According to the Human Development Report 1999 of the United Nations Development Programme, there is no country that treats its women as well as its men, according to a complex measure that includes life expectancy, wealth, and education. Developing countries, however, present especially urgent problems.  Gender inequality is strongly correlated with poverty. When poverty combines with gender inequality, the result is acute failure of central human capabilities.  In the group of "medium human development" countries taken as a whole, the male adult literacy rate is 83.3%, as against 67.3% for women; in the "low human development countries" the rate is 57.2% for males, 35.8% for females.  School enrollment percentages (combining all three levels) are, in the medium development countries, 60% for females, 68% for males; in the low human development countries, 33% for females, 44% for males.  In terms of real GDP per capita, in the medium development countries women control $2220 as against $4414 for men; in the low human development countries, $691 for women, $1277 for men.  We do not yet have reliable statistics for rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment, because in many countries little attention is paid to domestic violence and sexual harassment, rape within marriage is not counted as a crime, and even stranger-rape is so rarely punished that many women are deterred from reporting the crime.

If we turn to the very basic area of health and nutrition, there is pervasive evidence of discrimination against females in many nations of the developing world.  It is standardly believed that where equal nutrition and health care are present, women live, on average, slightly longer than men:  thus, we would expect a sex ratio of something like 102.2 women to 100 men (the actual sex ratio of Sub-Saharan Africa).  Many countries have a far lower sex ratio: India's, for example, is 92.7 women to 100 men, the lowest sex ratio since the census began early in this century.  If we study such ratios and ask the question, "How many more women than are now present in Country C would be there if they had the same sex ratio as Sub-Saharan Africa?" we get a figure that economist Amartya Sen has graphically called the number of "missing women."  There are many millions of missing women in the world today.  Using this rough index, the number of missing women in Southeast Asia is 2.4 millions, in Latin America 4.4, in North Africa 2.4, in Iran 1.4, in China 44.0, in Bangladesh 3.7, in India 36.7, in Pakistan 5.2, in West Asia 4.3.  If we now consider the ratio of the number of missing women to the number of actual women in a country, we get, for Pakistan 12.9%, India 9.5%, Bangladesh 8.7%, China 8.6%, Iran 8.5%, West Asia 7.8%, North Africa 3.9%, Latin America 2.2%, Southeast Asia 1.2%.  In India, not only is the mortality differential especially sharp among children (girls dying in far greater numbers than boys), the higher mortality rate of women compared to men applies to all age groups until the late thirties. In some regions, the discrepancy is far greater than the national average:  in rural Bihar, for example, an NGO has counted heads and arrived at the astonishing figure of 75 females to 100 males.

One area of life that contributes especially greatly to women's inequality is the area of care.  Women are the world's primary, and usually only, caregivers for people in a condition of extreme dependency: young children, the elderly, those whose physical or mental handicaps make them incapable of the relative (and often temporary) independence that characterizes so-called "normal" human lives.  Women perform this crucial work, often, without pay and without recognition that it is work.  At the same time, the fact that they need to spend long hours caring for the physical needs of others makes it more difficult for them to do what they want to do in other areas of life, including employment, citizenship, play and self-expression.

The influential human rights approach has a great deal to say about these inequalities, and the language of rights has proven enormously valuable for women, both in articulating their demands for justice and in linking those demands to the earlier demands of other subordinated groups.  And yet the rights framework is shaky in several respects.  First, it is intellectually contested: there are many different conceptions of what rights are, and what it means to secure a right to someone.  (Are rights prepolitical, or artifacts of laws and institutions?  Do they belong to individual persons only, or also to groups? Are they always correlated with duties, and who has the duties correlated with human rights? And what are human rights rights to? Freedom from state interference primarily, or also a certain positive level of well-being and opportunity?) Thus to use the language of rights all by itself is not very helpful: it just invites a host of further questions about what is being recommended. Second, the language of rights has been associated historically with political and civil liberties, and only more recently with economic and social entitlements. But the two are not only of comparable importance in human lives, they are also thoroughly intertwined: the liberties of speech and association, for example, have material prerequisites. A woman who has no opportunities to work outside the home does not have the same freedom of association as one who does. Women deprived of education are also deprived of much meaningful participation in politics and speech. Third, the human rights approach has typically ignored urgent claims of women to protection from domestic violence and other abuses of their bodily integrity. It has also typically ignored urgent issues of justice within the family: its distribution of resources and opportunities among its members, the recognition of women's work as work. Fourth and finally, the rights approach is often criticized for being merely Western, and for being insensitive to non-Western traditions of thought. Even if one believes that these criticisms are in many ways mistaken (as I shall argue they are), one might still wish to search for an alternative or at least a supplement to this contested language that would be free of this problem.

I shall argue that the alternative or supplement we need is the capabilities approach, an approach to issues of basic justice and to the measurement of quality of life pioneered within economics by Amartya Sen, put into practice in the Human Development Reports, and developed by me in a slightly different way within feminist political theory.
 

II.    The Capabilities Approach:  An Overview
I shall argue that international political and economic thought should be feminist, attentive (among other things) to the special problems women face because of sex in more or less every nation in the world, problems without an understanding of which general issues of poverty and development cannot be well confronted. An approach to international development should be assessed for its ability to recognize these problems and to make recommendations for their solution. I shall propose and defend one such approach, one that seems to me to do better in this area than other prominent alternatives. My version of this approach is philosophical, and I shall try to show why we need philosophical theorizing in order to approach these problems well. It is also based on a cross-cultural normative account of central human capabilities, closely allied to a form of political liberalism; one of my primary tasks will be to defend this type of cross-cultural normative approach as a valuable basis from which to approach the problems of women in the developing world. Finally, I shall also try to show that my version of the capabilities approach, while attractive for many reasons, has special advantages when we are approaching the special problems faced by women: both intellectually and practically, there is a strong link between a concern for gender justice and reasons we might have to turn to the capabilities approach.

