize $1998$) on development and ethics. Together, they developed the "Capacities Approach."
• Media and Institutional Recognition:
      * Media success in radio, TV, and press.
      * Over $30$ honorary doctorates.
      * Awards: Princesa d’Astúries Prize for Social Sciences ($2012$), Balzan Prize for Moral Philosophy ($2022$).
      * Collaboration with United Nations (World Institute for Development Economics Research).

Thinking Basic Social Justice from the Concrete

• Critique of Traditional Indicators: For decades, international organizations used quantitative indicators like GDP (PIB) to measure quality of life.
      * GDP Flaw: It increases even when intolerable inequalities persist. Calculations based only on GDP encourage countries to seek growth without improving conditions for the poorest subjects.
      * The Statistical Trap (Example): If one person consumes half a chicken a day and another consumes zero, the statistic says the average is a quarter chicken. If the first's consumption rises to two chickens and the second's remains zero, the statistic shows progress (one chicken average), which is false and unjust.
• The Counter-Theory: The Capacities Approach:
      * Fundamental Question: "What are people actually capable of doing and being?" and "What real opportunities do they have?"
      * Purpose: To orient public policies toward effectively improving people's lives based on values like equality and dignity.
• Methodological Decision: Individual Cases: A theory for improvement must start with personal stories to observe factors enabling life improvements.

The Case of Vasanti: A Detailed Illustration

• Context: A woman from Gujarat, India. She was malnourished and abused by an alcoholic/gambling husband.
• Specifics: Her husband had a vasectomy to receive a government economic incentive, leaving her without children to help. She eventually divorced.
• Turning Point: Her brothers took her in (rare cases), lent her money for a sewing machine, and she prospered thanks to a credit from SEWA (an NGO founded by Ela Bhatt). She became an activist.
• Eight Factors of Oppression Revealed:
      1. Malnutrition (poverty and gender discrimination).
      2. Legislation on property/inheritance (discriminatory).
      3. Illiteracy (educational lack).
      4. Domestic violence.
      5. Access/lack of access to credit.
      6. Impossibility of female friendship/social circles (especially in lower castes).
      7. Lack of leisure activities.
      8. Inability to control/plan one's own life.

The Capacities Approach: A New Framework

• Core Principles:
      1. Treats each person as an end in themselves (not averages).
      2. Focuses on freedom/choice: Societies promote opportunities; individuals decide whether to exercise them.
      3. Pluralistic regarding values: Capacities are qualitatively different; they cannot be measured on a single numerical scale.
      4. Addresses structural inequalities (discrimination/marginalization).
      5. State Responsibility: Public policy is responsible for improving capacities.
• Internal vs. Combined Capacities:
      * Internal Capacities: Personal traits, innate aptitudes, and trained skills (interaction with environment). These are dynamic and can be lost without practice.
      * Combined Capacities: The sum of internal capacities and the actual possibilities offered by the social, political, and economic environment.
      * Example (The Tennis Player): A person has the physical traits and training (Internal). However, they need courts, equipment, time, and legal permission to play (Combined). Without external conditions, they are personally capable but effectively incapacitated.
      * Example (The Professional): A doctor from one country who moves to another but is legally barred from practicing: their Internal capacity is intact, but their Combined capacity is destroyed.

Basic Capacities and Human Rights

• Basic Capacities: Innate faculties (influenced by DNA, maternal nutrition, prenatal experience) that allow for later development.
• Threshold of Capability: Political goal is for everyone to surpass a "minimum threshold" of combined capacity.
      * Anti-Meritocracy: The least naturally gifted require the most societal effort to reach the threshold (e.g., educational adaptations for cognitive disabilities).
• Functioning: The active realization of capacities.
      * Example: Fasting (Internal capacity utilized through choice) vs. Starving (Lack of capacity).
      * Functioning is the destination of capacities, but capacities remain the political goal to respect freedom of choice.
• Limits to Liberalism:
      * Children: It is legitimate to impose functionings (education/protection) because they haven't developed full choice capacity.
      * Dignity: Practices like slavery or humiliation are never tolerated, regardless of cultural preference.

The Ten Central Capacities

1. Life: Living to a normal lifespan.
2. Bodily Health: Good health, adequate nutrition, and shelter.
3. Bodily Integrity: Movement, freedom from violence, sexual/reproductive choice.
4. Senses, Imagination, and Thought: Cultivated use of these, basic literacy, math, science, and the freedom to produce/experience religion/art.
5. Emotions: Ability to feel affection, grief, gratitude, and justified indignation without fear or anxiety.
6. Practical Reason: Forming a conception of the good and critical reflection on one's life.
7. Affiliation: Living with/for others, social basis for self-respect and non-humiliation.
8. Other Species: Respectful relationship with animals, plants, and nature.
9. Play: Laughter, play, and recreation.
10. Control over Environment:
        * Political: Effective participation in decisions.
        * Material: Property rights and employment respect.

