From theories of justice to just practices and policies

From theories of justice to just practices and policies

Since, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, theories of justice are mainly developed at the level of ideal theory, the capability approach to social justice and equality may not be particularly useful in telling us what justice- enhancing strategies and policies to develop. Indeed, this has sometimes been phrased as a serious concern, namely, that theories of justice are too abstract and do not help us with social justice struggles on the ground. One may well argue that we roughly know what is going wrong and we need political action rather than more and more detailed theorizing. Moreover, some think that the subtleties of the theories of justice are easily abused in reality in order to justify gross inequalities, as may have been the case with philosophical discussions on individual responsibility. For example, a book by Brian Barry (2005) exemplifies this concern with the direct application of theories of justice to political change and the reform of the welfare state, rather than with further philosophical refinements of theories of justice. Related charges have been specifically aimed at the capability approach as well. For instance, it has been argued that not enough attention has been paid to issues of social power in the capability writings on justice, and Feldmann and Gellert (2006) have underscored the importance of recognizing the struggles and negotiations by dominated and disadvantaged groups if social justice is ever to be realized. Such questions of power politics, effective social criticism, successful collective action, historical and cultural sensitivities, and the negotiation of competing interests are indeed largely absent from the philosophical literature on theories of justice. These ideal theories develop standards of a just society, but often do not tell us what institutions or policies are necessary if just societies are to be constructed, nor do they tell us what social and political processes will help advocates implement these social changes in concrete ways.

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But the capability approach can be linked to more concrete justice- enhancing policy proposals that have been developed. For one thing, the Millennium Development Goals can be understood as being a practical, albeit truncated, translation of the capability approach in practice. In fact, at the level of severe global poverty, any concrete poverty-reduction strategy which conceptualizes poverty in a capability sense is, for most accounts of justice, a concrete justice-enhancing strategy, since these theories would include the absence of severe poverty as a principle of justice.

If we move from the area of poverty-reduction strategies to the question of just social policies in countries or regions with higher levels of affluence, we then observe that there are much fewer actual examples of justice-enhancing policies that have been explicitly grounded in, or associated with, the capability approach. Yet many concrete policies and interventions could be interpreted as such, or are consistent with the capability perspective itself. One example relates to a policy of providing, regulating and/or subsidising child- care facilities. This can arguably be justified as a prerequisite for gender justice in capabilities since, due to gender norms, women will in effect not be able to develop themselves professionally if they are not supported in their need for decent quality-regulated (and possibly subsidised) child-care facilities. Mothers at home may be materially well-off if their husbands earn a good income but, if they do not have the genuine opportunity to hold jobs, then their capability sets are severely constrained and gender justice in capabilities cannot be achieved. An income metric which assumes equal sharing in the household may not detect any moral problem, but a capability metric will claim that women will have less freedom than men, since the provisions are not there to ensure that both parents can hold jobs, and gender norms and other gendered social mechanisms make it difficult for men to volunteer to stay at home with their kids.

Another example concerns a justice-enhancing intervention that was set up by a small group of citizens in Utrecht, a large city in Holland (but, as the example will show, it could be any city with immigrants who speak another language). It is well known that the children of immigrants are disadvantaged at school since they are very likely to enter school with a much weaker knowledge of the Dutch language than non-immigrant children. For this reason, a group of citizens decided to set up a network of volunteers to read books to small immigrant children in their own homes. In this way, they effectively reduced the gap in educational opportunity between immigrant children and non-immigrant children. This example also illustrates that justice- enhancing strategies are not confined to public policy, but can also be initiated by persons and groups at the grassroots.

But, despite the many possibilities of using the capability approach to practice justice-enhancing strategies, capability scholars have been criticized for having their priorities wrong: by focusing so much on the metric of justice and on human diversity in the conversion of resources into capabilities, their approach draws attention away from huge inequalities in terms of resources

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(income, wealth) and therefore helps to preserve the (unjust) status quo. Pogge (2002a) has specifically argued that the capability approach – Sen’s work in particular – overemphasizes the role of national and local governments, thereby neglecting the huge injustices created by the global economic system and its institutional structures, such as global trade rules. Pogge may have a point in his charge that capability theorists have paid insufficient attention to these issues, which have been discussed at length in the philosophical literature on global justice. But one might also argue that this is orthogonal to the issues about which the capability approach to social justice is most concerned, namely, how to make interpersonal comparisons of advantage for the purposes of social justice. One could, quite plausibly, hold the view that, since most capability theorists are concerned with human well-being, they should invest their energies in addressing the most urgent cases of injustice, investigate their underlying causal processes and mechanisms, and concentrate on the develop- ment of solutions. This is not, however, a valid critique of the capability approach as a theory, nor does it recognize the role that the approach can play in substantive debates about global justice and inequality. One should simply not take the capability approach for being more than it is: an evaluative approach that draws our attention to people’s beings and doings, and their real freedom to be who they value being, and do the things they value doing.

Questions

5.1 Which are the four main theoretical schools of social justice? Can you identify existing social policies or justice-enhancing interventions that are based on each one of these schools or approaches?

5.2 How do the concepts of equality and justice relate, and how do they

differ?

5.3 Explain the essence of Rawls’ theory of justice in your own words.

5.4 Take one social group (e.g. women, ethnic or religious minorities, dalits,

scheduled tribes and castes, disabled people, the elderly, gays, etc.). Describe the main concerns of justice for that social group from a human development and capability perspective.

5.5 What are the most important issues of justice in your country or community? How would a human development and capability perspective analyse that issue?

5.6 Do you know a policy in your country that is based, either explicitly or implicitly, on the capability approach?

Notes

1 For an accessible introduction to contemporary political philosophy, see Swift (2001). 2 It is noteworthy, however, that some critics have argued that Sen’s capability approach also contains an implicit (and fairly comprehensive) conception of the good life, which leads us to question how well it is situated within the tradition of

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liberal egalitarian theories of justice (see e.g. Arneson 2000 or Deneulin 2002). 3 For a lengthier introduction to Rawls’ work on justice, see Richardson (2006). 4 There are other capability critiques on Rawls, including critiques regarding the limited scope of Rawlsian theory and its contractarian nature. See Nussbaum (2006) and Brighouse and Robeyns (2010). 5 For example, most critiques by Pogge (2002a) remain as yet unanswered. Some responses are forthcoming in Brighouse and Robeyns (2010). 6 For the difference between capabilities and social primary goods, see the previous section. For the difference between capabilities and Dworkinian resources, see Williams (2002) and Pierik and Robeyns (2007).