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Amartya Sen's Capability Approach

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 Amartya Sen, in 1980, in his Tanner Lectures on human values titled 'Equality of What' at Stanford University, questioned the adequacy of using marginal or total utility and primary goods for measuring equality. The social systems should aim to expand the people's capabilities or their freedom to achieve beings and doings which they value. 

Various concepts of the capabilities  theory of Amartya Sen are discussed below :


1. Functionings: Functionings are doing the activity or being in a state that contributes to a person's well-being. Functionings should be separated from the commodities employed to achieve them. 

2. Capabilities: Capability is a set of functions a human being can achieve when a person has the freedom and opportunity to choose/select a quality of life that he has reason to value. 

3. Agency- Agency refers to any goal/target a person wishes to achieve what he had valued. A person who possesses this ability or agency is the agent.

4. Choosing the most important functioning for a good life- Sen suggests that identification of crucially important capabilities associated with basic needs can help set up moral and political priorities. This kind of exercise can help assess the extent and nature of poverty in developing countries. 
5. Evaluation of capability to live a good life - 

Evaluating capability concerns assessing the freedom that people have to choose high-quality options. Some determinants are
 A. Individual Physiology, B. Local Environment diversity, C. Variation in social condition, D. differences in rational perspectives,  E. Distribution within the family 

Martha Nussbaum's capability theory of Justice stresses the following points.

1. Life - Being able to live to the end of human life of normal length.
2. Bodily health: Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; being adequately nourished.

3. Bodily integrity: Being able to move freely from place to place: to be secure from violent assaults including sexual assaults and domestic violence.
4. Sense, Imagination and Thought. - Being able to use the sense to imagine, think and reason- and to do so these things in a "truly human" way, a way informed and cultivated through education and mathematical and scientific way. Being able to experience and choose as per own wish and interest in music, literature etc. 

5. Emotion: Being able to have an attachment to people or things outside ourselves, to love those who love us and care for us, to grieve in their absence etc. 


6. Practical Reason- Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one's life. 

7. Affiliation - Recognize and show concern, social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation: being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others.


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