Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, Harry Brighouse and Ingrid
Robeyns, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),  pp., $ cloth,
$. paper.
doi: ./S
How just or unjust is a particular society,
or indeed, the international realm? To
answer this question, we need a metric
with which to evaluate the moral worth
(the justness) of social arrangements. Two
approaches to measuring justice have
emerged in the recent literature, each
focusing on a particular metric: one on pri-
mary goods, the other on capabilities. The
former approach, pioneered by John
Rawls, holds that principles of justice
should be concerned with the distribution
of particular social goods or resources
(for example, liberties, opportunities,
income, and wealth) among persons; the
latter, pioneered by Amartya Sen and
Martha Nussbaum, holds that principles
of justice should be concerned with the dis-
tribution of capabilities—namely, of sub-
stantive freedoms to achieve particular
“functionings” (for example, being nour-
ished, educated, healthy). Which approach
should we favor?
In this rich collection, Harry Brighouse
and Ingrid Robeyns bring together distin-
guished philosophers and political theorists
to debate the virtues and vices of these
competing metrics of justice. The first part
of the book focuses on the fundamental
properties of the two metrics from a theor-
etical perspective; the second part looks at
how well each of them fares in addressing
applied ethical problems, including justice
in health, gender justice, and justice for
children. The collection is then brought to
a close with an essay by Amartya Sen.
This is an outstanding collection—well
organized, interesting, and informative.
recent books on ethics and international affairs
All the essays are of high academic quality,
and the collection as a whole fully achieves
its aim: advancing our understanding of
primary goods and capabilities, without
necessarily declaring one superior to the
other (p. ).
Given the limited space at my disposal, I
cannot comment on all the aspects of the
book that deserve attention. I will therefore
focus on one of its core messages,
expressed explicitly or implicitly in a num-
ber of essays, namely that instead of being
“competing” approaches to justice, the pri-
mary goods and capabilities metrics have
much in common, and much to learn
from each other. The insight behind this
suggestion is easy to grasp. On the one
hand, a primary goods metric seems defec-
tive because of its insensitivity to people’s
different abilities to convert goods into
“functionings.” Plainly, an able-bodied
and a disabled person with the same
resources are unlikely to be equally well-
off. On the other hand, capability-based
metrics are often (although not always,
think of Martha Nussbaum’s work) too
vaguely defined, lacking a full index of
those functionings to which access is
necessary for a decent life.
In light of this, advocates of primary
goods should learn from capability theorists
to make their metrics more sensitive to
interpersonal differences, as discussed, for
instance, in the essay by Thomas Pogge.
Capability theorists, by contrast, should
draw on the insights of advocates of pri-
mary goods to develop an index of capabili-
ties. There may indeed be a parallelism
95
between what makes certain social goods
particularly valuable and what makes cer-
tain capabilities important (see Harry
Brighouse and Elaine Unterhalter’s essay).
The similarity, or at least complementar-
ity, between the two approaches is further
confirmed in an essay by Norman
Daniels, who claims that, at least as far as
justice in health is concerned, the concep-
tual spaces covered by a capabilities
approach and by a nuanced primary
goods approach virtually coincide. In a
similar vein, Sen himself emphasizes that
if there are differences between resourcist
and capability-based views, these only con-
cern one aspect of a theory of justice.
“There is no claim,” he writes, “that the
capability perspective can take over the
work that other parts of Rawlsian theory
also demand, particularly the special status
of liberty and the demands of procedural
fairness” (p. ). In Sen’s view, whether
we should adopt the primary goods or
capabilities approach only matters at the
level of comparing persons’ overall advan-
tages, which is what Rawls’s difference
principle is concerned with.
If these observations are correct, how-
ever, one might wonder to what extent
there is a genuine disagreement between
resourcist and capability theorists. If there
is so much that they have in common,
and so much that they can learn from
96 RECENT BOOKS ON ETHICS AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
one another, is the contrast perhaps over-
stated? A possible way of further testing
whether these approaches differ, and to
what extent, might be to consider their
implications for the measurement of justice
across different societies. Is one approach
better placed than the other to measure jus-
tice against the background of cultural
pluralism characterizing the global arena?
Is one less informationally demanding
than the other, and therefore more likely
to be workable when measurements are
extremely complex, extending over a wide
range of people and communities? Even
though none of the essays in this book
directly tackles these questions, they could
certainly constitute a fruitful area for future
research.
That said, Measuring Justice remains an
excellent collection, which importantly
contributes to deepening our understand-
ing of the primary goods and capability
approaches, and provides valuable insights
for both political theorists and prac-
titioners.
—LAURA VALENTINI
The reviewer is a Junior Research Fellow in Politics at
The Queen’s College, Oxford. She specializes in inter-
national justice, human rights, and methods in nor-
mative theorizing. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in such journals as the Journal of
Political Philosophy, Review of International Studies,
and American Political Science Review.
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