Capability approach

The capability approach evaluates well-being and justice by people’s real freedoms to achieve valued ways of being and doing, rather than by resources or utility alone.

Capability: A person’s substantive freedom to achieve a particular way of being or doing. Capabilities are the approach’s central evaluative space: what people are genuinely able to achieve.
Amartya Sen: An economist and philosopher whose work developed the capability approach to welfare and justice. Sen established its open-ended, comparative framework for assessing substantive freedom.
Human development: The expansion of people’s opportunities and abilities to live lives they value. The approach provides a conceptual foundation for defining development in human terms.
Utilitarianism: A moral theory that assesses actions or institutions by their consequences for overall utility. The capability approach rejects utility as a sufficient measure of individual advantage.
Central Human Capabilities: Martha Nussbaum’s proposed list of capabilities required for a life worthy of human dignity. The list makes capability selection explicit, unlike Sen’s deliberately open framework.
Functioning: An achieved state or activity, such as being nourished, educated, or politically engaged. Functionings are the beings and doings whose achievement capabilities make possible.
Martha Nussbaum: A philosopher who developed a capabilities-based account of human dignity and political justice. Nussbaum proposed a threshold list of central capabilities for constitutional protection.
Human Development Index: A composite measure of national achievement in health, education, and income. The index applies a limited human-development perspective to cross-country comparison.
Welfarism: The view that social evaluation should depend only on individual welfare or utility levels. Capability analysis includes freedoms and opportunities that welfare totals may overlook.
Capability Measurement: Methods for assessing people’s real opportunities when those freedoms are difficult to observe directly. Capabilities concern possibilities, so empirical indicators often measure them only indirectly.

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