Article

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

2019, Vol. 18(3) 282–304
How politically liberal ª The Author(s) 2019
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should the capabilities sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1470594X19825495
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approach want to be?

Rosa Terlazzo
Kansas State University, USA

Abstract
In this article, I develop a tension in the capabilities approach between committing to
political liberalism and ensuring full capability for all persons. In particular, I argue that the
capabilities approach can maintain a commitment to full capability only by embracing at
least one of three kinds of comprehensiveness: Even if it can avoid comprehensiveness
along the dimensions of height and depth, it is committed along the dimension of
breadth. In short, because the possession of capability can be hampered either by
external obstacles that prevent a person from accessing a good or by internal obstacles
that prevent a person from being open to it, the capabilities approach faces a dilemma:
Either it can ensure that persons are free of internal obstacles to the possession of
capability by pushing them to be open to functionings across a relatively comprehensive
set of domains of life (that is, require breadth-comprehensiveness); or else it can side
with political liberalism by making options externally available across many domains of
life without encouraging internal endorsement – but in this case, it runs the risk that
persons will foreseeably and avoidably face internal obstacles to genuine possession of
some capabilities.

Keywords
capabilities approach, comprehensive doctrines, full capability, internal obstacles,
political liberalism

Corresponding author:
Rosa Terlazzo, Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University, 1116 Mid Campus Dr North, 201 Dickens
Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506-0803, USA.
Email: rterlazzo@ksu.edu
Terlazzo 283

Martha Nussbaum’s version of the capabilities approach has evolved over the years from
a perfectionist to a politically liberal theory. But to what extent is the capabilities
approach, given its own commitments, actually compatible with political liberalism?
Ultimately, I argue that the capabilities approach faces a dilemma: Either it can ensure
that persons are free of internal obstacles to the development of capabilities by pushing
them to be open to a set of functionings across a relatively comprehensive set of domains
of life; or else, in keeping with political liberalism, it can make options externally
available across many domains of life without encouraging internal endorsement. While
the former option squares poorly with a politically liberal rejection of comprehensive
doctrines, the latter acknowledges that some persons will foreseeably and avoidably face
internal obstacles to genuine possession of some capabilities.
It is my intention here to raise this dilemma without recommending which path the
capabilities approach should take. Political liberalism has been the target of much
criticism,1 and it is quite possible that the capabilities approach should give up on the
features of political liberalism that clash with ensuring full capability for persons.
Indeed, it is possible that political liberals themselves should give up on some elements
of their own theory. While I take the respect and stability to which political liberalism is
committed to be important values, I leave open both the possibility that they may be
secured absent political liberalism, and the possibility that they should sometimes be
compromised in favor of other values.
The article proceeds in five parts. In the first section, I briefly introduce the relevant
commitments of the capabilities approach and political liberalism. In the second section,
I distinguish between three dimensions of the comprehensiveness of doctrines and estab-
lish my focus on the capabilities approach’s ability to avoid breadth-comprehensiveness.
In the third section, I investigate and reject one route by which the capabilities approach
might aim to avoid breadth-comprehensiveness. In the fourth section, I develop the
dilemma for the capabilities approach. And finally, in the fifth section, I respond to the
objection that the dilemma as posed proves too much by undermining the capabilities
approach’s focus on capability rather than functioning.

The central ideas

In order to understand the conflict between the capabilities approach and political lib-
eralism, we must begin by establishing the central commitments of each. Since these
issues will be familiar to many readers, I rehearse them only briefly here, in order to
highlight the elements especially relevant to this article. Note, however, that I am
concerned in this article only with Nussbaum’s version of the capabilities approach,
since only Nussbaum adopts the politically liberal commitments that give rise to the
conflict addressed here.2

The capabilities approach

The central idea behind the capabilities approach is that the currency of individual
advantage ought to be the capabilities that persons possess: or in other words, that justice
requires a focus on ‘what persons are actually able to do and be’,3 ‘treating each as an
284 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

end, and none as a mere tool to the end of others’.4 For our purposes, we should focus on
three contrasts between the capabilities approach and its contenders.
First, the capabilities approach’s focus on the substantive lives that persons can lead is
an explicit rejection of preference satisfaction as the appropriate currency of distributive
justice.5 Since what people desire is a highly contingent and socially influenced matter,
people may adapt their preferences and aspirations to what they can expect to get. And in
circumstances of injustice, preference satisfaction theories like utilitarianism may there-
fore recommend satisfying the expansive preferences of the advantaged and the con-
stricted preferences of the disadvantaged, rather than working to close the gap in
achievement between the two groups.6 The capabilities approach, in contrast, holds that
persons should have equal opportunities to live valuable lives, even if the circumstances
of some have left them willing to settle for less than they ought.
Second, the emphasis on the opportunity to live a substantively good life also con-
stitutes a rejection of Rawlsians’ treatment of resources as the appropriate currency of
justice.7 While a primary goods account solves the problem of adaptation to inequality,
some people can achieve far more than others with the same set of resources: The person
who lives in a punishing climate, is pregnant or lactating, or is paraplegic, will require
greater resources than her fellows to be adequately sheltered, adequately nourished, or to
achieve freedom of mobility, respectively.8 And the capabilities approach holds that we
should concern ourselves directly with persons’ relative abilities to lead good lives,
rather than with their relative shares of instrumentally valuable resources required to
live such lives.
Finally, the capabilities approach’s commitment to treating each person as an end
stands in contrast to the utilitarian commitment to treating persons as only interchange-
able vessels for utility.9 While utilitarianism aims to maximize the total amount of utility
in society rather than focusing on its fair distribution between persons, the capabilities
approach holds that justice requires ensuring that each individual has a robust opportu-
nity to live a good life. That is, the capabilities approach denies that the capabilities of
one person can be sacrificed for the good of others.
The capabilities approach, then, is committed to ensuring that each person has the
capability to live a valuable life. In order to give shape to this idea of a valuable life,
Nussbaum proposes and later modifies a list of 10 central capabilities that she argues that
all persons should have a real opportunity to take advantage of. These capabilities are
chosen for their connection to the ‘intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of a
human being’.10 Crucially, given the connection between dignity and persons’ opportu-
nities to pursue their own conceptions of the good, capabilities are intended to be
opportunities to function in certain ways, rather than requirements to do so.11 I will not
discuss the details of this list because, in this article, I am not concerned with any
particular item on it. Instead, I am concerned with precisely how politically liberal her
list can be, if it is to retain both its focus on what persons are actually able to do and be,
and its commitment to ensuring the capabilities for all rather than only some individuals.

