Nussbaum’s capability approach explicitly aims at producing a defensibly universalis-tic ethics. She seeks this by starting with human universals: aspects of human life which all humans in all societies share in, areas of experience and choice in which all humans must have some conception or other of what well-being is, and how it can be achieved.
We begin from the general intuitive idea of a creature who is both capable and needy... the question we are asking is: What are the features of our common humanity, features that lead us to recognise certain others, however distant their location and their forms of life, as humans and, on the other hand, to decide that certain other beings who resemble us superficially could not possibly be human? The question directs us to cross boundaries. . . (Nussbaum1990a:219)4
When we cross these boundaries and look around, what we find ourselves working toward is ‘‘a kind of story about what seems to be part of any life that we count as a human life’’ (Nussbaum 1990a: 219). This story generates a list of aspects of human potential for well-being, ‘‘functionings’’ as Nussbaum sometimes calls them:
The list we get if we reflect this way is open-ended... like most Aristotelian lists, our working list is meant not as a systematic philosophical theory, but as a summary of what we think so far, and as an intuitive approximation, whose intent is not to legislate, but to draw attention to certain areas of special importance. And the list is not only intuitive, but also heterogeneous; for it contains both limits against which we press and powers through which we aspire. (1990a: 219)
These aspects of potential for well-being are the eponymous capabilities. Nuss-baum’s own list runs: (1) Mortality; (2) The human body; (3) Capacity for pleasure and pain; (4) Cognitive capability: perceiving, imagining, thinking; (5) Early infant development; (6) Practical reason; (7) Affiliation with other human beings; (8) Relatedness to other species and to nature; (9) Humor and play; (10) Separateness (1990: 219-24).
This list gives the capability approach a theory of the good: a ‘‘list theory,’’ as such theories are often called. Indeed it is worth comparing Nussbaum’s list with some other list theories of the good, in particular with those offered by the neo-Thomist ‘‘new natural law theorists’’ such as John Finnis, who offers a list of seven goods: life (cf. Nussbaum’s 1, 2, 10), knowledge (cf. her 3), play (9), beauty (8), friendship (7), practical reasonableness (6), and religion (1).
On the basis of this list of the human capabilities, the capability approach then offers a foundational normative claim. And here I pause to query the vague connective ‘‘on the basis of’’: how does the list of capabilities generate the normative claim? There are many routes that might get us from a theory of the good to the theory of the right. Contrast consequentialist and deontological routes, for instance, and bear in mind that this is only one of many contrasts that might be drawn. There is much work still to be done by capability theorists in deciding between these alternatives.
The foundational normative claim of the capability approach is egalitarian in two distinct ways. The capability approach posits it as the good that ethical and political choice should work toward the (a) equal support and realization of citizens’ capacities, which in themselves are thought of as (b) broadly equal capacities - in general, citizens do not differ enormously in what they are able or unable to do or achieve or experience.
The task of Aristotelian politics is to make sure that no citizen is lacking in sustenance. With respect to each of the functionings... citizens are to receive the institutional, material and educational support that is required if they are to become capable of functioning in that sphere according to their own practical reason - and functioning not just minimally, but well... Politics examines the situations of the citizens, asking... what the requirements of the individual for good functioning are, in the various areas. Both the design of institutions and the distribution of resources by institutions is done with a view to their capabilities... [Politics’] aim is... to design a comprehensive support scheme for the functionings of all citizens over a complete life. (Nussbaum 1990a: 228)
This, in quick outline, is the capability approach. What are we to make of it? The quick reply is that it is an extremely plausible application of neo-Aristotelianism to political philosophy. However, there are reasons to doubt that the Aristotelianism is more than neo-.
It is clear that the capability approach deals well, or can deal well, with the most obvious objections that it raises. For example, the approach is not really vulnerable at all to Bernard Williams’s objection to all forms of Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian naturalism, that they depend on an antiquated teleological biology:
In Aristotle’s teleological universe, every human being... has a kind of inner nisus toward a life of at least civic virtue, and Aristotle does not say enough about how this is frustrated by poor upbringing, to make it clear exactly how, after that upbringing, it is still in this man’s real interest to be other than he is. If Aristotle, with his strong assumptions about the nisus of each natural kind of thing toward its perfection, cannot deliver this result, there is not much reason to think that we can. Evolutionary biology, which gives us our best understanding of the facts that Aristotle represented in terms of a metaphysical teleology, cannot do better in trying to show that an ethical life is one of well-being for each person [because] evolutionary biology is not at all directly concerned with the well-being of the individual, but with fitness. (Williams 1985: 44)
Williams assumes here that evolutionary biology and ‘‘metaphysical teleology’’ are two understandings of the very same facts. This seems mistaken. The facts about human life that Nussbaum appeals to in spelling out her list of functionings or capabilities are facts about human ethology as it is now. They are not facts about how that ethology developed in the past, as evolutionary facts are. Moreover, there need be nothing particularly ‘‘metaphysical’’ about the kind of teleology needed by the capability approach. For sure, the approach needs the claim that we do have various sorts of‘‘inner nisus,’’ such as the nisus to avoid our own deaths, or the nisus to deploy practical reason in planning our own lives. That is a claim against which Bernard Williams has another important argument, his famous argument against external reasons: he only gestures toward this argument in the quotation above, though on reflection it may well seem that it is really Williams’s anti-external-reasons argument that is, subterraneously, driving his thinking here. To assess that argument would be another paper.5 The point for now is that it does not seem very ambitiously metaphysical to say that we have more than one inner nisus. Nor does that claim conflict with the facts about evolution: it could be an evolutionary fact that we have evolved these inner nisus.
