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Karl Marx and the capabilities approach
Get PDFThis chapter examines certain connections between Karl Marx and the capabilities approach. It contains a brief discussion of Marx’s influence upon, and reception by, contemporary capability theorists. However, the chapter is primarily concerned with identifying, and reflecting on, certain formal and substantive affinities between Marx’s account of human flourishing and the capabilities approach. Those formal affinities include Marx’s ‘pluralistic’ account of value; his ‘normative individualism’; and his opposition to wholly ‘subjective’ accounts of advantage. Those substantive affinities include the overlap between certain modern accounts of ‘central capabilities’, and the extensive account of the necessary conditions of human flourishing that can be reconstructed from Marx’s writings. In addition to these questions of influence and affinity, the chapter considers whether his work might provide a critical perspective on some contemporary versions of the capabilities approach. Marx’s insistence on the value of fulfilling work and meaningful community, for instance, draws attention to particular capabilities that might be underestimated by others. More generally, Marx’s account of the threshold conditions of the good life suggests that, in pursuing the social and other changes that best promote human flourishing, we should not set our sights too low
The capability approach and gendered education: Some issues of operationalism in the context of the HIV/AIDs epidemic in South Africa
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Well-being, preference formation and the danger of paternalism
Get PDFInformed or rational desire, capability and prudential value list views of well-being - must accommodate human limitations, as well as address issues about adaptation and paternalism. They sometimes address adaptation by toughening the requirement(s) on those desires, satisfaction of which constitutes well-being. That exacerbates a concern that these accounts if adopted will encourage policies which override actual desires and enforce paternalistic restrictions. Sunstein, like Sen, invokes democratic deliberation to address the adaptation problem, and advocates autonomy promoting paternalistic restrictions. Sunstein and Thaler's 'libertarian paternalism' extends this flavour of argument to cover examples of irrationality from behavioural economics. Their variation of the informed desire account involves highly idealized preferences which cannot, in practical terms, guide a paternalistic social planner, but lead to a potentially large range of cases where paternalistic intervention might, in principle, be justified. I argue that the liberal paternalist policy agenda should as currently conceived be resisted
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