Political liberalism
Nussbaum intends her account to be politically liberal in the following sense:
Terlazzo 285

[T]he list of central human capabilities [is] the core of a specifically political form of
liberalism, in the Rawlsian sense. I imagine that citizens of many different comprehensive
doctrines can all endorse the items on this list, as things that are essential to a flourishing
human life, whatever else that life also pursues and values. It is neither an exhaustive
account of the good nor a metaphysically grounded account. Each citizen will interpret its
metaphysics differently, in the manner of a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus,” understand-
ing the core values in terms of the rest of her comprehensive doctrine [ . . . ] The political
account of capabilities has moral force, as does the political conception in a Rawlsian
political liberalism; but it is not grounded in any theory of the human that goes beneath
politics.12

The commitment to political liberalism, then, and to the overlapping consensus that
comes with it, amounts to a rejection of comprehensive doctrines as accounts of political
justice. By a comprehensive doctrine, I mean one that purports to offer a complete
account of value in life, and can therefore provide for its holder both a full evaluative
account of all facets of life, and a comprehensive basis for moral action guidance.13 At
the limit, then, a comprehensive doctrine offers for all possible values both an account of
what is good and an ultimate explanation of why it is good.
Nussbaum’s rejection of the capabilities approach as a comprehensive doctrine is
motivated by two primary ideas: the idea of stability and the idea of respect. First,
Nussbaum holds with John Rawls that in order for an account of justice to be justifiable,
it must be one that is capable of commanding stability over time for the right reasons –
and like Rawls, she also holds that a theory of justice justified by one particular com-
prehensive doctrine cannot be stably accepted by those whose comprehensive doctrines
conflict with it.14 A comprehensive doctrine imposed by the state forces citizens to
choose between acting as the state requires and acting in accordance with their consid-
ered convictions, and a state that routinely asks citizens to ignore their deepest convic-
tions is unlikely to command stable allegiance from them.
But even if we could leave stability to the side, Nussbaum’s commitment to political
liberalism would still be motivated by requirements of respect.15 Even if persons could
be made to be stably governed by a comprehensive doctrine that they did not share,
Nussbaum holds that it would place them in a position of second-class citizenship to
force them to do so, and this would amount to using some as mere tools for the good of
others. Such a state would use its power to publicly affirm and reinforce the deepest
convictions of some citizens, while denying both the truth of other citizens’ convictions
and, by extension, the power of those citizens to develop an adequate conception of the
good. In this way, it would deny the basic equality of citizens – one of the premises on
which any liberal system is presumably built. Accordingly, she adopts political liberal-
ism in order to show respect for persons with different comprehensive doctrines.16

Three dimensions of comprehensiveness

My claim, ultimately, will be that the capabilities approach cannot both (a) avoid com-
prehensiveness and (b) retain its commitment to ensuring that each individual can
genuinely do and be all of the things promised by the capabilities list. But since the
286 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

capabilities approaches’ status as a politically liberal doctrine has been frequently ques-
tioned, it is worth refining the senses in which the capabilities approach might be
committed to comprehensiveness. In this section, I propose a distinction between three
elements of comprehensiveness that a doctrine might have. This distinction both clarifies
a conflation in the literature and helps to situate my own argument in relationship to
other related critiques of the capabilities approach.
First, a doctrine might be comprehensive in the sense that it involves a final explana-
tion of why some things rather than others are good. While such explanations are often
metaphysical (as with most religious doctrines and many classical moral doctrines the
state might adopt), they need not be (since an explanation grounded in, say, human
psychology might offer a final explanation of what has value without making any thick
metaphysical claims).17 What unifies doctrines that are comprehensive in this sense is
that they (a) make deep explanatory claims about value that (b) are incompatible with
some and often many of the deep explanatory claims made by other comprehensive
doctrines. Insofar as such doctrines ‘stand behind’ and justify other actions and claims
about value, let us call this the ‘depth’ dimension of comprehensiveness.18
It is the depth dimension of comprehensiveness that has received the lion’s share of
attention in discussions of political liberalism. Rawls’s own turn toward political liberal-
ism was motivated by the conviction that citizens could not be expected to be governed
by a comprehensive doctrine meant to supersede their own deep explanations of value in
life,19 and many of those who reject political liberalism reject it on the grounds that
doctrines that are comprehensive in this sense are at least sometimes legitimate justifica-
tions for state action.20 There are, however, two other dimensions of comprehensiveness
worth considering.
Second, a doctrine might be comprehensive in the sense that it claims to capture those
things that are excellent. Let us call this the ‘height’ dimension of comprehensiveness. In
order to be genuinely comprehensive, a doctrine must give an exhaustive account of
what has value, and this will necessarily include making claims about what is most
exceptional or excellent. Of course, individuals’ actual approximations of comprehen-
sive doctrines often fail in practice to be fully comprehensive, and so could fail to make
claims about excellence. But two things are worth noting here. First, while such failures
might in fact occur, they would to that extent be failures of comprehensiveness, and the
missing account of excellence could and must in theory be developed in order for the
doctrine to count as genuinely comprehensive. Second, it is very often the excellent
rather than the adequate that ultimately guides persons’ actions in life, and so it would be
peculiar for individual approximated comprehensive doctrines to frequently lack
accounts of what is excellent or ultimately good. Comprehensive doctrines adopted by
states will also likely fail to be fully comprehensive in practice, but doctrines adopted by
states will count as more comprehensive along the height dimension to the extent that
they make more claims about excellence.
Third and finally, a doctrine might be comprehensive in the sense that it makes claims
about what is good in all domains of life. Let us call this the ‘breadth’ dimension of
comprehensiveness. A doctrine that is genuinely comprehensive will tell us not only
what matters most – it will also need to be able to resolve for us all questions about value
and action guidance. To be truly comprehensive, a doctrine should in theory be able to
Terlazzo 287

tell me equally what my government owes to me, how I should relate to my partner, and
which standards of personal cleanliness I may adopt. Again, actual individual or state
approximations of comprehensive doctrines will almost certainly fail this requirement in
practice, but they will be more comprehensive along the breadth dimension to the extent
that they make claims about what is good in a broader set of areas of life.
While all three dimensions of comprehensiveness may come together in state policy,
they need not. Comprehensiveness on the depth dimension might occur in the absence of
comprehensiveness on the height and breadth dimensions, as in the case of a state that
adopts an official religion but refrains from using that religion to make substantive
claims about good lives for citizens. Conversely, a state might adopt a doctrine that is
comprehensive on the height and/or breadth dimensions without being comprehensive
on the depth dimension. We can imagine a state that took a stance on either excellence or
broad goodness on the grounds that all of its citizens agreed – but for different reasons –
that those objects were valuable. And of course, we can have height-comprehensiveness
without breadth-comprehensiveness, or vice versa. A state might aim to advance only the
fine arts, thereby concerning itself with extreme value in only one narrow area of life; or
it might concern itself with ensuring that citizens are living sufficiently decent lives in
many disparate areas without concerning itself in any way with whether their lives are
excellent.
Note as well that the politically liberal opposition to comprehensive doctrines should
extend to all three dimensions, since comprehensiveness on any of them can raise
problems with regard to both stability and respect independently of comprehensives
on the other dimensions. Even if a state made only general claims about the nature of
the good, rather than its substance, issues of respect would still arise. In offering even a
general justification for goodness, the government would publicly proclaim that citizens
who endorsed that justification succeeded in capturing that element of the moral truth,
while all others failed. And depending on the nature and strength of those claims,
stability might also be threatened – after all, history is littered with examples of
religiously-motivated conflict that threatens stability.
Similarly, height- and breadth-comprehensiveness can also make problems for both
stability and respect. While it is in theory possible for all conceptions of the good present
in a society to agree on what makes life excellent and what makes life good in many
disparate areas, such agreement is highly unlikely – and it is even more unlikely in the
kind of diverse democracies where we would expect to find many disparate conceptions
of the good. Accordingly, when the state makes claims about what has value or tries to
encourage those values in citizens – even when it refrains from offering a deep explana-
tion for that value – it shows disrespect for the citizens who will invariably disagree. As
above, the government publicly endorses the lives that some citizens choose to live, and
condemns others. And depending on the content of the value claims made by the gov-
ernment, the strength of the disagreement from dissenters, and the force of the govern-
ment’s attempts to advance those values, height- and breadth-comprehensiveness may
also lead to instability when citizens rebel.
Which type of comprehensiveness, then, do I argue that the capabilities approach is
committed to? And how is my argument different from other arguments that Nussbaum’s
capabilities approach fails to be politically liberal?
288 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

