The Capabilities Sample Clauses

The Capabilities. Rather than critique liberalisms focus on individualism, Xxxxxxxx argues that an expanded liberalism can be the basis of a project of human emancipation. Xxxxxxxx, in her positive project, proposes a conception of liberalism which embraces the Aristotelian notion of natural sociability of humans and which could recognize inequality of power among individuals. Purged from her account are the principles of liberalism which were central to the early modern social contract – the idea that individuals were equal in power, the idea that justice required a civil compact, and the idea that human’s natural state was one of war or competition. In Chapter One, I outlined Xxxxxxxx’x critique of liberalism from within, and her argument that liberalism’s principle that each individual must be treated as an end does not entail normative self-sufficiency and thus atomism, as feminist critics of liberalism suggest. Rather liberalism expresses a basic and important fact about human existence which should be protected by political institutions. Liberalism insists that each individual is separate and an end in themselves, which means, for Xxxxxxxx that empowering people means first and foremost empowering individuals. Using this principle of liberalism becomes a matter of great practical importance in the arena of international development, particularly in those projects which focus on how a group of individuals is faring either without aid in their home country or through the assessment of a particular development project. When we are trying to find out how a group of people is doing, we cannot just sum the happiness of all, we need to find out how each individual is doing. We need criteria for this, but not just any criteria will do. The criteria used for such a trans-cultural project must be the object of an overlapping consensus, given the other important value of liberalism, for Xxxxxxxx, that it does not impose one set of institutions or one set of comprehensive views on any group of individuals. In order to furnish criteria for how each individual is doing in a society, without imposing a comprehensive view of the good life, Xxxxxxxx produces what she calls the ‘capabilities approach’, the central component of which is a core set of human capabilities which any state should be able to ensure for each of its members. 428 This is a core set of ‘capabilities’ and not just resources, since Xxxxxxxx thinks distribution of resources does not always get at the important quest...