The aim of my project as a whole is to provide the philosophical underpinning for an account of basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires. I shall argue that the best approach to this idea of a basic social minimum is provided by an approach that focuses on human capabilities, that is, what people are actually able to do and to be -- in a way informed by an intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being. I shall identify a list of central human capabilities, setting them in the context of a type of political liberalism that makes them specifically political goals and presents them in a manner free of any specific metaphysical grounding. In this way, I argue, the capabilities can be the object of an overlapping consensus among people who otherwise have very different comprehensive conceptions of the good. And I shall argue that the capabilities in question should be pursued for each and every person, treating each as an end and none as mere tools of the ends of others. Women have all too often been treated as the supporters of the ends of others, rather than as ends in their own right; thus this principle has particular critical force with regard to women's lives. Finally, my approach uses the idea of a threshold level of each capability, beneath which it is held that truly human functioning is not available to citizens; the social goal should be understood in terms of getting citizens above this capability threshold.

The capabilities approach has another related, and weaker, use. It specifies a space within which comparisons of life quality (how well people are doing) are most revealingly made among nations. Used in this way, as in the Human Development Reports, it is a rival to other standard measures, such as GNP per capita and utility. This role for the conception is significant, since we are not likely to make progress toward a good conception of the social minimum if we do not first get the space of comparison right. And we may use the approach in this weaker way, to compare one nation with another, even when we are unwilling to go further and use the approach as the philosophical basis for fundamental constitutional principles establishing a social minimum or threshhold. On the other hand, the comparative use of capabilities is ultimately not much use without a determinate normative conception that will tell us what to make of what we find in our comparative study. Most conceptions of quality of life measurement in development economics are implicitly harnassed to a normative theory of the proper social goal (wealth maximization, utility maximization, etc.), and this one is explicitly so harnassed. The primary task of my argument will be to move beyond the merely comparative use of capabilities to the construction of a normative political proposal that is a partial theory of justice.

The capabilities approach is fully universal: the capabilities in question are important for each and every citizen, in each and every nation, and each is to be treated as an end. Women in developing nations are important to the project in two ways: as people who suffer pervasively from acute capability failure, and also as people whose situation provides an interesting test of this and other approaches, showing us the problems they solve or fail to solve. Defects in standard GNP and utility based approaches can be well understood by keeping the problems of such women in view; but of course women's problems are urgent in their own right, and it may be hoped that a focus on them will help compensate for earlier neglect of sex equality in development economics and in the international human rights movement.
 

III.    The Need for Cross-Cultural Norms
Should we be looking for a set of cross-cultural norms in the first place, where women's opportunities are concerned? Obviously enough, women are already doing that, in many areas. To take just one example, women laboring in the informal sector, for example, are increasingly organizing on an international level to set goals and priorities. Many other examples are provided by the international human rights movement and international agreements such as CEDAW. But this process is controversial, both intellectually and politically. Where do these normatives categories come from, it will be asked? And how can they be justified as appropriate ones for cultures that have traditionally used different normative categories? Now of course no critical social theory confines itself to the categories of each culture's daily life. If it did, it probably could not perform its special task as critical theory, which involves the systematization and critical scrutiny of intuitions that in daily life are often unexamined. Theory gives people a set of terms with which to criticize abuses that otherwise might lurk nameless in the background. Terms such as "sexual harassment" and "hostile work environment" give us some obvious examples of this point. But even if one defends theory as valuable for practice, it may still be problematic to use concepts that originate in one culture to describe and assess realities in another -- and all the more problematic if the culture described has been colonized and oppressed by the describer's culture. Attempts by international feminists today to use a universal language of justice, human rights, or human functioning to assess lives like those of Vasanti and Jayamma is bound to encounter charges of Westernizing and colonizing -- even when the universal categories are introduced by feminists who live and work within the nation in question itself. For, it is standardly said, such women are alienated from their culture, and are faddishly aping a Western political agenda. The minute they become critics, it is said, they cease to belong to their own culture and become puppets of the Western elite.

We should begin by asking whose interests are served by the implicit nostalgic image of a happy harmonious culture, and whose resistance and misery are being effaced. Describing her mother's difficult life, Indian feminist philosopher Uma Narayan writes, "One thing I want to say to all who would dismiss my feminist criticisms of my culture, using my 'Westernization' as a lash, is that my mother's pain too has rustled among the pages of all those books I have read that partly constitute my 'Westernization,' and has crept into all the suitcases I have ever packed for my several exiles." This same pain is evident in the united voice of protest that has emerged from international women's meetings such as those in Vienna and Beijing, where a remarkable degree of agreement was found across cultures concerning fundamental rights for women.

Nonetheless, when we advance a set of universal norms in connection with women's equality, we will also face three more sincere and respectable objections, which must be honestly confronted.

First, one hears what I shall call the argument from culture. Traditional cultures, the argument goes, contain their own norms of what women's lives should be: frequently norms of female modesty, deference, obedience, and self-sacrifice. Feminists should not assume without argument that those are bad norms, incapable of constructing good and flourishing lives for women. By contrast, the norms proposed by feminists seem to this opponent suspiciously "Western," because they involve an emphasis on choice and opportunity.

My full answer to this argument will emerge from the proposal I shall make, which certainly does not preclude any woman's choice to lead a traditional life, so long as she does so with certain economic and political opportunities firmly in place. But we should begin by emphasizing that the notion of tradition used in the argument is far too simple. Cultures are scenes of debate and contestation. They contain dominant voices, and they also contain the voices of women, which have not always been heard. It would be implausible to suggest that the many groups working to improve the employment conditions of women in the informal sector, for example, are brainwashing women into striving for economic opportunities: clearly, they provide means to ends women already want, and a context of female solidarity within which to pursue those ends. Where they do alter existing preferences, they typically do so by giving women a richer sense of both their possibilities and their equal worth, in a way that looks more like a self-realization than like brainwashing -- as Tagore's heroine vividly states, telling her husband why she has decided to leave him. Indeed, what may possibly be "Western" is the arrogant supposition that choice and economic agency are solely Western values!

