UC San Diego

This thesis concerns the capabilities approach, which is widely adopted and cited as a way to conceptualize human well-being, also called welfare. The concept of ‘capabilities’ has been developed in different but overlapping ways by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The views of both authors are rooted in Aristotle’s theory of living well, which I outline and then use in my exegesis of their concepts.

If the concept of capabilities is to do serious work in evaluating individual and population-level ‘capabilitarian well-being,’ a measure must be developed that fits with the concept. Accordingly, I investigate how well different ingredients of capabilities measures - including their representations and relevant operational procedures - cohere with core features of Sen and Nussbaum’s conceptual characterization. Both authors characterize capabilities as value-laden, and both authors explain that different kinds of capabilities cannot in general be traded off against one another to create total orderings of capabilitarian well-being. Ergo, measures that represent capabilities as not value-laden are inconsistent with respect to the value-ladenness of Sen and Nussbaum’s characterization. Similarly, measures that provide total orderings by trading off different kinds of capabilities indicators are inconsistent with respect to Sen and Nussbaum’s general commitment to avoid such trade-offs. Outputs for such measures are what I call ‘off-target,’ meaning there is good reason to believe such measures do not measure capabilities as characterized by Sen and Nussbaum.

Yet even if off-target, such measures may remain useful as rough metrics depending on context or purpose. For example, even total orderings of capabilities may be justified with respect to the purpose of furthering an international conversation, or as rough measures used to identify poverty as different kinds of capability deprivation. I conclude by analyzing two contemporary capabilities measures – Jaya Krishnakumar’s improved Human Development Index and Sabina Alkire and James Foster’s Deprivation Depth Measure - as exemplars of measurement systems that are inconsistent with respect to Sen’s and Nussbaum’s characterization of capabilitarian well-being yet remain useful as approximate indicators with respect to a limited set of purposes.