Virtually all of the criticisms of Nussbaum’s political liberal bona fides have focused
on the depth dimension of comprehensiveness. Numerous philosophers have argued that
while her method for selecting the capabilities on her list claims to be free of metaphy-
sical or other controversial deep commitments about the good, her list or her method for
defending it in fact only succeeds via appeal to some deeper controversial value com-
mitments.21 And in her most explicit responses to these criticisms, she focuses almost
entirely on showing that justifications that she offers for her account are not the same
kinds of thick, controversial, metaphysical justifications that have been offered by com-
prehensive liberals like Kant, Mill, and Joseph Raz.22 Indeed, throughout her work, in
defense of her political liberalism, her primary focus is on showing that her capabilities
approach can avoid relying on deep metaphysical justifications.23
In this article, I take no stand on whether the capabilities approach avoids depth-
comprehensiveness. For the sake of argument, I will grant that it does. To my knowledge,
no one has claimed that the capabilities approach is height-comprehensive, and in part
for this reason, I will also grant that this is so. From the earliest iterations of her list,
Nussbaum has specified that the list of central capabilities is meant to take no stand on
what makes a life good beyond a certain sufficiency threshold and is instead meant to
capture only ‘the features whose absence means the end of a human form of life’.24
Whether or not the absence of any of those capabilities does indeed signal the end of a
human form of life, it seems correct to me that the list need not and does not aim to take
any stand on what makes life excellent.
The dimension along which I take the present tension between the capabilities
approach and political liberalism to arise is breadth-comprehensiveness. I argue that
in order to retain its commitment to what each individual person can actually do and
be with regard to the central capabilities, the capabilities approach must encourage
citizens to value or countenance certain functionings in a broad set of areas of life.25

The capabilities approach and breadth-comprehensiveness

To see why the capabilities approach cannot avoid comprehensiveness on the breadth
dimension, let us get a better idea of where political liberals take their political concep-
tions of justice to apply. In Rawls’s famous phrase, a political conception is one that
applies particularly to a specific kind of subject: that is, to the basic structure of society.
The basic structure of society includes ‘a society’s main political, social, and economic
institutions, and how they fit together into one unified system of social cooperation from
one generation to the next’.26 Since the borders of Rawls’s own account of the basic
structure are somewhat unclear,27 let us adopt a slightly clearer and more general account
of the area to which a political conception is meant to apply. Jonathan Quong clarifies
that ‘political conceptions only set out to explain what we owe to one another as
members of a just or legitimate state [ . . . Their] subject matter is restricted to claims
about justice, citizenship, state legitimacy, or political obligation’. In particular, a polit-
ical conception ‘does not aim to provide a comprehensive account of how we ought to
live in every aspect of our lives’.28 In Rawls’s words again, when a political conception
asks a person to see herself as the conception requires (that is, in Rawls’s case, as free
and equal), it ‘describe[s] how citizens think of themselves in a democratic society when
Terlazzo 289

questions of political justice arise’.29 This is compatible with denying that persons are
free and equal in other contexts, as one might when one privately views members of
one’s own religious community as chosen people, without holding that this status has any
political implications. Ultimately, then, a political conception makes claims about how
certain domains of society ought to be structured, requires citizens to see themselves and
their fellows in a particular way in certain areas of their lives, and entitles citizens to
make a particular type and limited number of claims on their governments and each
other.
The question, then, is whether the capabilities approach is indeed limited in these
sorts of ways, or whether it makes broader demands. I will argue that its demands must
be broader. On the face of it, the content of the capabilities Nussbaum proposes seems to
cover areas of life that are in no obvious way related to political life or the basic structure.
For instance, Nussbaum includes on her list opportunities for play, for sexual satisfac-
tion, for making music and art, and for having relationships with the nonhuman world.
While she also includes liberties such as freedom of speech, conscience, and association,
which seem more directly related to the political core of society, the former set of
capabilities seems to be one that citizens would use almost exclusively in nonpolitical
ways and in an extremely broad set of domains of life. The extremely broad and varied
set of life domains to which the capabilities relate, then, might lead us to suspect that the
capabilities approach is in fact quite comprehensive along the breadth dimension.
Relating to a broad set of domains of life, however, may not be enough for the
capabilities approach to count as comprehensive along the breadth dimension. We might
say that capabilities are political not with regard to the domains that they cover, but
rather with regard to the claims that they ground. In other words, despite the fact that they
relate to areas outside of society’s main political, social, and economic institutions, they
remain political insofar as they capture the set of things that citizens are entitled to
demand from their government.
On at least one plausible interpretation of Rawls’s primary goods, some primary
goods work in roughly this way. To be sure, some of Rawls’s primary goods are expli-
citly related to the political realm, such as basic rights and liberties, freedom of move-
ment and free choice of occupation, and powers and prerogatives of offices and positions
of responsibility within the basic structure. But the primary goods also include income
and wealth, and the justification for that inclusion seems to relate to a broader domain of
life in a way that might mirror Nussbaum’s inclusion of capabilities for play, sexual
satisfaction, and so on.30
To see how, consider the justification that Rawls offers for the primary goods he
includes. In Rawls’s words, ‘given the political conception of citizens, primary goods
specify what their needs are – part of what their good is as citizens – when questions of
justice arise’.31 As we saw above, Rawls’s political conception of justice makes only the
minimal request of citizens that they see themselves and each other as free and equal
when basic questions of democratic justice arise.32 Seeing themselves as free and equal,
however, requires seeing themselves and others as having two moral powers: the capac-
ity for a sense of justice and the capacity to adopt and revise conceptions of the good.
Given these powers that they are assumed to hold as citizens, they are assumed to have
two corresponding higher order interests: interests in developing those two moral
290 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

