Nussbaum on Capabilities: What Is a Person Able to Do and to Be?

The Quote

"In the capabilities approach, the central question asked by the political philosopher is not, 'How satisfied is this woman?' or 'How much in the way of resources is she able to command?' but 'What is she actually able to do and to be?'"

— Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011)

Historical Context

This passage appears in the opening chapter of Creating Capabilities, the book in which Martha Nussbaum offers her most accessible and systematic account of the capabilities approach. The approach had been developing for more than two decades by the time the book appeared. Its origins lie in the 1980s, when Nussbaum, then working closely with the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, began searching for a framework that could adequately assess the quality of life in developing countries. The dominant frameworks at the time were unsatisfying. Utilitarian measures, such as Gross Domestic Product per capita or self-reported life satisfaction, told you nothing about the actual opportunities available to individuals. Resource-based measures, such as income or wealth, told you what people had but not what they could do with it. A person could have adequate resources and still be unable to move freely, to participate in political life, to form relationships, or to live with dignity because of social, cultural, or political barriers.

Nussbaum's work on women in developing countries sharpened the problem. In a series of studies conducted in India in the 1980s and 1990s, collected in Women and Human Development (2000), she documented how conventional measures of well-being systematically obscured the deprivation of women. Women often reported high life satisfaction even when they were malnourished, denied education, and unable to leave their homes. Resources that appeared to flow to households were often distributed unequally within them, with women and girls receiving less food, less medical care, and less education than men and boys. The problem was not just that the measures were inaccurate but that they were asking the wrong question. They asked about satisfaction, or about resources, when they should have been asking about what people could actually do and be.

The passage from Creating Capabilities distills this insight into a single, programmatic question. It is deliberately framed as a question rather than an answer because the capabilities approach is, at its core, a way of asking rather than a fixed doctrine. It directs attention to the substantive freedoms that make a life human and dignified, and it insists that any adequate theory of justice must be organized around these freedoms rather than around the metrics that economists and policymakers had traditionally favored.

Philosophical Interpretation

The passage operates on three levels simultaneously, and each level reveals a different dimension of Nussbaum's philosophical project.

On the first level, the passage is a methodological critique. It identifies two dominant approaches to assessing well-being, the utilitarian approach that asks about satisfaction and the resource-based approach that asks about command over resources, and it argues that both are inadequate. The utilitarian approach fails because satisfaction is a poor proxy for well-being. People adapt their expectations to their circumstances, a phenomenon that Nussbaum, following Sen, calls "adaptive preferences." A person who has never had access to education may report satisfaction with their life, not because their life is going well but because they have lowered their expectations to match what they believe is possible. The resource-based approach fails because resources are means, not ends. Having money is valuable only insofar as it enables a person to do things, and the same amount of money can translate into very different capabilities depending on the person's physical condition, social environment, and political context. A person with a disability may need more resources than a person without one to achieve the same level of functioning, and a society that distributes resources equally without attending to these differences is not treating its members justly.

On the second level, the passage articulates a positive vision. The question "What is this person actually able to do and to be?" redirects attention from inputs and subjective states to real freedoms, the substantive opportunities a person has to live a life they have reason to value. This is what Nussbaum means by "capabilities." A capability is not merely an internal capacity, like the ability to see or to reason. It is a combined capability, the internal capacity together with the external conditions, social, economic, and political, that make it possible to exercise that capacity. A woman who has the internal capacity for political participation but lives in a society that denies women the right to vote does not have the combined capability for political participation. The capabilities approach asks about combined capabilities, and this is what makes it a theory of justice rather than merely a theory of well-being. It identifies what societies owe their members, not just what individuals owe themselves.

On the third level, the passage connects the capabilities approach to the concept of human dignity. Nussbaum has argued that the capabilities approach is grounded in the idea that every person has a dignity that demands respect, and that this dignity is not an abstract metaphysical property but a concrete claim on social arrangements. A life that falls below the threshold of central capabilities, a life in which a person cannot think, move, love, play, or participate in political life, is a life in which dignity has not been respected. The question "What is this person able to do and to be?" is thus not a neutral inquiry into well-being. It is a normative demand that social and political institutions be arranged so that every person can live a life worthy of human dignity.

The choice of pronoun in the passage is significant. Nussbaum asks about "this woman," not "this person" or "this individual." This is not accidental. The capabilities approach was developed in part through Nussbaum's work on women in developing countries, and the passage reflects her conviction that theories of justice must be tested against the lives of the most vulnerable, those whose deprivation is most likely to be hidden by conventional measures. The use of "this woman" is a reminder that the capabilities approach is not an abstract theory but a tool for addressing real, concrete, and often gendered forms of deprivation.

Related Concepts

The capabilities approach connects to several broader philosophical traditions. In the virtue ethics tradition that runs from Aristotle through the present day, Nussbaum finds the insight that human flourishing cannot be reduced to a single metric. Aristotle's account of eudaimonia, the fulfilled human life, is pluralistic: it includes reason, friendship, pleasure, political participation, and practical wisdom, and no one of these can substitute for the others. Nussbaum's list of ten central capabilities is, in a sense, a contemporary version of Aristotle's pluralistic account of the human good, adapted to the demands of a political theory that must be usable across cultures.

The approach also resonates with the liberal tradition's emphasis on freedom and equal respect. Nussbaum describes the capabilities approach as a "partial theory of justice," one that specifies what people are owed without dictating how they should live. This places it in the tradition of political liberalism, alongside the work of John Rawls, while pushing beyond Rawls in its attention to the substantive conditions that make freedom real rather than merely formal. A person who has the legal right to vote but cannot read the ballot, who has the legal right to work but cannot move freely, has formal freedom without the substantive freedom that the capabilities approach demands.

Learning Path

To deepen your understanding of Nussbaum's capabilities approach, consider the following path:

1. Start with the thinker: Read the full Martha Nussbaum page to understand her biography, her intellectual development, and the full range of her philosophical contributions.
2. Explore the philosophical context: The capabilities approach draws on the virtue ethics tradition and the feminist philosophy tradition. Engaging with both illuminates the theoretical background of Nussbaum's work.
3. Connect to dignity and justice: The capabilities approach is grounded in the concept of dignity and is a theory of justice. Exploring these concepts deepens understanding of what is at stake in the approach.
4. Explore the topics: The approach speaks to questions of purpose and the good life, asking what it means to live a life that is fully human.
5. Read the primary source: Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Harvard University Press, 2011) is the most accessible statement of the approach and the source of the passage discussed here.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Martha Nussbaum." Covers Nussbaum's capabilities approach, her theory of emotions, and her contributions to political philosophy.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Capabilities Approach." A comprehensive overview of the capabilities approach, including both Nussbaum's and Sen's versions.
3. Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). The primary source of the quoted passage and the most systematic statement of the approach.
4. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Martha Nussbaum." An accessible overview of Nussbaum's philosophy and its intellectual context.