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Humanity, Virtue, Justice: a Framework for a Capability Approach

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Humanity, Virtue, Justice: a Framework for a Capability Approach Humanity, Virtue, Justice: A Framework for a Capability Approach By Benjamin James Bessey A Thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Philosophy School of Philosophy, Theology, and Religion College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham October 2015 2 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract This Thesis reconsiders the prospects for an approach to global justice centring on the proposal that every human being should possess a certain bundle of goods, which would include certain members of a distinctive category: the category of capabilities. My overall aim is to present a clarified and well-developed framework, within which such claims can be made. To do this, I visit a number of regions of normative and metanormative theorising. I begin by introducing the motivations for the capability approach, and clarifying some of its most distinctive features. Next, I focus on Martha Nussbaum's version of the approach, and identify several problems therein. The most important concerns epistemology, and especially the challenges that constructivist theories pose. The middle part of the Thesis presents an alternative, based on the work of John McDowell, which I argue has superior prospects. Then, I turn to two further problems: that of making sense of the universalistic aspirations of cosmopolitanism, and that of integrating the microscopic prescriptions of ethics with the macroscopic analyses of political philosophy. Using the Aristotelian interpretation of its core framework that I have developed, I conclude that the capability approach can provide compelling answers to important questions about global justice. 3 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my two current supervisors, Heather Widdows and Iain Law, and my former supervisor Alex Miller. All three have contributed significantly through inspiration, feedback, and support. In particular, I'd like to thank Heather for providing a constant backbone to my project, and being tolerant (perhaps too tolerant!) of my periodic lapses, and Iain for being endlessly reassuring and such a fine armchair psychiatrist. I owe a debt to many of my fellow students at Birmingham for stimulating conversation and friendship over my time here, especially Herj Marway, Naomi Thompson Paul Broadbent, Khai Wager, Ben Matheson, and Natalie Ashton. Participants at IRSE in Caerleon in April of this year provided a morale-boost as well as nice feedback on parts of what has become Chapter 6. Kirk Surgener has pulled out all the stops in proofreading the whole Thesis over the past two weeks, and has provided me with helpful criticism thereon, as well as similarly constructive barbs throughout the project. Finally, Sarah Louise-Johnson has done a wonderful job of putting up with having two(!) Thesis-finishers in her house for the past month, and has been a source of huge friendship and support in all of my time at Birmingham. Financial support for this research came from several sources at the University, for which I am very grateful. I'd like to give thanks to my sisters, their partners, and Max (and, independently, to my Grandmother and uncle) for providing me with a refuge from this Thesis from time to time. My parents have also been a source of support, not least by refraining to ask if I'm finished yet. If this Thesis had a dedication, it would be to Ruth; I wish she was still around to greet it with the loving incomprehension it would warrant. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Capability-Theoretic Justice in Context 4 • §1 Historical Context 4 • §2 Resourcism and Welfarism: Two Existing Approaches 5 • §3 Problems with Resourcism and Welfarism 10 • §4 Resources, Functionings, and Capabilities 14 Chapter 2: Nusbaum's Capability Approach: Problems and Lacunae 18 • §1 Justice and Flourishing 19 • §1.1 Justice and Sufficient Good 19 • §1.2 'Why Capability?' 23 • §1.2.1 'Why Capability?' in Nussbaum 25 • §1.2.2 Justifying the Capability Account 32 • §1.3 The Bounds of Justice 38 • §1.3.1 The Inner Bound: The Role of the State 40 • §1.3.2 The Inner Bound: The Personal as Political 44 • §1.3.3 Liberalism?: Individualism and the Privileging of 48 Choice • §2 Constructivism or Realism? 55 • §2.1 Introduction 55 • §2.2 Nussbaum's Methodology 60 • §2.2.1 The Early Approach: Human Nature and 60 Evaluation • §2.2.2 The Late Approach: Informed Desire and 65 Substantive Good 5 • §2.3 Sketch of the Problem 70 • §2.3.1 Unclarities, Inconsistencies, and Lacunae 70 • §2.3.2 Plural and Local Specification: Bounded 71 Constructivism? Or an Acknowledgement of Epistemic Limits? • §2.3.3 What Explains the Convergence? 