powers. And with those interests, they hold one final higher order interest for political
purposes: the interest in advancing whatever determinate conception of the good they in
fact hold.33 The primary goods that they are owed by government, then, are selected
based on their ability to further the higher order interests that they are assumed to have
qua citizens: namely, the interest in advancing a conception of the good and developing
their two moral powers. Primary goods, then, are the ‘general all-purpose means’ to ends
that persons have in their capacity as citizens.34
It is important to note, however, that primary goods are ‘clearly not anyone’s idea of
the basic values of human life, and must not be so understood, however essential their
possession’.35 And this is because, in part, citizens’ interest in pursuit of their actual
conceptions of the good might in some cases lead them to forgo use of the primary goods
to which they are entitled. Although all citizens must be entitled, for instance, to freedom
of movement, and to take on offices and positions of responsibility within the basic
structure, pursuit of many of their particular comprehensive doctrines will prevent them
from ever doing so. And if political liberalism is going to refrain from denigrating these
citizens’ conceptions of the good, then it must say that their lives are no worse for having
made no use of these primary goods. Primary goods are claimed to be neither good in
themselves nor necessarily instrumentally good for persons – they are only claimed to be
good for furthering the higher order interests of citizens. This is important, because
framing things in this way allows citizens to reach an overlapping consensus on their
inclusion in a theory of political justice: It is less demanding to agree that citizens be
entitled to these things, than to agree that these things have worth in themselves. So,
while citizens are entitled to primary goods including wealth and income, they are not
required to make use of them or to value them, and they are taken to be no worse off as
persons if they do not do so.
Nussbaum might seem to run a similar line of argument, since she argues that the
capabilities represent substantive opportunities that citizens must have but need not take
up. Again, her position is that governments are required to provide citizens with the
capability to do certain things, but that citizens should not, in virtually all cases, be
forced into functioning in associated ways. So, it might seem that, similar to Rawls,
citizens are entitled to demand capabilities from their governments, but they are not
required to make use of them if doing so conflicts with their conceptions of the good, and
they are no worse off if they do not. In this way, even if the capabilities apply in a broad
range of areas of life, the capabilities approach avoids comprehensiveness on the breadth
dimension because the provision of those capabilities is purely political: The approach
does not ask citizens to value the functionings associated with them, and it does not say
that their lives go worse if they never exercise their capabilities. Once again, this move
would have a valuable upshot, because it would make it easier for citizens to reach an
overlapping consensus on the inclusion of the capabilities.
Unfortunately, Nussbaum cannot so easily take this position once we recognize that
capability might be hampered in several different ways.36 Clearly, capabilities can be
externally frustrated, either by (a) laws and other coercive institutions that prevent their
exercise, or (b) a lack of the resources necessary to exercise that capability. So, a person
can lack a genuine capability to vote either if she is coercively removed from her polling
place, or because she has access to neither a private nor a public form of transportation to
Terlazzo 291

get her there. That capabilities can be frustrated in this way is uncontroversial, since
anyone will acknowledge that one’s option set is made smaller by external obstacles that
prevent one from pursuing a particular course of action.
But capabilities can also be internally frustrated. One type of internal frustration is
similarly straightforward: That is, the case in which a person lacks an internal skill or
competency required for a particular kind of functioning. As before, no one would deny
that being illiterate frustrates one’s opportunity to read at least as fully as lacking books.
But we must also recognize a second and less straightforward way in which capability
can be internally frustrated: One may fail to view the functioning in question as an option
that they can take up.37
Sometimes the line between competency and openness is blurred, as in the case of the
depressed person who lacks the capability for valuable play even if she has both the time
and the resources for the activities involved in playing. Although nothing external stops
her, such a person feels incapable of play because of the grasp her depression has on her;
her depression prevents her from seeing play as something that she could engage in. And
cases like this suggest that we should also recognize nearby cases, in which a person feels
drawn to exercise some capability, but cannot bring himself to do so because he doesn’t
believe that it is appropriate for someone like him to behave in that way. Think here of
the self-described manly man who yearns to play jazz saxophone, but thinks that doing
so is effeminate. Even if the norms are not strictly externally enforced, he may have
internalized them in a way that renders the option off limits as far as he is concerned. And
this case in turn suggests that we should likewise recognize the barrier to capability that
arises when a person simply sees no value in the associated functioning – or even takes it
to be positively wrong or harmful. Because they take this view of the functioning, they
see an obstacle to taking it up themselves: Harmful and worthless things are not the kinds
of things that we can generally bring ourselves to take up. Even if no external obstacle
prevents me from torturing a stray kitten, I would never consider doing so.
If we translate this into the economic language of option sets, then we can understand
these internal obstacles to functioning as ones that prevent an option from even being
seriously considered and weighed against other available options. While the options
strictly remain in each person’s objective option set, they are not a part of their subjective
option sets; practically, when deciding how to act in the world, our subjects do not
consider these options to be part of their option sets. To return to the general language
of capability and functioning, our subjects lack meaningful capability in each area
because, by virtue of the fact that they cannot bring themselves to engage in the asso-
ciated functionings, those functionings are effectively closed to them. That is, the func-
tionings are not merely unchosen – rather, they are not even considered.
In some cases, of course, we should not be worried if a person lacks a capability –
indeed, we should be positively glad if one lacks the capability to torture a kitten. But the
same general problem also exists for the specific capabilities on Nussbaum’s list. A
person’s capability for sexual pleasure is genuinely compromised if she believes that
taking pleasure from sexual relationships is sinful or morally impermissible, and a
person’s capability to live with concern for animals, plants, and the world of nature
faces a genuine obstacle if she believes that natural environments are dirty or worthless.
In each case, although there are no external obstacles preventing her from doing so, there
292 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

is a very real sense in which she cannot do or be the thing in question, because her own
inability to see herself valuing or engaging in the functioning prevents her from doing so
in practice.38
This point is only reinforced when we recall the capabilities approach’s first motiva-
tion for rejecting preference satisfaction as an appropriate currency of distributive jus-
tice: That persons’ preferences might become problematically adapted so that they fail to
want what is good for them or what they are owed. In those cases, we rightly recognize
that a person’s capability is compromised and that their preferences must be changed if
they are to be genuinely able to do and be the things associated with the relevant
capabilities on the list. But given this, if persons’ preferences can more generally count
the exercise of capabilities as unavailable, inappropriate, worthless, or morally unac-
ceptable, then ensuring full capability will require the removal of these internal obstacles
to functioning as well.39
As we will see in the next section, however, it is this second kind of internal require-
ment that prevents the capabilities approach from taking the Rawlsian route of avoiding
comprehensiveness by making the capabilities things that are instrumentally valuable for
citizens but not necessarily valued by persons. This is because, as I argue below, this
second kind of internal obstacle to capability forces the capabilities approach to place
requirements on what citizens must value or countenance in broad areas of their lives.40
That is, it requires the capabilities approach to be comprehensive along the dimension of
breadth in a way that Rawls’s political liberalism need not be.41

