This chapter outlines the systematic study of social primary goods approach and the capability approach to measuring justice. One way in which political theorists and philosophers have responded to the debate between Rawls and Amartya Sen is by defending the social primary goods or the capability approach on grounds of their theoretical properties. In her contribution, Elizabeth Anderson sets herself the task of defending the capability approach, in particular her own version of the approach (Anderson 1999), against Pogge's criticism. The book Measuring Justice closes with an essay in which Sen reflects on the influence of John Rawls on his own thinking, and on the contributions in the first part of the volume. The essay clearly illustrates the absence of consensus among political theorists and philosophers about whether either the social primary goods approach or the capability approach is to be preferred as a metric of justice.

This chapter examines how the capability approach has been, and might be, justified as superior to its resourcist competition. It shows that capability theorists assert, while resourcists deny, that a public criterion of social justice should take account of the individual rates at which persons with diverse physical and mental constitutions can convert resources into valuable functionings. The chapter then examines to what extent a resourcist criterion can be sensitive to natural human diversity. It also explores the reasons for and against believing that greater compensatory accommodation of such diversity would to a more plausible public criterion of justice. That the capability approach has done much to advance the discussion of social justice is a great tribute to its foremost champions: Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. Key determinants of quality of life includes distribution within the family, differences in relational perspectives, variations in social climate, environmental diversities and personal heterogeneities.

Developing and deploying the notion of primary goods requires an idealizing assumption that models persons as motivated and able to advance their own aims in cooperation with others. A primary goods approach is not in tension with commitment to ensuring that all persons attain certain capabilities. Rawls focuses on the importance of our capacities to develop a sense of justice and a rational life plan. Nussbaum maintains that when it comes to practical reason and affiliation, equal human dignity is undermined by unequal capability. A capabilities approach might differ from a primary goods approach in two ways. It might represent the strong position that certain capabilities must be guaranteed equally, or it might maintain a higher threshold for certain capabilities. Both positions come at the cost of restricting some basic liberties and would appear to fit better with comprehensive forms of liberalism than they do with political liberalism.

In this chapter, the author defends the capabilities approach against Pogge's critique, and explains why it is superior to its main rivals, subjective and resourcist approaches. Theories of distributive justice must specify two things: a metric and a rule. The metric characterizes the type of good subject to demands of distributive justice. The rule specifies how that good should be distributed. The fundamental difference between capability theorists and resource theorists lies rather in the degree to which their principles of justice are sensitive to internal individual differences, and environmental features and social norms that interact with these differences. Capabilities and resource theorists agree that principles of justice aim to secure persons' effective access to the means they need to satisfy their objective interests, as defined in terms of needed functionings. The capabilities approach is capable of supplying a public criterion of justice suitable for the basic structure of society.

In this chapter, the author summons up qualified two cheers for the capability approach. According to the capability approach to the characterization of individual's condition for purposes of social justice theory, a person's wellbeing can be identified with the quality of her beings and doings, what Amartya Sen calls "functionings". Sen defends the capability approach against two rivals. One is welfare conceived in mental state terms, as desire satisfaction or as pleasure and the absence of pain. A second rival is the account of primary social goods developed by John Rawls. The author has urged that the principle of social justice that imposes on all of us a responsibility to ensure, to some degree, that no human life is avoidably blighted and wasted, is better regarded as responsive to people's overall condition rather than to the means or resources to which they have access.

This chapter argues that there is more convergence than difference between an account of justice and health that focuses on opportunity, properly construed, and one that sees the target of justice as protecting human capabilities. At first sight, the egalitarian version of Sen's capabilities view seems to push us toward any intervention, including any use of health-care technology that eliminates disadvantages in opportunity produced by inequalities in our capability sets. The primary way to seek justice in health is to organize institutions that deliver necessary public health protections and medical services, and that fairly distribute the other socially controllable factors that determine the level and distribution of population health. A goal of the opportunity view is to protect normal functioning, while not leveling all differences among people in their exercisable opportunities. In principle, normal functioning does not coincide with the idea of securing a simple sufficiency of capabilities.

This chapter argues that a metric based on Sen's capability approach suggests a more promising, and to a certain extent, more just scheme, than one based on social primary goods. It is divided into two sections. In the first section, the chapter discusses the main elements of the primary goods metric in relation to disability. The second section outlines the capability metric and comparatively considers its merits over the "rival" approach. John Rawls broadly defines social primary goods as those "all-purpose means" and resources that free and equal moral persons need for "carrying out their plans in life". While disabilities caused by social factors receive attention under the social primary goods metric, those resulting from natural causes, such as "any combination of ordinary genetic variations, self-caused factors, and differential luck" are more problematic, and give rise to different and more controversial responses.

The debate between advocates of a primary-goods focused approach to justice and advocates of a capabilities focused approach has been conducted without much explicit attention to how the perspective of children should be represented and interpreted. This chapter makes some modest progress toward remedying this neglect. As with Rawls's theory, the capabilities approach has been developed and refined in many different ways. Crucial motivation for the capabilities approach lies in the claim that the metric of primary goods is insufficiently sensitive to diversity within the human population. There is a strong tendency in capabilities theory to privilege agency considerations and there is no direct recognition of intrinsic goods of childhood. So even if focus on functionings for children is compatible with sensitivity to intrinsic goods of childhood, more work needs to be done to illuminate the precise character and significance of these goods.

The contention of this chapter is that both Rawls's social primary goods theory and Sen and Nussbaum's capabilities approach offer some resources to guide our thinking. One natural move is to say that education is a social primary good in Rawls's sense. Amartya Sen develops the capabilities approach in response to various problems, none of which have directly to do with education, in the social primary goods approach. The primary goods approach, on its face, is ill- suited to dealing with involuntary differences in individuals' abilities to make use of a fixed amount of resources. The main argument made in the chapter is that neither the primary goods approach nor the capabilities approach, in its current state, is adequate to the task of guiding policymakers in deciding what the content and distribution of educational opportunities should be.

This chapter analyzes the difference between social primary goods and capabilities for the case of gender inequality and gender justice. It discusses the usefulness of the Rawlsian account of justice as fairness to analyze problems of gender injustice. Sally Haslanger's analysis of the concept of gender provides a good starting point. Haslanger defines gender in terms of the social positions that men and women occupy. The social primary goods metric is part of a political and ideal-theoretical conception of justice. But such a political and ideal-theoretical conception of justice brackets out the main sources and manifestations of gender injustice. Whether a plausible and convincing capability theory of justice that can fully integrate gender concerns will one day be developed remains to be seen. The chapter offers some arguments why the development of such theory may be worthwhile.

The intellectual interest in, and practical relevance of, comparative questions about justice as and when they can be answered, has driven the search for justice in the world, even when the political slogans have often invoked the excellence of perfectly just societies. Ingrid Robeyns and Harry Brighouse have skillfully explained the basic ideas of primary goods and capabilities, and why it might be at all plausible that either or both of them can serve as the basis of assessing and comparing the respective overall advantages that different persons have. They have also discussed why and how these two different informational perspectives compete with each other as material for distributional judgments. Thomas Pogge has presented a strongly combative defense of the case for using resources rather than capabilities as the basis for the principles of justice.