Capabilities across Borders

A dear person once wrote me: “What good can we do to the world if we don’t start from the people we love? Should we paint, help the poor or just be home for your sister who is growing up?”. This question was constantly popping out from the back of my head while I was reading Martha Nussbaum’s chapter “Capabilities across national boundaries”.

In this chapter the author discusses the close relation between the capabilities approach and human rights. Both provide “an account of extremely important fundamental entitlements that can be used as a basis both for constitutional thought within a nation and for thinking about international justice” (284). Furthermore the capabilities approach, as the human rights discourse, believes in prepolitical entitlements: thus by the mere fact of being born into the human community, an individual posses rights. Nussbaum intensifies this idea by declaring “a nation that has not recognized these entitlements is to that extent unjust” (285).

image courtesy of The Guardian, 23.1.11

Human Rights are a historical product: events that occurred throughout the 19th and 20th century invited the international community to draft international documents in order to prevent such atrocities to take place ever again. Although many states ratified and signed these documents, consensus is far from being reached. From a religious perspective of the four major religions, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam would like to see a shift of focus from entitlements to duties and from considering the individual as the final subject of justice to the community.

Human rights are a political artifact: their philosophical background is derived by the reality that we now live in organized political societies to which we are related through a legal system of rights and duties. Could we indeed think of the freedom to religious expression if we did not presuppose a division between public and private sphere? Could we think of the right to life if we lived in the ‘state of nature’? Furthermore within our daily lives we are always driven to think that it is not who we are, but what we do to define us. Thus why by simply being born, should we be empowered with human dignity?

HR is often treated as an aid-kit that can be distributed homogenously from North to South and West to East: local discourses are thus left behind, although they determine people’s worldviews. Nussbaum as well seems to forget the implications that specific cultures, languages and religions play in the formatting of an identity both on the personal and societal level. Indeed she states “to secure a right to citizens in these areas is to put them in a position of capability to function in that area” (287). Hence the capabilities/rights must be context based precisely because the conditions of work and livelihood shift. Consequently the “prerequisites for living a life that is fully human rather than subhuman” (278) can not be neither equal nor stable through space and time. I remember having a debate around this same issue in the Diversity & Integration class in my first year at LUC. Back then, I was arguing in favour of the most basic human rights: food, shelter and water. However thinking about it in Nussbaum’s terms, if a person is born in the U.S.A and he is deprived of education or Internet, is he then living a subhuman life?

To conclude Nussbaum defends the capabilities approach, and implicitly human rights, on the basis of equal human dignity. The author claims that because we are all recognized under this notion, the world community “should be working towards these goals together” (291). However I wonder what would she answer to “What good can we do the world, if we don’t start from the people we love?”. A negative answer to the question would indeed imply that as individuals we must firstly care for what strictly surrounds us in order to improve the whole reality.

By Georgia Rae Lasio (Third year student, LUC ... presently at McGill University)