A dilemma for the capabilities approach

This leaves the capabilities approach with the following dilemma: Either it can maintain
its commitment to full capability for each person, in which case it will be (relatively)
comprehensive along the breadth dimension; or else it can avoid comprehensiveness
along the breadth dimension, but recognize that some persons will then foreseeably lack
full capability for some of the relevant items on the list.
Why think that the capabilities approach is committed to breadth-comprehensiveness
if it maintains its commitment to ensuring that all persons can genuinely do and be the
items on the list of capabilities? While it may of course not always be possible to fully
ensure capability, governments committed to the capabilities approach can use all of the
tools at their disposal to attempt to secure full capabilities for all citizens. This will
require, however, ensuring not only that persons have sufficient resources, freedom from
external coercion, and internally-developed skills to take advantage of relevant oppor-
tunities, but it will also ensure requiring that they have a conception of the good that
allows them to see each of these relevant opportunities as a real opportunity for them-
selves that they are entitled along every dimension to take advantage of.
Given how broadly the capabilities range, however, this will make it very hard for the
capabilities approach to be politically liberal, since it will make it very hard for the
approach to avoid comprehensiveness along the breadth dimension. If we really care
about what persons can do and be, then it is not enough to say that persons are entitled to
request what is externally required to exercise certain capabilities from their govern-
ments, as they would be entitled on a Rawlsian scheme to request a requisite share of the
Terlazzo 293

wealth and income required to pursue whatever their conception of the good might be. If
we do this, then individuals may fail to exercise particular capabilities because –
although they have all of the external requirements and internal skills for doing so –
they fail to see the option as one that they could take up. If we genuinely care about what
people can do and be, then, we must ensure that persons are actually in a position in the
first place to see each of the items on the list as something that they could in fact see
themselves acting on. And once we have required this, we have made claims about how
citizens must be robustly and genuinely prepared to live their lives across a very great
range of domains of life. In other words, once we have required internal openness to the
function associated with a capability, we have adopted a list which is comprehensive
over a great many areas of life, even if it succeeds in avoiding claims about the meta-
physical grounds of those capabilities or the excellences that might come out of them.
And because the list implies this breadth-comprehensive requirement, the set of concep-
tions of the good that will be able to endorse it is significantly narrower than the set of
conceptions of the good that could endorse a genuinely politically liberal alternative.
This in turn brings with it politically liberal concerns about respect and stability.
If we remove the internal openness to functioning from the requirement for capability,
then Nussbaum is likely correct that a very broad set of conceptions of the good could
endorse her list – and that concerns about stability and respect therefore need not arise.
At various points, she emphasizes that groups that will not wish to function in the ways
affiliated with the capabilities on the list will still be able to sign on to the overlapping
consensus, on the grounds that they will see the capabilities as valuable and important for
other citizens even if they themselves will not make use of them.42 For instance, she asks
us to imagine

an Amish citizen, who believes that it is wrong to participate in politics. It is reasonable

enough to expect that this person can still support the inclusion of the right to vote as an
element on this list, because she has chosen to be in a democratic society, and she can
believe that the possibility of voting is in general a valuable thing to have in such a society,
even though she herself will not vote.43

Indeed, Nussbaum goes on to say, the Amish citizen might even support the provision
of the general capability for her own sake, since having it can make her choice to forgo it
more meaningful: after all, ‘to be a nonvoter in a nation that has no elections expresses
nothing much about human values;’44 it is sticking to one’s path when one could have
done otherwise that makes the choice a meaningful one.
But although she endorses the option for all citizens to vote, there remains an impor-
tant sense in which our Amish citizen lacks the robust opportunity to vote herself. While
she endorses the option, she is fully committed – in accordance with her comprehensive
doctrine – to never voting herself. Her willingness to sign on to the list for this set of
reasons is compatible with her seeing herself as unentitled to ever take advantage of the
functionings associated with at least this capability – and it therefore leaves her with a
less robust capability to actually vote than she could have.
Here then is our dilemma, fully articulated: On the one hand, we can ensure full
capability – including an absence of all relevant internal obstacles to functioning – using
294 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

a doctrine which is comprehensive at least insofar as it requires persons to value or

countenance for themselves a number of ways of living in many very broad and separate
domains of life. In this case, we will allow citizens to refrain from functioning, but will
not allow them to hold comprehensive doctrines that prevent the associated functionings
from being live options for them. In other words, if we care about ensuring full capa-
bility, then we will use a doctrine that is comprehensive at least along the breadth
dimension, and that will therefore alienate a number of comprehensive doctrines that
could have otherwise gotten on board with the provision of partial capabilities.
On the other hand, we can avoid comprehensiveness along all dimensions, including
the breadth dimension, but recognize that some citizens will then foreseeably lack full
capability. In this case, individuals can opt out of particular functionings that they take to
be harmful or worthless for themselves on the basis of their comprehensive doctrines,
and persons with a broader range of comprehensive doctrines can therefore endorse our
overlapping consensus. In this case, however, we must recognize that some citizens will
foreseeably and avoidably forgo functioning because they lack full capability. In either
case, we fail to simultaneously avoid comprehensiveness along all dimensions in the way
that political liberalism recommends and also ensure that the state is committed to what
each individual citizen can actually do and be.

Three possible relationships between openness to functioning

and full capability
One might object that the problem is actually far larger than I have made it out to be. In
focusing on capability rather than functioning, the central aim of the capabilities
approach is to provide persons with genuine opportunities while simultaneously preser-
ving their freedom to act on the basis of their values. But if ensuring genuine opportunity
requires a sufficiently robust openness to function, then the range of values that is
compatible with genuine opportunity becomes worryingly narrow. That is, if openness
to functioning is really required for capability, then this might threaten not merely the
capabilities approach’s status as politically liberal – it might threaten the very justifica-
tion for distinguishing between capability and functioning that lies at the heart of the
capabilities approach.45
In this section, I offer three possible relationships between full capability and open-
ness to function, all of which salvage the approach’s central justification for distinguish-
ing between capability and functioning. I call them the conflicting values account, the
substantive value account, and the historical openness account. While I argue that the last
of these will be most attractive to those with political liberal sympathies, I also argue that
the dilemma discussed above remains. Before I introduce these accounts, however, let
me further clarify the problem.
Let us put things once again in the economic language of option sets. Given what I
have said, the course of action that a person ultimately chooses is the option that remains
after the alternatives have been winnowed away by the following factors: her external
obstacles, her lack of internal competencies, her internal obstacles, and her values. When
it comes to the capabilities on Nussbaum’s list, external obstacles and a lack of internal
competency are supposed to be illegitimate constraints on a person’s ultimate choice. A
Terlazzo 295

