Reasoning About Well‐Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities*

Compliance and Non-compliance with International Human Rights Standards: Overplaying the Cultural

“…So, for example, 11 It is important to note the controversy that Nussbaum's treatment of social criticism has attracted. The suspicion is that her account of internal criticism attempts to impose 'expertocratic' knowledge on local contributions by not taking seriously enough the articulation of the 'voices' of those oppressed and marginalised women whose situation it seeks to capture (Jaggar 2006;Okin 2003). For instance, Okin observes of Nussbaum's methodology that 'whereas Nussbaum aims to enable the…women [in her enquiry] to speak for themselves, and to avoid the error of imposing on them categories that "reflect [her] own immersion in a particular theoretical tradition," as their interpreter, she has allowed her own voice to dominate' (Okin 2003: 297).…”

Equality and diversity

“…2 Whether this 'seeing' also involves an emotional identification with badly-off others is a moot point (see Anderson, 1999;Arneson, 2000). (2000) for a similar argument against the way women often adapt their preferences to accommodate unjust practices, leading to a critique, albeit not a wholesale abandonment, of existing desires and subjective and preference-based approaches to moral reasoning; see also Jaggar (2006) for a critical examination of Nussbaum's reasoning concerning well-being and her capability approach to human functioning more generally. 4 It is also problematic for reasons concerning the way well-being is conceptualised as commensurable with other values, and whether it is a 'master value', reflecting teleological moral systems and the value of agency (see, for example, Kant, 1997, pp 51-4;Scanlon, 1998, pp 108-46;Sen, 1992, pp 56-62;Dworkin, 2002, pp 134-5; and Chapter Two here; see also Nietzsche's critique of well-being identified as a human goal in Nietzsche, 1975a, pp 135-6 and explored further in this chapter and in Chapters Four, Five and Six).…”

The perfectionism of Nussbaum's adaptive preferences

“…13 Presumably Nussbaum would not want to hold that persons who have adaptive preferences entirely fail to engage in practical reasoning. For related problems, see Jaggar 2006. 14 There remains the possibility that Nussbaum might offer a procedural justification, according to which a person's conception of the good counts as reasonable insofar as she meaningfully holds all of the capabilities on the list. I discuss the problem with this suggestion below.…”