74 • §2.4 Jaggar's Critique 76 • §2.4.1 Jaggar's Epistemic Critique 76 • §2.4.2 Jaggar's Normative Critique 78 • §2.5 What is Required in Response? 80 Chapter 3: Justification, Objectivity, and the Human Good 83 • §1 Adaption: Realism or Constructivism? 85 • §1.1 Adaptive Preferences 85 • §1.2 Baber's Transworld Preferentism 91 • §2 Arguing About Constructivism 98 • §2.1 Privileging one's own Perspective – Authority 100 • §2.1.1 Paternalism and Alienation 100 • §2.1.2 Methodological Exclusion; Authority and 102 Expertise • §2.2 Privileging one's own Perspective – Bias 105 • §2.2.1 Individualism and Epistemic Path-Dependence 106 • §2.2.2 Marginalised Voices 108 • §2.3 Constructivism as Self-Effacing 111 • §2.4 Making Sense of Epistemological 'Naturalism' 116 • §2.5 Rawls' 'Political Constructivism' 123 • §3 The Locus of Epistemic Values; Contingent Virtue 141 Chapter 4: Shapeless Virtue 147 • §1 Secondary-Quality Realism 150 6 • §1.1 The General Picture: Realism, Idealism, Quietism 150 • §1.2 The General Picture: Rules and Rails 154 • §1.3 Worldly Facts; Human Responses 156 • §1.4 Sui-Genereity and Circularity 162 • §1.5 Constructivism Redux? 167 • §2 Virtue as a Shapeless Unity 174 • §2.1 Particularism, Cognition, and Affect 175 • §2.2 Reasons Internalism as a Form of Proceduralism 183 • §2.2.1 Excursus: On the Barriers to Virtue 191 • §2.2.2 Defending the Divide: Alienation and Blame 194 • §Anthropocentricity and Universalism 201 Chapter 5: A Circle: Humanity, Well-Being, Justice, Virtue 204 • §1 Introducing Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism 205 • §1.1 Naturalism in Nussbaum 205 • §1.2 Sketching a Neo-Aristotelian Naturalist Capability Theory 207 • §2 Reductionism? 212 • §2.1 The Core View 212 • §2.1.1 Life-Form and Normativity 212 • §2.1.2 Foot's Gloss, and Hursthouse's 216 • §2.2 Anti-Reductionist Critique 219 • §2.3 Difficulties of Interpretation 222 • §2.3.1 Foot 223 • §2.3.2 Hursthouse 224 • §2.3.3 Thompson 228 • §3 An Alternative View 230 • §3.1 The Human Life-Form and the Virtuous Life 231 • §3.1.1 Life-Form and the Good Life 231 • §3.1.2 Cultural and non-Cultural Formation 236 • §3.2 The Right and the Good 239 7 Chapter 6: Humanity as the Polis 245 • §1 Justice as a Property of Individuals and Relations 247 • §1.1 What is Essential to an Aristotelian Approach? 247 • §1.2 Thompson's Dikaiological Matrix 251 • §1.3 Against Vogler's 'Promulgation Problem' 255 • §2 Personal and Structural Justice 259 • §2.1 Structural Irreducibility, and the Difference it Makes 261 • §2.2 Structural Injustice as a Barrier to Virtue 270 • §2.3 Two Alternatives: A Conditional Interpretation, and 274 Exculpation-Maximalism • §3 What are the Practical Consequences? 277 • §3.1 Regulating Regret 280 • §3.2 Motivating Imaginative Engagement 283 • §4 Capability-Theoretic Justice Revisited 286 • §4.1 The Wider Context: Cosmopolitan Universalism 287 • §4.2 Drawing the Threads Together 289 Appendix A: Nussbaum's List of Essential Capabilities 292 Appendix B: Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism? 294 • §1 What Are the Meta-Level Claims? 295 • §2 Living Up To the Label 297 • §3 Anti-Reductionism vs. Pre-Theoretic Ubiquity 301 • §4 On Second Naturalism 303 • §5 Quietism and the Point of Metaethics Redux 308 Bibliography 310 8 Introduction One recently central topic of discussion in political philosophy has been concerned with justice at the global level, the level of all humanity; one increasingly popular – and now quite mainstream – approach to this topic has emphasised the concept of human capability. There are many questions that might be asked in a philosophy Thesis, against this backdrop: about the prescriptions the approach would generate when applied to real-world controversies; about its precise relationship to the social sciences; about precisely which capabilities are of normative significance, and for which purposes1. This Thesis, however, seeks to re-examine the concepts and proposals that are often in the background when academics or practitioners talk about the capabilities and their relevance to global justice, and so aims to set out a renewed framework within which more fine-grained questions might be pursued. As a result, while I shall occasionally touch directly on clearly first-order questions – as when I discuss the appropriate definition of capability in Chapter 2 – most of my work will relate to more abstract issues in methodology and epistemology, defending a capability approach indirectly by placing it as a coherent element within a broader philosophical context. The overarching project of this Thesis aims to set out a normative approach to global justice, similar though not identical to that of Martha Nussbaum, which centres on a concept of 'capability'.
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