person’s values, on the other hand, are supposed to be a legitimate constraint. The
capabilities approach is meant to ensure that a person’s values are determinative of her
final choice by ensuring that these other factors do not illegitimately determine her
choice. Accordingly, it focuses on providing persons with robust opportunities to func-
tion rather than aiming to force them into particular functionings.
But I have introduced the further category of internal closedness to function, which is
also supposed to be an illegitimate imposition on capability. And this raises a problem
for the capabilities approach’s focus on capability rather than functioning, because
values often themselves involve a closedness to functioning. For many of us, a central
part of us what it is to love our spouses, or to be genuinely committed to our religions, is
that we could not imagine even seriously considering walking away from our love or our
faith, let alone doing so.46 While there are no external obstacles that prevent us from
leaving our loves or changing our religions, we cannot as we are actually do those things
– and we cannot do so precisely because of how deeply we value our actual loves and
actual religions. Most of us would take this to be a legitimate way in which our values
shape our choices. But if what I have said is right, and openness to functioning is required
for genuine capability, then many values will themselves seem to become an illegitimate
frustration of capability rather than a legitimate way of choosing a functioning from
within one’s capability set.
If we are to take the capabilities approach at all seriously, then, it must be the case that
the criticism offered here does not prove too much. That is, there must be some prin-
cipled way of distinguishing between internal obstacles that compromise capability and
those – like the examples of valuing above – that represent a legitimate exercise of
forgoing a capability. In the remainder of the article, I consider three such principled
distinctions – all of which, I argue, fail to avoid comprehensiveness.

The conflicting values account

On this account, a person will count as having full capability only if she values at least
one functioning associated with each capability on the list. This value requirement does
not threaten the capabilities approach’s emphasis on capability rather than functioning,
because it allows persons to have full capabilities that they reasonably decide not to
exercise. Persons who value a functioning associated with each item on the list may –
indeed must – decide not to exercise one of those functionings whenever a conflict arises
between two of the functionings they value. And conflicts of this sort may be very
frequent: think of the hunger striker who values both protesting injustice and being
well-nourished, or the prospective nun who values both sexual pleasure and devoting
herself to God. Once they make a decision, they (at least temporarily) stop being open to
some of the functionings that they did not choose. But as long as they continue to value
those alternate functionings alongside their chosen functionings, they do not face pro-
blematic internal obstacles to changing their minds and exercising the currently-
unexercised capabilities in the future. That is, while they will reasonably and foreseeably
forgo some functionings, as long as they value functionings associated with all of the
items on the list, they will continue to have full capability (provided, of course, they also
retain the external resources and internal skills required).
296 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

Interestingly, it is open to Nussbaum to claim that this will be precisely the position
we will find ourselves in after the appropriate education of our moral sentiments. If she,
like Rawls, takes her theory to apply as stated only in ideal theory, then she might take it
to apply only in a world in which everyone had been raised to value and endorse the
capabilities for their own sake.47 If we imagine our Amish citizen to have grown up in
such a world, then perhaps she values the capability to vote in precisely this way: She
takes abstention from politics to be a gift worthy of giving to God only because she takes
political participation to be such a great intrinsic good for herself and all other citizens.
Because she takes it to be such a great good, she recognizes that at some future point she
may change her mind and want to exercise that capability – and because she recognizes
the good of political participation, she respects the choices of her fellow Amish citizens
who choose differently, and therefore does not make herself part of a social obstacle that
would prevent them from exercising their own capabilities as they see fit.
While this is likely not an accurate current description, we could certainly imagine
that this was the doctrine that all Amish citizens held – and indeed, we could imagine that
all citizens valued the functionings associated with all capabilities and merely took there
to be different trade-offs to be made between them. Perhaps this, then, is the correct
account of the relationship between full capability and internal obstacles to functioning.
Note, however, two features of this account.
The first is that if this is so, then the capabilities approach is an account of political
justice that is appropriate only for a world very unlike our own, where disagreement
about the good is far less deep. Many – perhaps all – of us do not value functionings
associated with all of the capabilities on the list, even if we wholeheartedly believe that
those capabilities should be protected for others. And if this is correct, then the conflict-
ing values account significantly limits the set of comprehensive doctrines that could sign
on to an overlapping consensus around the capabilities.48 While such a route toward
idealization is one option for Nussbaum, if this is the route taken, then the narrower
limits of the resulting overlapping consensus should be highlighted.
Second, note that the conflicting values account remains significantly breadth-
comprehensive. To ensure full capability, the state will need to attempt to ensure that
all persons value functionings associated with every facet of every capability – which, as
we have seen, covers quite a broad set of areas of life. And since the state will take a
stand on value in so many areas, we should expect the problems associated with both
respect and stability to arise if we apply it in any world where deep disagreement about
the good does exist.

The substantive value account

On this account, whether a person has full capability will depend on whether the asso-
ciated functioning she forgoes is forgone for the sake of an alternative functioning that is
sufficiently objectively valuable. That is, whether a person has a problematic internal
obstacle to exercising a capability will depend directly on the objective value of the
alternate functioning she chooses, rather than on her subjective estimation of the value of
the functioning not chosen. So, if our Amish citizen fails to vote, whether she counts as
Terlazzo 297

having the capability will depend on whether or not she forgoes voting in order to
function in a valuable way (say, to pay homage to God or to live a rich religious life).
This account also preserves the justification for focusing on capability rather than
functioning, because it recognizes that different kinds of valuable lives are possible and
that many of them will require forgoing the exercise of some capabilities. Furthermore,
the substantive value account solves the problem raised by the conflicting values
account, since it does not require a person to value functionings associated with all
capabilities in order to count as fully possessing all capabilities. On the substantive value
account, as long as our Amish citizen’s life of paying homage to God is a valuable one,
she can see voting as worthless or even harmful for herself and still retain the full
capability to vote (again, as long as she retains the requisite external resources and
internal skills).
However, this account also has three noteworthy features. The first once again con-
cerns comprehensiveness. Since having full capability on this account depends on the
value of alternative chosen functionings rather than functionings associated with capa-
bility, the state must take a stand on which functionings count as valuable across a range
of functionings that extends even beyond the basic capabilities. Although it does not
require citizens to agree with its value judgments in order to have full capability, the
state’s claims about value are even more breadth-comprehensive than on the conflicting
values account. And since the state once again takes a stand on value in so many areas,
we should once again expect the problems associated with both respect and stability to
arise – especially given that the justification for this account depends on there being
disagreement about whether the functionings associated with capabilities are valuable.
The second feature to note is that this account gives the same verdict for two cases
that intuitively ought to receive different verdicts. Consider the possibility of forgoing
sexual pleasure permanently in order to live a monk’s life of cloistered devotion to God.
Assuming for the sake of argument that such a life counts as valuable, we get the verdict
that the person who chooses to be a monk counts as having the full capability for sexual
pleasure despite being closed to exercising that capability – and indeed, despite perhaps
seeing sexual pleasure as to be avoided because it is base or depraved. Again, we are able
to get this verdict because our account wants to provide space for different individuals to
choose to live very different kinds of valuable lives while still fully retaining all of the
basic capabilities. But note that this account gives this verdict both in the case of the man
who decides on this life in his late 20s after experiencing and considering a life that
includes sexual pleasure, and the youth who chooses monkhood at 13 without having
done so.49 All that matters for determining capability on this account is that the life of a
celibate monk be a valuable life to live. But if we think that the life of the older chooser
includes a far more robust opportunity than the life of the younger chooser to actually
live a life that includes sexual pleasure, then we should prefer an account that allows us
to make a distinction between the capabilities commanded by the two potential monks.
Third, while this technical redefinition of capability solves the problem at hand, it still
leaves the functionings associated with the relevant capability outside of the person’s
subjective option set. Although it ensures such a person the chance to live a valuable life
– because the option chosen is by definition objectively valuable – those who hold with
298 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

