El declive de la ética de las capacidades

Capability approach is one of the most important contributions of contemporary political philosophy to the subject of international distributive justice and more generally to the implementation of development policies. In this paper I aim to shed light on some pitfalls of the last production of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Sen’s last book “The idea of justice” introduced his theory as a “comparative” approach to issues of justice, while rejecting “transcendental” approaches such as Rawls’one. I will show how this dichotomy between comparative and transcendental approach is mistaken, since it rests on wrong assumptions on what we can require from a theory of justice. As far as Nussbaum is concerned, I will show how weak is her attempt to present herself as a supporter of Rawls’ political liberalism and to reject the Aristotelian roots of her interpretation of capability approach. Her turn to political liberalism is flawed since she separates political liberalism from liberal perfectionism, while nowadays it is widely discussed the necessity of enhancing the quality of public debate and developing the civic virtues as supporters of liberal perfectionism demand. I finally show how a perfectionist interpretation of capability approach can be useful as a way for evaluating social policies in these times of economic crisis.