THE
PUSHPIN PUNDIT
Nussbaum’s Frontiers
of Justice: Redemption Through
Utilitarianism Still Possible
(revised November 26, 2006)
The biggest problem with Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities”
approach is that Nussbaum gives absolute priority to improvements below
capability thresholds. As Peter Singer
puts it, Nussbaum’s theory “appears to require that if a society has only one
member below the minimum entitlement level, it should spend all its resources
on bringing that member above the entitlement level before it spends anything
at all on raising the welfare level of anyone else, no matter how big a difference
the resources could make to everyone else in society. That, surely, is an absurdity.” Singer, "Response to
Martha Nussbaum" (2002).
In Frontiers of
Justice, Nussbaum does not fully confront this implausible aspect of her
theory; she does not fully confront the problem that her theory could require
massive welfare losses by people above capability thresholds in order to secure
a tiny improvement by a person below a capability threshold. But fortunately for Nussbaum, she can avoid
such implausible results – as long as she adopts a utilitarian policy on
tradeoffs below the thresholds. For in the current social situation, it is
not necessary to sacrifice an enormous amount of above-threshold welfare in
order to make tiny below-threshold improvements. There are always some people below capability
thresholds who can be helped in a welfare-efficient manner. This is true even within wealthy societies,
and it is especially true if we apply the capabilities approach internationally
(which Nussbaum quite properly advocates).
Nussbaum’s theory would be irredeemable if she gave
absolute priority to those farthest
below capability thresholds. Her theory
would then become a variant of welfare egalitarianism, with all the
implausibility of that egalitarian approach (see Chapter 5 of my book Distributive Justice and Disability:
Utilitarianism against Egalitarianism).
But Nussbaum does not assign absolute priority to those farthest below
capability thresholds; she does not specify how she would make tradeoffs below
the thresholds. While this is a gap in
her theory, it is also a door to redemption through utilitarianism.
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