Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?

Abstract

During the past 25 years, the capability approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has come to play a major role in political philosophy and normative economics. This approach has gained much support, among academics as well as among international agencies and non-governmental organizations, at the expense of competing resourcist and welfarist approaches exemplified, respectively, by John Rawls’s theory and utilitarianism.