This is one place where we should distinguish Aristotle from neo-Aristotelians. Williams may have a good point against the historical Aristotle’s own ethics and politics; he may be right that Aristotle is committed to, and bases his normative views on, a defunct metaphysical and teleological science. (Though even with the historical Aristotle, that seems an overly uncharitable reading, given the possibility of separating ethology from scientific theories about how that ethology came into being.) Williams is surely wrong to say that any neo-Aristotelian has to share that commitment to implausible antique science - and certainly Nussbaum seems able to avoid any such commitment. (For Nussbaum’s own rather different arguments against Williams’s objection, see her 1995.)
A different objection asks why it should be assumed that all basic human capabilities are essentially benign. If we can say that there are human capabilities for practical reason and humor, why can’t we also say that there are human capabilities for spite, murder, adultery, war, treachery, embezzlement? If there are no such malign capabilities, we need to know why not, given the striking prevalence of these sorts of activity in human life. Or if there are malign capabilities, we need to decide how to respond to this fact. Perhaps it means that the capabilities approach cannot be applied at all - we need to try some other approach. Or perhaps it means that the capabilities approach can be applied, but yields immor-alism rather than a conventionally moral outlook. The point is not that the capability approach cannot deal with this sort of objection. It is that it is a virtue of the capability approach to raise this problem so clearly, since the problem is central for any biologically based ethics.
A third sort of objection to the capabilities approach will begin in suspicion of the sheer scope and ambition of the kind of state that Nussbaum envisages: ‘‘[Politics’] aim is... to design a comprehensive support scheme for the functionings of all citizens over a complete life’’ (1990a: 228); ‘‘The job of government... does not stop until we have removed all impediments that stand between [the] citizen and fully human functioning’’ (1990a: 215).
It sounds like the capability approach has a worrying tendency toward statism and centralism. But here we come back to the problem I noticed above, about how to get from a theory of the good to a theory of the right. The objection to sweeping claims like these is not that the capability approach inevitably yields a worryingly strong form of statism. It is that there seems to be no inevitability at all about the emergence of these strongly statist views alongside the theory of the good with which the capability approach begins. The capability approach cannot be a complete political philosophy without clear answers to crucial questions of liberty and rights: about the balance between state and individual, about what sorts of state intervention and confiscation are permissible and why, and indeed about what justifies the very existence of the state in the first place. Again, I am not suggesting that these questions cannot be answered by adherents of the capability approach - though I am suggesting that they have not been answered yet.6
A different kind of question about the capability approach, to which I briefly turn in closing, is not whether it is plausible, but whether Nussbaum is right to claim that it is genuinely Aristotelian. To answer that, let us take the components of the capability approach one by one.
First, I said above, the capability approach aims to offer us a universalistic approach to ethics and politics, by identifying aspects of human life which all humans in all societies share in, and in which all humans must have some conception or other of what well-being is, and how it can be achieved. In its concern to identify these functionings, the theory is certainly very like Aristotle’s own, though Nussbaum identifies them more clearly and systematically than Aristotle does.
However, the reasons why Aristotle and Nussbaum wish to identify a set of capabilities and found a normative theory on them seem to be different. Nussbaum 1988 takes her own universalism to be an ambition that Aristotle shares: she sees him as someone who engages in a cosmopolitan critique of all known ethical and political outlooks. But it is surely clear that Aristotle does not share Nussbaum’s ambition. Unlike some other Greeks - Herodotus, for instance - he is simply not interested in being able to engage in normative debate in a cosmopolitan way. Aristotle certainly wants to vindicate his own ethical and political views as the absolute truth, but the vindication is for his own and his friends’ and peers’ sake, not for the sake of just any interlocutor at all. If the barbarians disagree with him, Aristotle does not wish to argue with them. He simply doesn’t care. They are barbarians.
This mention of barbarians brings us to the most striking difference of all between the neo-Aristotelian capability approach and anything that is actually in Aristotle himself - the difference that makes the capability approach acceptable to modern liberal individualists like me, while Aristotle’s own political naturalism is not. As I noted above, the central normative claim of the capability approach is doubly egalitarian: we are to work toward the (a) equal support and realization of citizens’ capabilities, which are thought of as (b) broadly equal capabilities. The problem with taking these egalitarian claims as not only neo-Aristotelian, but also historically Aristotelian, is not that Aristotle does not make similar sounding claims. As Nussbaum goes to great lengths to demonstrate, he certainly does. The problem is that Aristotle’s egalitarian claims only sound similar. The trick is in the word ‘‘citizens,’’ politai.