Another general point should be stressed: Cultures are dynamic, and change is a very basic element in all of them. Contrasts between West and non-West often depict Western cultures as dynamic, critical, modernizing, while Eastern cultures are identified with their oldest elements, as if these do not change or encounter contestation. Looking at the relationship between her grandmother's way of life and her own, Narayan comments, "I find it impossible to describe 'our traditional way of life' without seeing change as a constitutive element, affecting transformations that become 'invisible' in their taken-for-grantedness." Criticism too is profoundly indigenous to virtually all cultures, but to none more so than to the culture of India, that extremely argumentative nation. To cite just one famous and typical example, Bengali religious thinker Rammohun Roy, imagining the horrors of death, singles out as especially terrible the fact that "everyone will contest your views, and you will not be able to reply." This too is Indian culture.

In short, because cultures are scenes of debate, appealing to culture give us questions rather than answers. It certainly doesn't show that cross-cultural norms are a bad answer to those questions.

Let us now consider the argument that I shall call the argument from the good of diversity. This argument reminds us that our world is rich in part because we don't all agree on a single set of practices and norms. We think the world's different languages have worth and beauty, and that it's a bad thing, diminishing the expressive resources of human life generally, if any language should cease to exist. So too, cultural norms have their own distinctive beauty; the world risks becoming impoverished as it becomes more homogeneous.

Here we should distinguish two claims the objector might be making. She might be claiming that diversity is good as such; or she might simply be saying that there are problems with the values of economic efficiency and consumerism that are increasingly dominating our interlocking world. This second claim, of course, doesn't yet say anything against cross-cultural norms, it just suggests that their content should be critical of some dominant economic norms. So the real challenge to our enterprise lies in the first claim. To meet it we must ask how far cultural diversity really is like linguistic diversity. The trouble with the analogy is that languages don't harm people, and cultural practices frequently do. We could think that threatened languages such as Cornish and Breton should be preserved, without thinking the same about domestic violence: it is not worth preserving simply because it is there and very old. In the end, then, the objection doesn't undermine the search for cross-cultural norms, it requires it: for what it invites us to ask is, whether the cultural values in question are among the ones worth preserving, and this entails at least a very general cross-cultural framework of assessment, one that will tell us when we are better off letting a practice die out.

Finally, we have the argument from paternalism. This argument says that when we use a set of cross-cultural norms as benchmarks for the world's varied societies, we show too little respect for people's freedom as agents (and, in a related way, their role as democratic citizens). People are the best judges of what is good for them, and if we say that their own choices are not good for them we treat them like children. This is an important point, and one that any viable cross-cultural proposal should bear firmly in mind. But it hardly seems incompatible with the endorsement of cross-cultural norms. Indeed, it appears to endorse explicitly at least some cross-cultural norms, such as the political liberties and other opportunities for choice. Thinking about paternalism gives us a strong reason to respect the variety of ways citizens actually choose to lead their lives in a pluralistic society, and therefore to seek a set of cross-cultural norms that protect freedom and choice of the most significant sorts. But this means that we will naturally value religious toleration, associative freedom, and the other major liberties. These liberties are themselves cross-cultural norms, and they are not compatible with views that many real people and societies hold.

We can make a further claim: many existing value systems are themselves highly paternalistic, particularly toward women. They treat them as unequal under the law, as lacking full civil capacity, as not having the property rights, associative liberties, and employment rights of males. If we encounter a system like this, it is in one sense paternalistic to say, sorry, that is unacceptable under the universal norms of equality and liberty that we would like to defend. In that way, any bill of rights is "paternalistic" vis a vis families, or groups, or practices, or even pieces of legislation, that treat people with insufficient or unequal respect. The Indian Constitution, for example, is in that sense paternalistic when it tells people that it is from now on illegal to use caste or sex as grounds of discrimination. But that is hardly a good argument against fundamental constitutional rights or, more generally, against opposing the attempts of some people to tyrannize over others. We dislike paternalism, insofar as we do, because there is something else that we like, namely liberty of choice in fundamental matters. It is fully consistent to reject some forms of paternalism while supporting those that underwrite these basic values.

Nor does the protection of choice require only a formal defense of basic liberties. The various liberties of choice have material preconditions, in whose absence there is merely a simulacrum of choice. Many women who have in a sense the "choice" to go to school simply cannot do so: the economic circumstances of their lives makes this impossible. Women who "can" have economic independence, in the sense that no law prevents them, may be prevented simply by lacking assets, or access to credit. In short, liberty is not just a matter of having rights on paper, it requires being in a material position to exercise those rights. And this requires resources. The state that is going to guarantee people rights effectively is going to have to recognize norms beyond the small menu of basic rights: it will have to take a stand about the redistribution of wealth and income, about employment, land rights, health, education. If we think that these norms are important cross-culturally, we will need to take an international position on pushing toward these goals. That requires yet more universalism and in a sense paternalism; but we could hardly say that the many women who live in abusive or repressive marriages, with no assets and no opportunity to seek employment outside the home, are especially free to do as they wish.

The argument from paternalism indicates, then, that we should prefer a cross-cultural normative account that focuses on empowerment and opportunity, leaving people plenty of space to determine their course in life once those opportunities are secured to them. It does not give us any good reason to reject the whole idea of cross-cultural norms, and some strong reasons why we should seek such norms, including in our account not only the basic liberties, but also forms of economic empowerment that are crucial in making the liberties truly available to people. And the argument suggests one thing more: that the account we search for should seek empowerment and opportunity for each and every person, respecting each as an end, rather than simply as the agent or supporter of ends of others. Women are too often treated as members of an organic unit such as the family or the community is supposed to be, and their interests subordinated to the larger goals of that unit, which means, typically, those of its male members. However, the impressive economic growth of a region means nothing to women whose husbands deprived them of control over household income. We need to consider not just the aggregate, whether in a region or in a family; we need to consider the distribution of resources and opportunities to each person, thinking of each as worthy of regard in her own right.
 

