Reasoning About Well‐Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities*

AS the activities of people on one side of the world increasingly affect the lives of those on the other, it becomes ever more urgent to develop ways of reasoning together about our values and priorities. This article discusses some approaches to moral reasoning recently proposed by Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum’s views on moral reasoning are presented in the context of defending the theory of capabilities associated with her name and that of Amartya Sen. Sen originally defined capabilities as socially available opportunities for valuable functioning and proposed them as a standard for measuring levels of development worldwide.1 Nussbaum has developed Sen’s idea by offering an explicit and wide-ranging (though not exhaustive) list of capabilities, which she offers as a solution to central questions in moral, social and political philosophy.2 Nussbaum presents the list of capabilities as a concrete alternative to moral relativism, establishing a universal moral standard for assessing local ways of life. The list provides a partial answer to the question of the good life, since it gives more determinate specification to such notoriously vague concepts as human well-being, flourishing and quality of life. It also contributes to a theory of justice, since it identifies the primary goods available for just distribution and sets a threshold that must be reached by all citizens before any society can be considered just (WHD 12, 75, 86). Finally, Nussbaum proposes the capabilities as an ideal for practical politics. “My central project is to work out the grounding for basic political principles to which all nations should be held by their citizens” (WHD 116). The theory of capabilities deserves careful attention. It makes an original contribution to several central philosophical questions and it has been enormously influential in drawing philosophers’ attention to previously neglected issues of global development and justice, especially justice for women. Moreover, capabilities theory is not simply a topic for philosophy seminars. It is now used by numerous international agencies and nongovernmental organizations, including the United Nations Development Program, which focuses its statistical tables on countries’ score on the Human Development Index using a capability metric developed in collaboration with Sen.3 Despite capabilities theory’s enormous popularity, questions have been raised about the value of this theoretical approach in general and Nussbaum’s list in particular. However, the present article focuses not on the substance of capabilities theory but rather on the types of reasoning that Nussbaum utilizes in its defense. Critics have charged that two of Nussbaum’s methods of reasoning are flawed by covert reliance on her own moral authority. I argue that the same problem emerges in two other approaches to moral reasoning utilized by Nussbaum. Nussbaum’s most systematic treatment of the capabilities and of the philosophical reasoning that supports them appears in her recent book, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Here, she provides not only an up-dated list of ten capabilities (WHD 78–80) but also extensive discussion of moral epistemology.4 My present concern is not with the content of the capabilities list but rather with Nussbaum’s claims about its metaphysical status and the methods of argument she uses to defend it. Nussbaum originally presented the capabilities list as a development of Aristotle’s ideas of human functioning. It offered “a thick vague theory of the good,” grounded in a conception of human beings that was not metaphysical but both empirical and normative.5 The conception “aims to be as universal as possible and its guiding intuition . . . directs it to cross religious, cultural, and metaphysical gulfs.”6 The thick vague theory of the good was intended as an “internal-essentialist . . . account of the most important functions of the human being,” revealing “what the most central features of our common humanity are.”7 Thus, Nussbaum’s early capabilities theory was explicitly essentialist and boldly universalist. It presented the capabilities as values that have been, and deserve to be, accepted in all societies at all times. The earlier Nussbaum insisted on an essentialist account of the capabilities because she thought that only essentialism could resist moral relativism. Opposition to relativism has been a central theme in her work on the capabilities, partly because relativism often rationalizes injustice to women in cultures across the world.8 Nussbaum’s early work on the capabilities attributed relativist views to postmodernist scholars, who rejected metaphysical realism, and to post-colonialist scholars, who challenged the imposition of Western standards on Nonwestern societies. She argued that, in rejecting “essentialist” conceptions of human nature, both groups typically lapsed into “an extreme relativism, or even subjectivism, about all questions of evaluation.”9 Nussbaum condemned moral relativism as philosophically incoherent and politically reactionary.10 In WHD, Nussbaum’s account of the capabilities is less uncompromising. She no longer postulates some real essence of humanity and she no longer presents the capabilities as universal in the sense of articulating a timeless ideal of well-being; now they are universal only in the weaker sense of offering an ideal for the modern world (WHD 77).11 Nussbaum weakens her claim that the capabilities are universally accepted but she is hopeful that universal agreement may be achieved in the future (WHD 103–4). 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