Law and political entitlements: a capabilities approach

• Centre for Public Policy, University of Melbourne

Read the full text

10 March 2009This paper develops a "capabilities approach" in asking what people are actually able to do and to be. In developing the author's version of the capabilities approach as a partial account of basic social justice, she emphasizes its links with constitutional law -- saying that my account of the ten central capabilities provides a source for basic political principles that can be given more concrete form in a nation’s constitution. Her work on the approach has been illuminated by comparative study of constitutional traditions: those of India, South Africa, and the U. S. in particular. In this paper, the author shows how just one constitutional tradition – that of the U. S. – embraced, at one time, significant elements of the capabilities approach, and, more recently, has retreated from it. This case is illuminating, because it will show us how easy it is for once-admirable commitments to be interpreted, later on and in a different political climate, in such a way that they deliver merely nominal entitlements, not true human capabilities.

This paper was presented at the Centre for Public Policy's 'Values & Public Policy' conference in February 2009.

Martha Nussbaum gained a BA from NYU and an MA and PhD from Harvard. Currently professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, she is considered one of the world's foremost philosophers.

Click here to download Raimond Gaita's response to the paper.