IV.    Traditional Economic Approaches to Development:  The Need for Human Norms
Another way of seeing why cross-cultural norms are badly needed in the international policy arena is to consider what the alternative has typically been. Prior to the shift in thinking that is associated with the work of Amartya Sen and with the Human Development Reports of the UNDP, the most prevalent approach to measuring quality of life in a nation used to be simply to ask about GNP per capita. This approach tries to weasel out of making any cross-cultural claims about what has value -- although, notice, it does assume the universal value of opulence. What it omits, however, is much more significant. We are not even told about the distribution of wealth and income, and countries with similar aggregate figures can exhibit great distributional variations. (Thus South Africa always did very well among developing nations, despite its enormous inequalities and violations of basic justice.) Circus girl Sissy Jupe, in Dickens's novel Hard Times, already saw the problem with this absence of normative concern for distribution. She says that her economics lesson didn't tell her "who has got the money and whether any of it is mine." So too with women around the world: the fact that one nation or region is in general more prosperous than another is only a part of the story: it doesn't tell us what government has done for women in various social classes, or how they are doing. To know that, we'd need to look at their lives. But then we need to specify, beyond distribution of wealth and income itself, what parts of lives we ought to look at -- such as life expectancy, infant mortality, educational opportunities, health care, employment opportunities, land rights, political liberties. Seeing what is absent from the GNP account nudges us sharply in the direction of mapping out these and other basic goods in a universal way, so that we can use the list of basic goods to compare quality of life across societies.

A further problem with all resource-based approaches, even those that are sensitive to distribution, is that individuals vary in their ability to convert resources into functionings. (This is the problem that has been stressed for some time by Amartya Sen in his writings about the capabilities approach.) Some of these differences are straightforwardly physical. Nutritional needs vary with age, occupation, and sex. A pregnant or lactating woman needs more nutrients than a non-pregnant woman. A child needs more protein than an adult. A person whose limbs work well needs few resources to be mobile, whereas a person with paralyzed limbs needs many more resources to achieve the same level of mobility. Many such variations can escape our notice if we live in a prosperous nation that can afford to bring all individuals to a high level of physical attainment; in the developing world we must be highly alert to these variations in need. Again, some of the pertinent variations are social, connected with traditional hierarchies. If we wish to bring all citizens of a nation to the same level of educational attainment, we will need to devote more resources to those who encounter obstacles from traditional hierarchy or prejudice: thus women's literacy will prove more expensive than men's literacy in many parts of the world. If we operate only with an index of resources, we will frequently reinforce inequalities that are highly relevant to well-being. As my examples suggest, women's lives are especially likely to raise these problems: therefore, any approach that is to deal adequately with women's issues must be able to deal well with these variations.

If we turn from resource-based approaches to preference-based approaches, we encounter another set of difficulties. Such approaches have one salient advantage over the GNP approach: they look at people, and assess the role of resources as they figure in improving actual people's lives. But users of such approaches typically assume without argument that the way to assess the role of resources in people's lives is simply to ask them about the satisfaction of their current preferences. The problem with this idea is that preferences are not exogenous, given independently of economic and social conditions. They are at least in part constructed by those conditions. Women often have no preference for economic independence before they learn about avenues through which women like them might pursue this goal; nor do they think of themselves as citizens with rights that were being ignored, before they learn of their rights and are encouraged to believe in their equal worth. All of these ideas, and the preferences based on them, frequently take shape for women in programs of education sponsored by women's organizations of various types. Men's preferences, too, are socially shaped and often misshaped. Men frequently have a strong preference that their wives should do all the child care and all the housework -- often in addition to working an eight-hour day. Such preferences, too, are not fixed in the nature of things: they are constructed by social traditions of privilege and subordination. Thus a preference-based approach typically will reinforce inequalities: especially those inequalities that are entrenched enough to have crept into people very desires. Once again, although this is a fully general problem, it has special pertinence to women's lives. Women have especially often been deprived of education and information, which are necessary, if by no means sufficient, to make preferences a reliable indicator of what public policy should pursue. They have also often been socialized to believe that a lower living standard is what is right and fitting for them, and that some great human goods (for example education, political participation) are not for them at all. They may be under considerable social pressure to say they are satisfied without such things: and yet we should not hastily conclude that public policy should not work to extend these functions to women. In short, looking at women's lives helps us see the inadequacy of traditional approaches; and the urgency of women's problems gives us a very strong motivation to prefer a non-traditional approach.
 

V.    Human Dignity and Human Capabilities
I shall now argue that a reasonable answer to all these concerns -- capable of giving good guidance to government establishing basic constitutional principles and to international agencies assessing the quality of life -- is given by a version of the capabilities approach.

The central question asked by the capabilities approach is not, "How satisfied is this woman?" or even "How much in the way of resources is she able to command?" It is, instead, "What is she actually able to do and to be?" Taking a stand for political purposes on a working list of functions that would appear to be of central importance in human life, users of this approach ask, Is the person capable of this, or not? They ask not only about the person's satisfaction with what she does, but about what she does, and what she is in a position to do (what her opportunities and liberties are). They ask not just about the resources that are present, but about how those do or do not go to work, enabling the woman to function.

To introduce the intuitive idea behind the approach, it is useful to start from this passage of Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written at a time when he was reading Aristotle and was profoundly influenced by Aristotelian ideas of human capability and functioning:

Similarly, the intuitive idea behind my version of the capabilities approach is twofold: first, that there are certain functions that are particularly central in human life, in the sense that their presence or absence is typically understood to be a mark of the presence or absence of human life. Second, and this is what Marx found in Aristotle, that there is something that it is to do these functions in a truly human way, not a merely animal way. We judge, frequently enough, that a life has been so impoverished that it is not worthy of the dignity of the human being, that it is a life in which one goes on living, but more or less like an animal, not being able to develop and exercise one's human powers. In Marx's example, a starving person just grabs at the food in order to survive, and the many social and rational ingredients of human feeding can't make their appearance. Similarly, the senses of a human being can operate at a merely animal level -- if they are not cultivated by appropriate education, by leisure for play and self-expression, by valuable associations with others; and we should add to the list some items that Marx probably would not endorse, such as expressive and associational liberty, and the freedom of worship. The core idea seems to be that of the human being as a dignified free being who shapes his or her own life, rather than being passively shaped or pushed around by the world in the manner of a flock or herd animal.

