Creating Capabilities

A short introduction, subtitled The Human Development Approach, to the capabilities approach to justice and development that Nussbaum built alongside the economist Amartya Sen. It opens with Vasanti, a poor woman in Gujarat, India, whose life cannot be understood through figures such as national income. The approach asks instead what each person is actually able to do and to be. Nussbaum distinguishes internal capabilities, such as skills and health, from combined capabilities, the real freedoms that depend on social conditions, and explains functionings, the activities those freedoms make possible. She sets out her list of ten central capabilities, including life, bodily health, bodily integrity, practical reason, affiliation, play and control over one's environment, and argues that a just society secures a threshold of each for every citizen. Later chapters address cultural diversity, the nation and global justice, the approach's philosophical sources and current issues, including animals. Critics argue that any fixed list risks paternalism; Sen himself declines to give one.

It is the clearest short account of an approach that has influenced the United Nations' human development reports and gives a practical alternative to measuring progress by income alone.