The capability approach to justice, made popular by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has been a stalwart of the human development literature for the last 30 years, and its core ideals underwrite the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. This dissertation offers a new version of the approach, rejecting many of its ideological commitments to liberal-democratic humanism and replacing them with more distinctly collectivist and communitarian ones. It contends that the capability approach, when used as a theoretical framework for global development, need not contain almost any ethical normativity with regard to a definition of justice, and indeed it is much more functional when it endorses a moderate ethical relativism. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, it shows that all existing versions of the capability approach are ideologically committed to a specific kind of liberal humanism, which its proponents consider universalist but that is actually quite provincial. Second, it argues that collectivist critiques from prominent capability theorists in the last decade have been misunderstood and their recommendations unheeded, a fact that this dissertation attempts to rectify. Third, it offers a properly collectivist account of group capabilities and group self-determination, which can do all the normative work that individual capabilities and agency perform in the approach's original versions. Finally, it introduces the notion of public objective capabilities, which justifies a higher deference to collective self-determination at the expense of some individual freedom and equitable participation in democratic polity. The overall goal of this new collectivist version of the approach is not to reject the worth of capability as a metric of global justice, but rather to reinforce it. A collectivist capabilitarianism shows that capability is so well suited to global development work that it can function across diverse political realities, without the ideological constraints of a liberal humanism that is widely accepted in the Global North but whose cross-cultural appeal has been far overstated by its proponents. / Ph. D. / For much the 20<sub>th</sub> century, development aid to the deeply impoverished nations of the Global South has taken the form of humanitarian assistance. Development projects have been motivated, first, by a humanist principle that all people everywhere deserve basic human rights and freedom from want; and, second, by the widely accepted belief that the Global South is entitled to receive vast reparations after centuries of colonial exploitation. Together, these two views have made development work the near-exclusive province of liberal humanists, and so most development projects are designed to advance ideological positions that are popular in Western democracies: individual freedom, fair opportunity, social equality, and fair political representation. But while the liberal-humanist ideology is perfectly valid on its own merits, it is neither the only nor the best available normative framework to underwrite development work. This dissertation argues that development workers—international NGOs, transnational activists, and various humanitarians—should design projects that incorporate a communitarian, morally particularistic, and non-liberal (but not <i>illiberal</i>) ethic that respects the collective self-determination of groups without requiring the affirmation of free agency for individual persons. This proposal follows some recent collectivist shifts in the literature on Amartya Sen’s capability approach to justice, which is explicitly or implicitly adopted by many development projects based in the Global South. An increasing number of critics in the last decade have argued that the approach’s liberal-humanist foundations hinder rather than promote its usefulness in eradicating systemic poverty while respecting local communal values. This dissertation sides with these critiques and takes them a step further, suggesting that development workers who endorse the capability approach should pay more attention and give more respect to the determinations of groups as opposed merely to individuals.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/77916 |
| Date | 05 June 2017 |
| Creators | D'Amato, Claudio |
| Contributors | Political Science, Pitt, Joseph C., Shadle, Brett L., Wimberley, Dale W., Moehler, Michael |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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