At one extreme, we may judge that the absence of capability for a central function is so acute that the person isn't really a human being at all, or any longer -- as in the case of certain very severe forms of mental disability, or senile dementia. But I am less interested in that boundary (important though it is for medical ethics) than in a higher one, the level at which a person's capability is "truly human," that is, worthy of a human being. The idea thus contains a notion of human worth or dignity.

Notice that the approach makes each person a bearer of value, and an end. Marx, like his bourgeois forebears, holds that it is profoundly wrong to subordinate the ends of some individuals to those of others. That is at the core of what exploitation is, to treat a person as a mere object for the use of others. What this approach is after is a society in which individuals are treated as each worthy of regard, and in which each has been put in a position to live really humanly.

I think we can produce an account of these necessary elements of truly human functioning that commands a broad cross-cultural consensus, a list that can be endorsed for political purposes by people who otherwise have very different views of what a complete good life for a human being would be. The list is supposed to provide a focus for quality of life assessment and for political planning, and it aims to select capabilities that are of central importance, whatever else the person pursues. They therefore have a special claim to be supported for political purposes in a pluralistic society.

The list in its current form represents the result of years of cross-cultural discussion, and comparisons between earlier and later versions will show that the input of other voices has shaped its content in many ways. It remains open-ended and humble; it can always be contested and remade. Nor does it deny that the items on the list are to some extent differently constructed by different societies. Indeed part of the idea of the list is that its members can be more concretely specified in accordance with local beliefs and circumstances. Here is the current version:
 

Central Human Functional Capabilities

1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one's life is so reduced as to be not worth living.

2. Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.

3. Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.

4. Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason -- and to do these things in a "truly human" way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one's own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one's mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences, and to avoid non-necessary pain.

5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to lovethose who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one's emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.)

6. Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one's life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience.)

7. Affiliation. A. Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation; to have the capability for both justice and friendship. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.)

B. Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails protections against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, caste, ethnicity, or national origin.

8. Other Species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.

9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.

10. Control over one's Environment.

A. Political. Being able to participated effectively in political choices that govern one's life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association.

B. Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods); having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

The list is, emphatically, a list of separate components. We cannot satisfy the need for one of them by giving people a larger amount of another one. All are of central importance and all are distinct in quality. The irreducible plurality of the list limits the trade-offs that it will be reasonable to make, and thus limits the applicability of quantitative cost-benefit analysis. At the same time, the items on the list are related to one another in many complex ways. One of the most effective ways of promoting women's control over their environment, and their effective right of political participation, is to promote women's literacy. Women who can seek employment outside the home have more resources in protecting their bodily integrity from assaults within it. Such facts give us still more reason not to promote one capability at the expense of the others.

Among the capabilities, two, practical reason and affiliation, stand out as of special importance, since they both organize and suffuse all the others, making their pursuit truly human. To use one's senses in a way not infused by the characteristically human use of thought and planning is to use them in an incompletely human manner. Tagore's heroine, summarizing her decision to seek a life apart from her husband, says, "I found myself beautiful as a free human mind." This idea of herself infuses all her other functions. At the same time, to reason for oneself without at all considering the circumstances and needs of others is, again, to behave in an incompletely human way.

The basic intuition from which the capability approach begins, in the political arena, is that human abilities exert a moral claim that they should be developed. Human beings are creatures such that, provided with the right educational and material support, they can become fully capable of these human functions. That is, they are creatures with certain lower-level capabilities (which I call "basic capabilities") to perform the functions in question. When these capabilities are deprived of the nourishment that would transform them into the high-level capabilities that figure on my list, they are fruitless, cut off, in some way but a shadow of themselves. If a turtle were given a life that afforded a merely animal level of functioning, we would have no indignation, no sense of waste and tragedy. When a human being is given a life that blights powers of human action and expression, that does give us a sense of waste and tragedy -- the tragedy expressed, for example, in the statement made by Tagore's heroine to her husband, when she says, "I am not one to die easily." In her view, a life without dignity and choice, a life in which she can be no more than an appendage, was a type of death of her humanity.

Notice that the approach makes each person a bearer of value, and an end. Marx, like his bourgeois forebears, holds that it is profoundly wrong to subordinate the ends of some individuals to those of others. That is at the core of what exploitation is, to treat a person as a mere object for the use of others. Thus it will be just as repugnant to this Aristotelian/Marxian approach as to a bourgeois philosophy to foster a good for society considered as an organic whole, where this does not involve the fostering of the good of persons taken one by one. Thus it will be insufficient to promote the good of "the community" or "the family," where that leaves intact gross asymmetries of capability among community or family members. Women are especially likely to be the losers when the good of a group is promoted as such, without asking about hierarchies of power and opportunity internal to the group. The capabilities approach insists on pressing that question. What the approach is after is a society in which persons are treated as each worthy of regard, and in which each has been put in a position to live really humanly. (That is where the idea of a threshold comes in: we say that beneath a certain level of capability, in each area, a person has not been enabled to live in a truly human way.) The capabilities sought are sought for each and every person, not, in the first instance, for groups or families or states or other corporate bodies. Such bodies may be extremely important in promoting human capabilities, and in this way they may deservedly gain our support: but it is because of what they do for people that they are so worthy, and the ultimate political goal is always the promotion of the capabilities of each person.

We begin, then, with a sense of the worth and dignity of basic human powers, thinking of them as claims to a chance for functioning, claims that give rise to correlated social and political duties. And in fact there are three different types of capabilities that play a role in the analysis. First, there are basic capabilities: the innate equipment of individuals that is the necessary basis for developing the more advanced capability, and a ground of moral concern. Second, there are internal capabilities: that is, states of the person herself that are, so far as the person herself is concerned, sufficient conditions for the exercise of the requisite functions. A woman who has not suffered genital mutilation has the internal capability for sexual pleasure; most adult human beings everywhere have the internal capability for religious freedom and the freedom of speech. Finally, there are combined capabilities, which may be defined as internal capabilities combined with suitable external conditions for the exercise of the function. A woman who is not mutilated but who has been widowed as a child and is forbidden to make another marriage has the internal but not the combined capability for sexual expression (and, in most such cases, for employment, and political participation). Citizens of repressive non-democratic regimes have the internal but not the combined capability to exercise thought and speech in accordance with their conscience. The list, then, is a list of combined capabilities. To realize one of the items on the list entails not only promoting appropriate development of people's internal powers, but also preparing the environment so that it is favorable for the exercise of practical reason and the other major functions.
 

