Capability and Well-Being

Capability is not an awfully attractive word. It has a technocratic sound, and to some it might even suggest the image of unclear 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. The expression was picked to represent the alternative combinations of things a person is able to do or be – the various functionings he or she can achieve.The capability approach to a person’s advantages is concerned with evaluating it in terms of his or her actual ability to achieve various valuable functionings as a part of living. The corresponding approach to social advantage- for aggregative appraisal as well as for the choice of institutions and policy- takes the sets of individual capabilities as constituting and central part of the relevant informational base of such evaluation. It differs from other approaches using other informational focuses, for example, personal utility (focusing on pleasures, happiness, or desire fulfillment), absolute or relative opulence (focusing on commodity bundles, real income, or real wealth), assessments of negative freedoms (focusing on procedural fulfillment of libertarian right and rules of non-interference), comparisons of means of freedom (e.g. focusing on the holdings of primary goods, as in the Rawlsian theory of justice), and comparisons of resource holdings as a basis of just equality (e.g. as in Dworkin’s criterion of equality of resources).