Nussbaum that the capabilities must not be traded off against one another might for this
additional reason object to this redefinition.50

The historical openness account

On this account, whether an internal feature of a person compromises a capability
depends on whether it was developed in the right kind of way. This historical focus
aims to avoid both the failure of the substantive value account to secure full capability
for the 13-year-old novitiate and the failure to accommodate deep value disagreement
found in the conflicting values account. To thread this needle, we can say that an internal
closedness to functioning does not compromise full capability as long as a person (a) was
open to or saw the functioning as valuable for themselves at a point of maturity sufficient
for understanding the ramifications of giving that functioning up and (b) came to see the
functioning as no longer valuable absent external coercion or internal compulsion.51
While the first condition ensures that there is a critical period in every person’s life
where the person herself does not take there to be obstacles to the exercise of her
capabilities, the second ensures that any obstacles that are taken to arise are the result
of the free exercise of the individual’s own reason. Although obstacles developed in
accordance with the historical account might still strictly remove functionings from her
subjective option set later in life, the account nevertheless ensures full capability at a
critical point in life that makes later, reversible, self-imposed obstacles unobjectionable.
Once again, this account retains a justification for focusing on capability rather than
functioning. It does so because it recognizes, like the substantive value account, that
reasonable people may ultimately disagree on the value of the functionings associated
with the capabilities. Since reasonable people may disagree, it makes that disagreement
compatible with the possession of full capability and does not force persons into func-
tionings of which they disapprove.
Unlike the conflicting value account, the historical openness account therefore allows
for deep value disagreement between persons who possess full capability. As before, our
Amish person can possess the full capability for political participation while believing
that voting is harmful insofar as it sullies her relationship with God. While a world in
which capability on this account were ensured would also look significantly unlike our
own, since it would require openness to functioning for everyone during the early part of
life, it would – unlike the conflicting values account – protect space for deep value
disagreement for the majority of adult life. But unlike the substantive values account, the
historical openness account can also distinguish between the capabilities possessed by
the 13-year-old novitiate and the novitiate in his late 20s. Insofar as the second novitiate
was open to – and indeed even explored – a life that included sexual pleasure, and insofar
as he decided to forgo or stop valuing it absent external coercion or internal compulsion,
he had a period during which he was genuinely able to exercise his capability, and turned
freely away from that exercise. Insofar as the younger novitiate failed to be open to
sexual pleasure at a point of maturity at which he could understand what giving it up
would mean, he was never in a position to actually live a life that included sexual
pleasure. Accordingly, the historical openness account takes the older novitiate but not
the younger novitiate’s closedness to functioning to be compatible with full capability –
Terlazzo 299

and by extension, it takes our Amish citizen’s closedness to political participation to be

compatible with full capability only if, during a period of sufficient maturity, she had
once been open to political participation before foreswearing it.
The historical openness account also raises fewer concerns than its competitors for
both stability and respect. Since it lets adults disagree about the value of the functionings
associated with the capabilities, and since it makes no claims about the value of a much
broader set of alternative functionings, it provides more space for deep disagreement
about the good than the conflicting values account, the substantive value account, or any
individual conception of the good adopted by a state. And since it tells adults neither
what they should value nor how they should live, it also provides citizens with fewer
reasons to oppose the state’s continued governance.
But note that ultimately, the historical openness account remains comprehensive on
the breadth dimension. Although it does not require persons to perpetually value or
remain open to the functionings associated with capabilities in order to possess full
capabilities, it does require them to do so during a critical period of maturity. If they
are to count as being able to genuinely do and be all of the things on the list of
capabilities, then they must for at least a period of their lives value or at least seriously
countenance substantive ways of being in a broad range of disparate areas of life. So,
while the historical openness account maintains the justification for focusing on capa-
bility rather than functioning and seems preferable from a political-liberal perspective to
the conflicting and substantive values accounts, the dilemma remains: The capabilities
approach must either embrace comprehensiveness along the breadth dimension or recog-
nize that some citizens will foreseeably lack full capability.
While the capabilities approach maintains its justification for focusing on capability
rather than functioning no matter which of these routes it chooses, each forces it to
diverge from political liberalism in noteworthy ways. Whichever route Nussbaum
chooses (if, indeed, she chooses one of them, rather than opting for the other horn of
the dilemma and committing more fully to political liberalism and the concomitant
recognition that full capability will sometimes be sacrificed for some citizens), it would
be helpful to relabel or develop a new label for the kind of political theory that the
capability approach ends up being.

So how politically liberal should the capabilities approach want

to be?
In this article, I have raised a tension rather than offered a solution. It seems that given
the commitments of the capabilities approach to what persons can actually do and be, the
capabilities approach is pushed toward at least one kind of comprehensiveness that
political liberalism wants to avoid. But we have not yet said whether this is a failure
of the capabilities approach, or a failure of political liberalism. The political liberal
concerns for respect and stability are concerns for real and important values, and these
values should not be ignored. But what drew the capabilities approach toward some
measure of comprehensiveness was the desire to ensure that all citizens could actually
take advantage in a meaningful way of the rights and opportunities that the political
conception of justice entitled them to – and this also represents a real and important value
300 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

that should be weighed seriously alongside the values of stability and respect. Perhaps
the capabilities approach oversteps its bounds and is inappropriately comprehensive in
its attempts to ensure full capability – but perhaps political liberalism instead fails to be
comprehensive enough to the extent that it fails to ensure that persons see themselves as
(at least for a period) morally entitled to make use of the primary goods that they are
politically entitled to.

