What is capability approach? Elaborate the distinctive features of the capability theory of equality. (2026, 15 Marks)
The capability approach, founded by Amartya Sen in his Tanner Lecture “Equality of What?” (1979), judges a person’s advantage by their capabilities — the real freedoms to be and do what they have reason to value. As a theory of equality, it answers Sen’s question by proposing basic capability equality.
The approach
- Functionings are beings and doings: being nourished, literate and healthy, appearing in public without shame.
- Capability is the set of functioning combinations a person can achieve (Commodities and Capabilities, 1985; Development as Freedom, 1999). A rich person fasting and a poor person starving are equally hungry, but only one could choose to eat.
- In Inequality Reexamined (1992) Sen argues that every serious theory seeks equality in some space — rights, utility, resources — so the real dispute is over the metric.
Distinctive features
- Ends, not means — against resourcism: income or John Rawls‘s primary goods are only means; Sen calls fixation on goods a kind of fetishism. People differ in conversion factors — personal (disability, pregnancy), social (caste, gender norms) and environmental (climate, disease) — so equal resources yield unequal freedom.
- Against welfarism: utility misleads because deprived people form adaptive preferences; the subjugated woman or landless labourer learns to want little, so a happiness metric hides the deprivation.
- Freedom, not just achievement: equality is assessed over the capability set, not realised outcomes, so choice is respected and equality and liberty are joined.
- Agency: people are agents, not recipients; Sen and Jean Drèze link women’s literacy and employment to lower child mortality and fertility.
- Plural and open-ended: capabilities are many and incommensurable, and their weights are set by public reasoning, not a formula.
- Nussbaum’s threshold version: Martha Nussbaum (Women and Human Development, 2000; Creating Capabilities, 2011) lists ten central capabilities — life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses–imagination–thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, control over one’s environment — which every citizen must hold above a threshold grounded in dignity.
- Policy reach: Mahbub ul Haq built the Human Development Index (1990) on Sen’s ideas. UNDP’s Human Development Report 2025 ranks India 130 of 193 (HDI 0.685) but records a 30.7% loss of HDI to inequality. Article 21A and the National Food Security Act, 2013 are capability-style guarantees.
Critiques
- Incompleteness: without a list, the theory cannot rank states or settle trade-offs; with Nussbaum’s list, it is charged with paternalism.
- Resourcist reply: Rawls and Thomas Pogge argue that institutions can observe and share resources, whereas capability judgements presuppose a contested view of the good life.
- Measurement: capabilities are counterfactual, so indices such as the HDI mostly measure achieved functionings.
- Individualism: it underplays collective structures of caste, class and community.
Conclusion
The capability approach changed the question of equality from what people have to what they can be and do, fusing equality with freedom and exposing inequalities invisible to income and happiness. Its openness weakens adjudication but suits democracy, which is why it anchors human-development policy rather than a single distributive rule.