VI.    Functioning and Capability

I have spoken both of functioning and of capability. How are they related? Getting clear about this is crucial in defining the relation of the "capabilities approach" to our concerns about paternalism and pluralism. For if we were to take functioning itself as the goal of public policy, a liberal pluralist would rightly judge that we were precluding many choices that citizens may make in accordance with their own conceptions of the good. A deeply religious person may prefer not to be well-nourished, but to engage in strenuous fasting. Whether for religious or for other reasons, a person may prefer a celibate life to one containing sexual expression. A person may prefer to work with an intense dedication that precludes recreation and play. Am I declaring, by my very use of the list, that these are not fully human or flourishing lives? And am I instructing government to nudge or push people into functioning of the requisite sort, no matter what they prefer?

It is important that the answer to this question is no. Capability, not functioning, is the appropriate political goal. This is so because of the very great importance the approach attaches to practical reason, as a good that both suffuses all the other functions, making them fully human, and also figures, itself, as a central function on the list. The person with plenty of food may always choose to fast, but there is a great difference between fasting and starving, and it is this difference that we wish to capture. Again, the person who has normal opportunities for sexual satisfaction can always choose a life of celibacy, and the approach says nothing against this. What it does speak against (for example) is the practice of female genital mutilation, which deprives individuals of the opportunity to choose sexual functioning (and indeed, the opportunity to choose celibacy as well). A person who has opportunities for play can always choose a workaholic life; again, there is a great difference between that chosen life and a life constrained by insufficient maximum-hour protections and/or the "double day" that makes women unable to play in many parts of the world.

Once again, we must stress that the objective is to be understood in terms of combined capabilities. To secure a capability to a person it is not sufficient to produce good internal states of readiness to act. It is necessary, as well, to prepare the material and institutional environment so that people are actually able to function. Women burdened by the "double day" may be internally incapable of play -- if, for example, they have been kept indoors and zealously guarded since infancy, married at age six, and forbidden to engage in the kind of imaginative exploration of the environment that male children standardly enjoy. Young girls in poor areas of rural Rajasthan, India, for example, have great difficulty learning to play in an educational program run by local activists -- because their capacity for play has not been nourished early in childhood. On the other hand, there are also many women in the world who are perfectly capable of play in the internal sense, but who are unable to play because of the crushing demands of the "double day." Such a woman does not have the combined capability for play in the sense intended by the list. Capability is thus a demanding notion. In its focus on the environment of choice, it is highly attentive to the goal of functioning, and instructs governments to keep it always in view. On the other hand, it does not push people into functioning: once the stage is fully set, the choice is theirs.
 

VII.    Capabilities and Care

All human beings begin their lives as helpless children; if they live long enough, they are likely to end their lives in helplessness, whether physical or also mental. During the prime of life, most human beings encounter periods of extreme dependency; and some human beings remain dependent on the daily bodily care of others throughout their lives. Of course putting it this way suggests, absurdly, that "normal" human beings do not depend on others for bodily care and survival; but political thought should recognize that some phases of life, and some lives, generate more profound dependency than others.

The capabilities approach, more Aristotelian than Kantian, sees human beings from the first as animal beings whose lives are characterized by profound neediness as well as by dignity. It addresses the issue of care in many ways: under "life" it is stressed that people should be enabled to complete a "normal" human lifespan; under "health" and "bodily integrity" the needs of different phases of life are implicitly recognized; "sense," "emotions," and "affiliation" also target needs that vary with the stage of life. "Affiliation" is of particular importance, since it mentions the need for both compassion and self-respect, and it also mentions non-discrimination. What we see, then, is that care must be provided in such a way that the capability for self-respect of the receiver is not injured, and also in such a way that the care-giver is not exploited and discriminated against on account of performing that role. In other words, a good society must arrange to provide care for those in a condition of extreme dependency, without exploiting women as they have traditionally been exploited, and thus depriving them of other important capabilities. This huge problem will rightly shape the way states think about all the other capabilities.

The capabilities approach has a great advantage in this area over traditional liberal approaches that use the idea of a social contract. Such approaches typically generate basic political principles from a hypothetical contract situation in which all participants are independent adults. John Rawls, for example, uses the phrase "fully cooperating members of society over a complete life." But of course no human being is that. And the fiction distorts the choice of principles in a central way, effacing the issue of extreme dependency and care from the agenda of the contracting parties, when they choose the principles that shape society's basic structure. And yet such a fundamental issue cannot well be postponed for later consideration, since it profoundly shapes the way social institutions will be designed. The capabilities approach, using a different concept of the human being, one that builds in need and dependency into the first phases of political thinking, is better suited to good deliberation on this urgent set of issues.

VIII.    Capabilities and Human Rights

Earlier versions of the list appeared to diverge from approaches common in the human rights movement by not giving as large a place to the traditional political rights and liberties -- although the need to incorporate them was stressed from the start. This version of the list corrects that defect of emphasis. The political liberties have a central importance in making well-being human. A society that aims at well-being while overriding these has delivered to its members an incompletely human level of satisfaction. As Amartya Sen has recently written, "Political rights are important not only for the fulfillment of needs, they are crucial also for the formulation of needs. And this idea relates, in the end, to the respect that we owe each other as fellow human beings." There are many reasons to think that political liberties have an instrumental role in preventing material disaster (in particular famine), and in promoting economic well-being. But their role is not merely instrumental: they are valuable in their own right.

Thus capabilities as I conceive them have a very close relationship to human rights, as understood in contemporary international discussions. In effect they cover the terrain covered by both the so-called "first-generation rights" (political and civil liberties) and the so-called second-generation rights (economic and social rights). And they play a similar role, providing the philosophical underpinning for basic constitutional principles. Because the language of rights is well-established, the defender of capabilities needs to show what is added by this new language.