Fertility, Corrosion, and Tragic Choices

• Fertile Capacities: Capacities whose presence favors many others.
      * Education: Allows for employment, practical reason, legal defense, and household bargaining power.
      * Property: Provides food, independence (especially for women against domestic violence), and self-esteem.
• Corrosive Disadvantages: Deprivations that negatively impact other areas.
      * Domestic Violence: Corrodes health, emotions, affiliation, and practical reason.
• Tragic Choices: Situations where two central capacities conflict (e.g., child labor where family survival depends on the child's income).
      * Response: Do not use cost-benefit logic. Intervene to create a future where such choices are not necessary (e.g., the Mid-Day Meal Scheme in Indian schools offering $350$ calories and $18$ grams of protein to incentivize schooling).

Critique of Alternative Approaches

• Utilitarianism: Measures satisfaction of preferences.
      * Objections:
          1. Averages ignore individuals.
          2. Satisfaction conflates qualitatively different things.
          3. Adaptive Preferences: People learn to want only what they can get (e.g., Vasanti didn't complain about illiteracy while oppressed).
          4. Infantillizes the population: Focuses on passive satisfaction rather than active freedom.
• Resource-Based (Social Contract): Measures income distribution.
      * Objection: A disabled person needs more resources to function than a non-disabled person. Income is a means, not an indicator of capability.
      * Antisemitism/Homophobia: Wealth does not solve exclusion or humiliation.

Comparison with Social Contract Theories (Hobbes, Locke, Rawls)

• The Contractual Problem: Theories like those of Rawls focus on "mutual advantage" between roughly equal rational agents.
• Exclusion: These theories often exclude those with cognitive disabilities or animals because they cannot subscribe to a contract.
• Nussbaum's Inclusion: Roots dignity in sensitivity and agency rather than rationality.
• Animal Rights: Every sensible creature is an end in itself and has the right to a "characteristic life of its species." Nussbaum is not vegan/abolitionist but argues for a minimum threshold of opportunity for animals.

Implementation and Education

• Education Case: Education is the prime fertile capacity.
      * In the case Plyler v. Doe ($1982$), the US Supreme Court struck down a Texas law charging undocumented immigrants $1,000$ dollars for education, calling illiteracy a "lasting disability."
      * Education should be mandatory until $16$ to prevent families from denying it for economic or religious reasons (a corrosive disadvantage).
• Global Security: Multinational companies (some with budgets exceeding states) pose risks. International law needs to protect human capacities against market whims or powerful political interests (e.g., the influence of figures like Elon Musk in $2025$).

Deontology vs. Consequentialism

• Nussbaum as Deontological: The approach is based on the duty of the state to protect dignity. It rejects maximizing collective utility at the expense of individual rights.
• Contrast with Rawls: Rawls is procedural (fair process). Nussbaum is focused on the result (everyone reaching the capability threshold), but since the result is defined as a duty toward human dignity, it remains deontological.

Conclusion and Limits

• Scope: The Capacities Approach is a political theory for human development, not a comprehensive theory of all reality.
• Limits: Unlike Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, or Arendt, Nussbaum does not extensively address the nature of power or the reality of war (e.g., Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Ethiopia). She largely assumes governments have good faith to implement justice.

Questions & Discussion

• On Liberty: Amartya Sen distinguishes negative liberty (no legal prohibition) from positive liberty (actual ability to act). In the Bengal famine of $1943$, peasants had the negative liberty to buy food but lacked the positive liberty because there was no food available.
• On Statistical Fallacy: Sissy Jupe in Dickens' Hard Times argues against Mr. Gradgrind: a nation of 50 million is not prosperous if she doesn't get any of that money.
• On Definitions:
      * Comprehensive: A theory claiming validity in all contexts without exception.
      * Political Liberalism: Affirms freedom as an end and requires pluralism/choice in legal orders.
• Current Global Issues: Discussion on the number of current wars ($59$ in progress as of January $2025$) and whether the Capacities Approach provides tools to solve conflicts like the bombings in Gaza.
• Case Studies:
      * Comparison of utility vs. dignity in industrial projects (e.g., car factory bringing wealth but needing evictions and causing pollution).
      * The use of "panem et circenses" (bread and circuses) from Juvenal ($100$ AD) to describe governments distracting subjects from politics.
      * The practice of buying votes ($140$ BC clientelism).