Nussbaum tells us that, for the Aristotelian, ‘‘the task of political arrangement is both broad and deep. Broad, in that it is concerned with the good living not of an elite few, but of each and every member of the polity. It aims to bring every member across a threshold into conditions... in which a good human life may be chosen and lived’’ (Nussbaum 1990a: 209). On the face of it this seems the plainest of exegetical sailing. After all, doesn’t Aristotle similarly say this, in a passage that Nussbaum has just quoted? ‘‘It is evident that the best politeia is that arrangement according to which anyone whatsoever [hostisoun] might do best and live a flourishing life.’’7
But here we come to it. ‘‘Anyone whatsoever’’: A slave? A barbarian? A woman? Of course not. Here and everywhere in the Politics that he uses this sort of general
Language, Aristotle means ‘‘anyone whatsoever who is naturally qualified to be a citizen in the first place' and takes this to be such an obvious qualification on his remarks that he does not bother to state it. (Any more than we might state the real, but to us easily invisible, limits on a claim true in our society such as ‘‘Everyone can vote.”)
Here a great gulf opens up between Aristotle’s ‘‘anyone whatsoever” and Nussbaum’s supposedly parallel ‘‘each and every member of the polity.’’ She and Aristotle disagree fundamentally: not about what is owed to a citizen, but about who is entitled to be a citizen in the first place. Nussbaum contrasts a defensible concern for the well-being of every citizen with an indefensible concern only for the wellbeing of what she calls ‘‘an elite few.’’ But, in her terms, the citizenry that Aristotle has in mind is ‘‘an elite few.’’
Remember the sheer number of slaves that, in Aristotle’s time, were working in Athenian society. (For more on slaves, cf. Depew, this volume, chapter 26.) Pretty well every Athenian citizen, even the poorest, had at least one domestic slave; in the true style of a Hegelian master and slave dialectic, poor citizens saw the possession of a slave as a mark of their own freedom. The rich would certainly not stop at a single domestic slave (rich households might include 50). There were many other categories of slaves besides domestic ones. Most, perhaps all, Athenian businesses presupposed the existence of slavery: large-scale businesses owned slaves who worked in factories and mines and docks and galleys; smaller-scale businesses like farms involved something like serfdom. The city of Athens deployed 1,200 ‘‘public slaves’’ ( demosioi) as its police force (these are the Scythians often mentioned in Aristophanes); other public slaves worked as clerks in the Athenian treasury and the Assembly, as executioners and torturers, at producing coins in the Athenian mint, as temple attendants like Ion in Euripides, and so on.
Familiar though they may be, these facts cannot be emphasized enough if we want, for the purposes of political philosophy, a clear view of exactly what kind of society it is that Aristotle was admiring and advocating, in his admiration and advocacy of the Athenian style of city-state. For instance, the facts about slavery at Athens should help us to get a proper perspective on Aristotle’s well-known doctrine (see e. g. Pol. 1278a22) that certain forms of work, and in particular manual labor, are inconsistent with the dignity of citizenship. Against the background of the socioeconomic facts about slavery at Athens, this is not an admirably high-minded proto-Marxian plea for ‘‘the construction of fully human and sociable forms of labor for all citizens’’ (Nussbaum 1990a: 231). Rather it is the fiercely conservative doctrine that slaves should be kept in their place, so that the citizens can be kept in theirs.
More widely, the sheer number of slaves as opposed to citizens that were found at Athens should help us to see the crucial ambiguity of that tricky phrase ‘‘all citizens.’’ Restricted in the way that Aristotle means to restrict it, and in the way that it was in fact restricted at Athens in his time, ‘‘all citizens’’ does not mean the universal-suffrage group of all mentally competent adults that liberals like myself and Nussbaum readily assume must be meant. The Aristotelian citizenry are nothing like the citizenry of a modern liberal democracy. They may indeed be equal among themselves, but then so are the members of a gentlemen’s club; what is more to the point is the number of nonequals who are excluded from their sort of equality. Given the racial distinctions that there usually were between Athenian freemen and their slaves, who were usually brought from the Middle East or central Asia as victims of war, terror, or professional slave-hunting (Pol. 1256b24), the closest equivalent to the Athenian citizenry in the modern world is the white elite of South African apartheid. And, remember, Aristotle in the Politics is busy arguing for this sort of polity: he goes to as much effort to show that slavery is natural as he does to show that the polis is natural, and indeed his arguments for the two theses are connected.
The uncomfortable conclusion of this train of thought is that Aristotle uses the resources of something like a capability approach to argue for a racist and supremacist segregationism. That fact should give us a little pause before we claim, as we might in a brash moment, that the neo-Aristotelian in political theory derives pretty well directly from the historically Aristotelian. It might also prevent us from being completely confident that an Aristotelian, or neo-Aristotelian, capability approach leads inevitably to a plausible and attractive liberal political theory like Nussbaum’s. It would be nice if it did, of course; but the fact is that Aristotle manages to take the approach to an embarrassingly different conclusion.
It is interesting to try to think out the reasons why this difference is possible. One of the reasons, at least, is obvious: in between Aristotle’s resolute chauvinism and Nussbaum’s resolute universalism, there came the radical cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism of Pauline Christianity.
World History
