Martha Craven Nussbaum

Capability and Well-Being

Amartya Sen (1933–) was born and educated in India before completing his doctorate in economics at Cambridge University. He has taught in India, England, and the United States and is currently the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of the most widely read and influential living economists. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Price in Economics for his work on welfare economics, poverty and famines, and human development. He has also made major contributions to contemporary political philosophy. In this essay, he proposes that alternatives be appraised by looking to the capabilities they provide for individuals rather than only by individual utilities, incomes, or resources (as in commonly used theories). Introduction Capability is not an awfully attractive word. It has a technocratic sound, and to some it might even suggest the image of nuclear war strategists rubbing their hands in pleasure over some contingent plan of heroic barbarity. The term is not much redeemed by the historical Capability Brown praising particular pieces of land – not human beings – on the solid real-estate ground that they ‘had capabilities’. Perhaps a nicer word could have been chosen when some years ago I tried to explore a particular approach to well-being and advantage in terms of a persons ability to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being.

Women's Capabilities and Social Justice

We come from our family’s house to live in our husband’s house. If we mention our name in this house, they say, “Oh, that is another family”. Yet when it comes to working, they say, “What you earn is ours, because you are in this family’s house”, or “because you are working on this family’s land. Let the land be registered in our names, so that we will not always feel like we are in someone else’s family”. (Santokbehn, agricultural laborer, Ahmedabad) In your joint family, I am known as the second daughter-in-law. All these years I have known myself as no more than that. Today, after efteen years, as I stand alone by the sea, I know that I have another identity, which is my relationship with the universe and its creator. That gives me the courage to write this letter as myself, not as the second daughter-in-law of your family … I am not one to die easily. That is what I want to say in this letter. (Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Letter from a Wife’, 1914) We not only want a piece of the pie, we also want to choose the eavor, and to know how to make it ourselves. (Ela Bhatt, founder, Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), 1992)

Education and Democratic Citizenship: Capabilities and Quality Education

Public education is crucial to the health of democracy. Recent educational initiatives in many countries, however, focus narrowly on science and technology, neglecting the arts and humanities. They also focus on internalization of information, rather than on the formation of the students critical and imaginative capacities. This article argues that such a narrow focus is dangerous for democracys future. Drawing on the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, the paper proposes a three‐part model for the development of young peoples capabilities through education, focusing on critical thinking, world citizenship, and imaginative understanding.

Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism

The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of laws in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan law is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international law, transforming it into a universal law of humanity.ÐKant, Perpetual Peace1

Symposium on Amartya Sen's philosophy: 5 Adaptive preferences and women's options

Any defense of universal norms involves drawing distinctions among the many things people actually desire. If it is to have any content at all, it will say that some objects of desire are more central than others for political purposes, more indispensable to a human beings quality of life. Any wise such approach will go even further, holding that some existing preferences are actually bad bases for social policy. The list of Central Human Capabilities that forms the core of my political project contains many functions that many people over the ages have preferred not to grant to women, either not at all, or not on a basis of equality. To insist on their centrality is thus to go against preferences that have considerable depth and breadth in traditions of male power. Moreover, the list contains many items that women over the ages have not wanted for themselves, and some that even today many women do not pursue – so in putting the list at the center of a normative political project aimed at providing the philosophical underpinning for basic political principles, we are going against not just other peoples preferences about women, but, more controversially, against many preferences (or so it seems) of women about themselves and their lives. To some extent, my approach, like Sens, avoids these problems of paternalism by insisting that the political goal is capability, not actual functioning, and by dwelling on the central importance of choice as a good. But the notion of choice and practical reason used in the list is a normative notion, emphasizing the critical activity of reason in a way that does not reflect the actual use of reason in many lives.

Beyond the Social Contract: Capabilities and Global Justice

The dominant theory of justice in the western tradition of political philosophy is the social contract theory, which sees principles of justice as the outcome of a contract people make, for mutual advantage, to leave the state of nature and govern themselves by law. Such theories have recently been influential in thinking about global justice. I examine that tradition, focusing on Rawls, its greatest modern exponent; I shall find it wanting. Despite their great strengths in thinking about justice, contractarian theories have some structural defects that make them yield very imperfect results when we apply them to the world stage. More promising results are given by a version of the capabilities approach, which suggests a set of basic human entitlements, similar to human rights, as a minimum of what justice requires for all. But among the traits characteristic of the human being is an impelling desire for fellowship, that is for common life, not of just any kind, but a peaceful life, and organized according to the measure of his intelligence, with those who are of his kind ... Stated as a universal truth, therefore, the assertion that every animal is impelled by nature to seek only its own good cannot be conceded. (Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace) Global inequalities in income increased in the 20th century by orders of magnitude out of proportion to anything experienced before. The distance between the incomes of the richest and poorest country was about 3 to 1 in 1820, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973 and 72 to 1 in 1992. (Human Development Report 2000, United Nations Development Programme) 1. A World of Inequalities A child born in Sweden today has a life expectancy at birth of 79.7 years. A child born in Sierra Leone has a life expectancy at birth of 38.9 years.1 In the USA, GDP per capita is US

The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis

34 142; in Sierra Leone, GDP per capita is US

Women’s Education: A Global Challenge

490. Adult literacy rates in the top 20 nations are around 99%; in Sierra Leone, the literacy rate is 36%. In 26 nations, the adult literacy rate is under 50%. The world contains inequalities that are morally alarming, and the gap between richer and poorer nations is widening. The chance of being born in one nation rather than another pervasively determines the life chances of every child who is born. Any *Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago Law School, 1111 E 60th Street, Chicago, IK, 60637, USA. ISSN 1360-0818 print/ISSN 1469-9966 online/04/010003-16  2004 International Development Centre, Oxford DOI: 10.1080/1360081042000184093

Who Is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology

In all situations of choice, we face a question that I call “the obvious question”: what shall we do? But sometimes we also face, or should face, a different question, which I call “the tragic question”: is any of the alternatives open to us free from serious moral wrongdoing? Discussing cases of tragic conflict from literature, philosophy, and contemporary life, I argue that it is valuable to face the tragic question where it is pertinent, because facing it helps us think how we might design a society where such unpalatable choices do not confront people, or confront them less often. Cost‐benefit analysis helps us answer the obvious question; but it does not help us either pose or answer the tragic question, and it frequently obscures the presence of a tragic situation, by suggesting that the obvious question is the only pertinent question. I apply these reflections to thinking about basic entitlements of citizens, such as might be embodied in constitutional guarantees.

Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security, Capabilities

Womens education is both crucial and contested. A key to the amelioration of many distinct problems in womens lives it is spreading but it is also under threat both from custom and traditional hierarchies of power and from the sheer inability of states and nations to take effective action. In this article I shall try to show first exactly why education should be thought to be a key for women in making progress on many other problems in their lives. Second I shall describe the sources of resistance to educating women and argue that objections from the side of traditionalism are misplaced and incoherent. (Here I shall draw on my experience with womens development groups in India.) Finally I shall argue that if womens education is to be fostered around the world two things must happen that are now not sufficiently happening. First nations and states within nations must make womens education a high priority matter and devote a good deal of their resources and energies to it. Second wealthy nations their concerned citizens and their corporations must all commit resources to the effort. (excerpt)