The idea of human rights is by no means a crystal clear idea. Rights have been understood in many different ways, and difficult theoretical questions are frequently obscured by the use of rights language, which can give the illusion of agreement where there is deep philosophical disagreement. People differ about what the basis of a rights claim is: rationality, sentience, and mere life have all had their defenders. They differ, too, about whether rights are prepolitical or artifacts of laws and institutions. (Kant held the latter view, although the dominant human rights tradition has held the former.) They differ about whether rights belong only to individual persons, or also to groups. They differ about whether rights are to be regarded as side-constraints on goal-promoting action, or rather as one part of the social goal that is being promoted. They differ, again, about the relationship between rights and duties: if A has a right to S, then does this mean that there is always someone who has a duty to provide S, and how shall we decide who that someone is? They differ, finally, about what rights are to be understood as rights to. Are human rights primarily rights to be treated in certain ways? Rights to a certain level of achieved well-being? Rights to resources with which one may pursue one's life plan? Rights to certain opportunities and capacities with which one may make choices about one's life plan?

The account of central capabilities has the advantage, it seems to me, of taking clear positions on these disputed issues, while stating clearly what the motivating concerns are and what the goal is. Bernard Williams put this point eloquently, commenting on Sen's 1987 Tanner Lectures:

In some areas, I would argue that the best way of thinking about what rights are is to see them as combined capabilities. The right to political participation, the right to religious free exercise, the right of free speech -- these and others are all best thought of as capacities to function. In other words, to secure a right to a citizen in these areas is to put them in a position of combined capability to function in that area. (Of course there is another sense of "right" that is more like my "basic capabilities": people have a right to religious freedom just in virtue of being human, even if the state they live in has not guaranteed them this freedom.) By defining rights in terms of combined capabilities, we make it clear that a people in country C don't really have the right to political participation just because this language exists on paper: they really have this right only if there are effective measures to make people truly capable of political exercise. Women in many nations have a nominal right of political participation without having this right in the sense of capability: for example, they may be threatened with violence should they leave the home. In short, thinking in terms of capability gives us a benchmark as we think about what it is really to secure a right to someone.

There is another set of rights, largely those in the area of property and economic advantage, which seem analytically different in their relationship to capabilities. Take, for example, the right to shelter and housing. These are rights that can be analyzed in a number of distinct ways: in terms of resources, or utility (satisfaction), or capabilities. (Once again, we must distinguish between the claim that "A has a right to shelter" -- which frequently refers to A's moral claim in virtue of being human, with what I call basic capabilities) -- from the statement that "Country C gives its citizens the right to shelter." It is the second sentence whose analysis I am discussing here.) Here again, however, it seems valuable to understand these rights in terms of capabilities. If we think of the right to shelter as a right to a certain amount of resources, then we get into the very problem I discussed in section iii: giving resources to people does not always bring differently situated people up to the same level of capability to function. The utility-based analysis also encounters a problem: traditionally deprived people may be satisfied with a very low living standard, believing that this is all they have any hope of getting. A capabilities analysis, by contrast, looks at how people are actually enabled to live. Analyzing economic and material rights in terms of capabilities thus enables us to set forth clearly a rationale we have for spending unequal amounts of money on the disadvantaged, or creating special programs to assist their transition to full capability.

A further advantage of the capabilities approach is that, by focusing from the start on what people are actually able to do, it is well set up to notice and foreground inequalities that women suffer inside the family: inequalities in resources and opportunities, educational deprivation, the failure of work to be recognized as work, and, of course, insults to bodily integrity. It is no accident that these feminist issues have been central to the approach since its inception: conceptually, the approach is well suited to their recognition to making recommendations for their amelioration.

The language of capabilities has one further advantage over the language of rights: it is not strongly linked to one particular cultural and historical tradition, as the language of rights is believed to be. This belief is not very accurate: although the term "rights" is associated with the European Enlightenment, its component ideas have deep roots in many traditions. Where India is concerned, for example, even apart from the recent validation of rights language in Indian legal and constitutional traditions, the salient component ideas have deep roots in far earlier areas of Indian thought -- in ideas of religious toleration developed since the edicts of Ashoka in the third century BC, in the thought about Hindu/Muslim relations in the Moghul Empire, and, of course, in many progressive and humanist thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who certainly cannot be described as simply Westernizers, with no respect for their own traditions. Tagore portrays the conception of freedom used by the young wife in his story as having ancient Indian origins, in the quest of Rajput queen Meerabai for joyful self-expression. The idea of herself as "a free human mind" is represented as one that she derives, not from any external infusion, but from a combination of experience and history.

So "rights" are not exclusively Western, in the sense that matters most; they can be endorsed from a variety of perspectives. Nonetheless, the language of capabilities enables us to bypass this troublesome debate. When we speak simply of what people are actually able to do and to be, we do not even give the appearance of privileging a Western idea. Ideas of activity and ability are everywhere, and there is no culture in which people do not ask themselves what they are able to do, what opportunities they have for functioning.

If we have the language of capabilities, do we also need the language of rights? The language of rights still plays, I believe, four important roles in public discourse, despite its unsatisfactory features. First, when used in the first way, as in the sentence "A has a right to have the basic political liberties secured to her by her government", this sentence reminds us that people have justified and urgent claims to certain types of urgent treatment, no matter what the world around them has done about that. I have suggested that this role of rights language lies very close to what I have called "basic capabilities," in the sense that the justification for saying that people have such natural rights usually proceeds by pointing to some capability-like feature of persons (rationality, language) that they actually have on at least a rudimentary level. And I actually think that without such a justification the appeal to rights is quite mysterious. On the other hand, there is no doubt that one might recognize the basic capabilities of people and yet still deny that this entails that they have rights in the sense of justified claims to certain types of treatment. We know that this inference has not been made through a great deal of the world's history. So appealing to rights communicates more than does the bare appeal to basic capabilities, which does no work all by itself, without any further ethical argument of the sort I have supplied. Rights language indicates that we do have such an argument and that we draw strong normative conclusions from the fact of the basic capabilities.