Author’s note
All mistakes are my own.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Luara Ferracioli, Jonathan Herington, participants at the
Beyond Contractarianism conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, three anonymous referees,
and the editors of this journal for their helpful feedback on this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Notes
1. See, for instance, Wall (2009) for reasons to prefer an integrated account of morality and
politics; Abbey (2007) for the argument that sufficient attention to gender justice requires
comprehensive rather than political liberalism; Sher (1997) for the argument that the state can
and should pursue objective goods rather than neutrality; Fowler (2010) for the argument that
political liberalism cannot protect the well-being of children; and Arneson (2000) for the
argument that many benefits of political liberalism are also available to perfectionist
liberalism.
2. While Sen does not share the politically liberal commitments that raise the problem discussed
here, I will sometimes translate the problem into Sen’s framework for those who prefer to
think through the problem in those terms. For Sen’s version of the capabilities approach, see
Sen (1980, 1993).
3. Nussbaum (2000: 70ff). Hereafter WHD.
4. Nussbaum (2006: 70). Hereafter FJ.
5. WHD 122ff. See also Cohen (1993).
6. WHD 136ff.
7. For Rawls’s theory, see Rawls (1999). For more on its rejection, see Cohen (1993).
8. WHD 69.
9. WHD 134.
10. FJ 70.
11. WHD 86–96.
12. Nussbaum (1998: 284).
Terlazzo 301

13. Rawls (2005: 12). Hereafter PL.

14. FJ 299ff; PL 140ff.
15. For extended discussion, see Nussbaum (2011b). For Rawls’ similar commitment, see his
discussion of the place of self-respect in political liberalism. PL 318.
16. For discussion of six ways in which the list aims to show this respect, see FJ 296–298.
17. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that not all deep value justifications need be
metaphysically grounded.
18. For extensive discussion of neutrality with regard to this dimension, see Larmore (1987).
19. PL.
20. That is, it is to this dimension of comprehensiveness that those concerned with ‘neutrality of
justification’ attend. See Arneson (2003), Sher (1997), and Wall (2009).
21. Note that some of these critics mount these objections to claim that she ought to move toward
political liberalism, while others mount them to claim that she ought to move toward a more
comprehensive position. See, for instance, Barclay (2003), Nelson (2008), Jaggar (2006),
Chambers (2004), Ferracioli and Terlazzo (2014), and Koppelman (2009).
22. Nussbaum (2011b, 2003).
23. For some especially clear examples, see Nussbaum (2011a: 109, FJ 79, WHD 76).
24. Nussbaum (1992: 215).
25. While there has been little discussion of the capabilities approach along the breadth dimen-
sion, there are a few important exceptions. Both Claassen (2014) and Carter (2014) argue that
the capabilities approach as it stands has implications for a broad range of areas of life that are
more substantive than they are claimed to be. Claassen argues that the capabilities on the list
all stand or fall together and, therefore, argues that functioning in many areas and over long
time periods will be required in order to ensure full capability. Carter argues that absent
additional external justification, the capabilities approach currently allows a significant
amount of paternalism to encourage functioning in a broad set of areas of life – although
he argues that this commitment to paternalism is not internal to the capabilities approach itself.
Khader (2011) also discusses the capabilities approach when arguing for the importance of
relying on a limited list of human goods in her account of adaptive preferences. However, I
leave these discussions to the side for two reasons. First, their focus is different: neither
Claassen nor Carter is directly concerned with the politically liberal commitments of the
approach, and Khader focuses more on her defense of perfectionism than on her rejection
of political liberalism as such. Second, the substance is also different: since Claassen’s claim
is much stronger than my own, and since – unlike Carter – I am interested in the requirement to
value functioning rather than the requirement to engage in it, I can remain agnostic on both
their points. Khader, alternatively, aims to defend a substantive account of adaptive prefer-
ences rather than critique the capabilities approach, and I take this to be a substantially
different project than my own.
26. PL 11.
27. Most relevantly, it is unclear to what extent the family is or is not a part of the basic structure,
and textual evidence suggests both readings. For discussion, see Abbey (2007). For related
ambiguities about whether issues pertaining to children belong in ideal or nonideal theory, see
Stemplowska and Swift (2014).
28. Quong (2011: 14).
29. PL 33.
302 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 18(3)

30. Similarly, the social bases of self-respect seem to relate to nonpolitical as well as political
areas of life.
31. PL 188.
32. In response to criticisms from Okin, Rawls later allows that the principles of justice might
more directly constrain the ways in which persons can view and interact with each other within
families, given the pervasive role that the family has in shaping persons’ life prospects – but as
Abbey argues, this constitutes a move back toward a more comprehensive liberalism. See
Okin (1994), Rawls (1997), and Abbey (2007).
33. PL 74.
34. PL 76.
35. PL 188, italics added.
36. I develop this idea further in Terlazzo (2014).
37. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to further develop the important distinction
between these types of internal obstacles to full capability.
38. One might object that value commitments can sometimes leave us legitimately closed to
functioning in a way that we should not take to compromise capability. I return to this issue
in the fifth section.
39. Classic cases of adaptive preference certainly intuitively pose this kind of internal obstacle to
functioning. However, I do not use the term ‘adaptive preference’ to illustrate the general
problem in this article because that term tends to suggest intuitively objectionable content that
is lacking in some of the cases that make most trouble for us.
40. Since I do not take the first – that is, skill-based – kind of internal requirement to raise
problems for political liberalism, I leave it to the side in what follows. For nearby criticisms
related to paternalism rather than political liberalism, see Carter (2014) and Claassen (2014).
Unless otherwise specified, all further references to internal requirements for capability will
be to internal openness to function.
41. Some might object that the internal requirement raises no special problem, because making
controversial goods even externally available is itself a threat to political liberalism. For
instance, see Quong (2011) for the argument that the mere expenditure of government funds
on controversial goods like opera is a violation of political liberalism. I lack the space to
address this stronger claim here, but note briefly why the problem raised by internal obstacles
is at minimum more serious than the problem raised by external provision: Citizens would
likely be readier to endorse the public external provision of some controversial options as part
of an overlapping consensus, if they did not have to endorse or be open to those options in their
own lives. I thank an external reviewer for pushing me to raise this issue.
42. For instance, FJ 182–185.
43. FJ 182–183.
44. FJ 184.
45. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this worry.
46. I borrow this point from Christman (2009: 128ff), who raises it in a discussion of autonomy.
47. Nussbaum notes that full acceptance of the capabilities may only occur after an appropriate
period of moral education (FJ 408–415). Rawls similarly recognizes that stability for the right
reasons occurs when people are raised under just institutions and develop an allegiance to
them. PL 142ff.
Terlazzo 303

48. Contrast this with Rawls’s requirement for overlapping consensus: He holds that compatibility
between political justice and comprehensive doctrines needs to take only a neutral form,
where ‘citizens themselves . . . view the political conception as derived from, or congruent
with, or at least not in conflict with, their other values’ (PL 11, italics added).
49. Note that the architectonic place that Nussbaum reserves for practical reason will not resolve
this problem, since our youth could exercise practical reason about his circumstance without
ever valuing or being open to a life that includes sexual pleasure.
50. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
51. If a person is closed to a functioning that they continue to take to be valuable because it is
precluded by another functioning that they also take to be valuable, then we can ascribe them
fully capable as we did on the conflicting values account.

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Author biography
Rosa Terlazzo is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kansas State University. She works in
social and political philosophy, with a primary emphasis on adaptive preferences, children, and
well-being.