Sen and Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach

Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and philosopher who would later receive the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, first laid out the capabilities approach in his 1979 Tanner Lecture "Equality of What?," delivered at Stanford University. Sen argued against both the utilitarian metric of subjective welfare and Rawls's metric of primary goods as adequate bases for assessing equality, on the grounds that neither properly accounts for the real, morally significant differences among persons in their ability to convert resources or welfare into valuable outcomes. A person with a disability, for instance, may need considerably more income or primary goods than an able-bodied person to achieve the same level of mobility or social participation, so equal primary goods, or even equal subjective satisfaction, can mask deep inequality in what people are actually able to do and become.