Second, even at the second level, when we are talking about rights guaranteed by the state, the language of rights places great emphasis on the importance and the basic role of these spheres of ability. To say, "Here's a list of things that people ought to be able to do and to be" has only a vague normative resonance. To say, "Here is a list of fundamental rights," is more rhetorically direct. It tells people right away that we are dealing with an especially urgent set of functions, backed up by a sense of the justified claim that all humans have to such things, in virtue of being human.

Third, rights language has value because of the emphasis it places on people's choice and freedom. The language of capabilities, as I have said, was designed to leave room for choice, and to communicate the idea that there is a big difference between pushing people into functioning in ways you consider valuable and leaving the choice up to them. But there are approaches using an Aristotelian language of functioning and capability that do not emphasize liberty in the way that my approach does: Marxist Aristotelianism and some forms of Catholic Thomist Aristotelianism are illiberal in this sense. If we have the language of rights in play as well, I think it helps us to lay extra emphasis on the important fact that the appropriate political goal is the ability of people to choose to function in certain ways, not simply their actual functionings.

Finally, in the areas where we disagree about the proper analysis of rights talk -- where the claims of utility, resources, and capabilities are still being worked out -- the language of rights preserves a sense of the terrain of agreement, while we continue to deliberate about the proper type of analysis at the more specific level.

Thus in many ways the capabilities framework and the human rights framework are complementary. One cautionary note is, however, suggested by some current uses of rights talk. The historical connection of the rights framework with "negative liberty" and an absence of state interference has led to its increasing use in connection with opening markets to foreign capital. The connection of these putative economic rights with the promotion of a wide range of human capabilities for all citizens of a nature is difficult to trace: complex empirical questions are involved. Markets sometimes do promote human capabilities. Sometimes, however, they do so very unevenly. And there are some capabilities, for example those related to health and education, that markets do not deliver well to people; other forms of state action are required.

To some degree the ambiguities I have described in the language of rights can lead to a blurring of these issues: people may come to believe that there is a clear conceptual connection between "promoting human rights" in the sense of opening markets and "promoting human rights" in the sense of promoting each citizen's capabilities. Using rights language without capabilities language thus seems unwise, particularly at a time of rapid economic globalization.
 

VIII.    Capabilities as Goals for Women's Development

I have argued that legitimate concerns for diversity, pluralism and personal freedom are not incompatible with the recognition of cross-cultural norms, and indeed that cross-cultural norms are actually required if we are to protect diversity, pluralism, and freedom, treating each human being as an agent and an end. The best way to hold all these concerns together, I have argued, is to formulate the norms as a set of capabilities for fully human functioning, emphasizing the fact that capabilities protect, and do not close off, spheres of human freedom.

Used to evaluate the lives of women who are struggling for equality in many different countries, developing and developed, the capabilities framework does not, I believe, look like an alien importation: it squares pretty well with demands women are already making in many global and national political contexts. It might therefore seem superfluous to put these items on a list: why not just let women decide what they will demand in each case? To answer that question, we should point out that the international development debate is already using a normative language. Where the capabilities approach has not caught on -- as it has in the Human Development Reports -- a much less adequate theoretical language still prevails, whether it is the language of preference-satisfaction or the language of economic growth. We need the capabilities approach as a humanly rich alternative to these inadequate theories of human development.

Of course the capabilities approach supplies norms for human development in general, not just for women's development. Women's issues, however, are not only worthy of focus because of their remarkable urgency. They also help us see more clearly the inadequacy of various other approaches to development more generally, and the reasons for preferring the capabilities approach. Preference-based approaches do not enable us to criticize preferences that have been shaped by a legacy of injustice and hierarchy: men's preferences for dominance and for being taken care of, women's preferences for a low level of attainment when that is the only life they know and think possible. The capabilities approach, by contrast, looks at what women are actually able to do and to be, undeterred by the fact that oppressed and uneducated women may say, or even think, that some of these capabilities are not for them. Resource-based approaches, similarly, have a bias in the direction of protecting the status quo, in that they do not take account of the special needs for aid that some groups may have on account of their subordinate status: we have to spend more on them to bring them up to the same level of capability. This fact the capabilities approach sees clearly, and it directs us to make a basic threshold level of capability the goal for all citizens. Human rights approaches are close allies of the capabilities approach, because they take a stand on certain fundamental entitlements of citizens, and they hold that these may be demanded as a matter of basic justice. In relation to these approaches, however, the capabilities approach is both more definite, specifying clearly what it means to secure a "right" to someone, and more comprehensive, spelling out explicitly certain rights that are of special importance to women, but which have not until recently been included in international human rights documents.

The capabilities approach may seem to have one disadvantage, in comparison to these other approaches: it seems difficult to measure human capabilities. If this difficult arises already when we think about such obvious issues as health and mobility, it most surely arises in a perplexing form for my own list, which has added so many apparently intangible items, such as development of the imagination, and the conditions of emotional health. We know, however, that anything worth measuring, in human quality of life, is difficult to measure. Resource-based approaches simply substitute something easy to measure for what really ought to be measured, a heap of stuff for the richness of human functioning. Preference-based approaches do even worse, because they not only don't measure what ought to be measured, they also get into quagmires of their own, concerning how to aggregate preferences -- and whether there is any way of doing that task that does not run afoul of the difficulties shown in the social choice literature. The capabilities approach as so far developed in the Human Development Reports is admittedly not perfect: years of schooling, everyone would admit, are an imperfect proxy for education. We may expect that any proxies we find as we include more capabilities in the study will be highly imperfect also -- especially if it is data supplied by the nations that we need to rely on. On the other hand, we are at least working in the right place and looking at the right thing; and over time, as data-gathering responds to our concerns, we may expect increasingly adequate information, and better ways of aggregating that information. As has already happened with human rights approaches, we need to rely on the ingenuity of those who suffer from deprivation: they will help us find ways to describe, and even to quantify, their predicament.

Women all over the world have lacked support for central human functions, and that lack of support is to some extent caused by their being women. But women, like men -- and unlike rocks and trees and even horses and dogs -- have the potential to become capable of these human functions, given sufficient nutrition, education, and other support. That is why their unequal failure in capability is a problem of justice. It is up to all human beings to solve this problem. I claim that the capabilities approach, and a list of the central capabilities, give us good guidance as we pursue this difficult task.