IB Philosophy 10.6 Creating Capabilities: the Human Development Approach – Martha C. Nussbaum Key Definitions

Adaptive preferences are desires and values that have been shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by unjust conditions of deprivation or oppression. For example, a person denied education from birth may not desire it, but this absence of desire does not show the deprivation is acceptable.

in Nussbaum's capabilities approach, one of the ten central human capabilities, encompassing both the ability to live with and toward others and the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation. Without affiliation, Nussbaum argues, other capabilities lose much of their value because human flourishing is irreducibly relational.

Agency is the capacity of an individual to act intentionally and make choices, exercising control over actions and their consequences.

Biomedical ethics is the branch of applied ethics that examines moral questions arising from advances in medicine and the biological sciences, including issues of life, death, patient autonomy, and the responsible use of biotechnology.

Developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, the capabilities approach evaluates human well-being and social justice by measuring what people are actually able to do and to be, rather than what resources they formally possess. It holds that a just society must guarantee every person a sufficient threshold of real, effective opportunities across central areas of human life, including bodily health, education, political participation, and emotional expression.

The cognitive theory of emotions, developed by Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought (2001), holds that emotions are not irrational disturbances but evaluative judgements about the world. Because emotions have evaluative content, they can be assessed for accuracy and rational coherence.

In Nussbaum's framework, a combined capability is the union of a person's internal capabilities (developed skills and traits) with the external social, political, and material conditions required to exercise them. A formal legal right is insufficient if social norms or lack of resources prevent its exercise.

The conversion problem, central to Nussbaum and Sen's capabilities approach, is the observation that different people convert the same resources into real opportunities at vastly different rates. A person with a disability, an elderly person, or a pregnant woman may need far more resources than an able-bodied adult to achieve equivalent effective freedom.

the philosophical position that all human beings share a common moral community that transcends national and cultural boundaries, and that obligations of justice and concern are not limited to compatriots. Kwame Anthony Appiah's version of cosmopolitanism insists on the equal dignity of every person while respecting genuine cultural diversity, rejecting both isolationist relativism and the demand for cultural uniformity.

Cultural imperialism refers to the imposition of one culture's values, norms, or practices onto other cultures, typically by those in positions of global power. Nussbaum responds to this objection by grounding the capabilities list in cross-cultural dialogue rather than any single cultural tradition.

The ethics of care, developed by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings, is a moral framework arguing that moral life centres on relationships, responsiveness, and attentiveness to particular others rather than abstract principles or impartial rules.

In Aristotle's ethics, eudaimonia refers to human flourishing understood as the active exercise of distinctively human capacities in accordance with virtue over a complete life. Often translated as "happiness," it more precisely means living and faring well through the full realisation of what a human being is capable of becoming.

in Nussbaum's capabilities approach, the active realisations of capabilities, specifically what a person actually does or experiences, such as being well-nourished or participating in political life. Functionings are distinguished from capabilities, which are the real freedoms to choose those states: a person who fasts has the capability of nourishment, while a person who starves involuntarily does not. Justice requires securing capabilities (the option), not compelling specific functionings (the outcome), thereby respecting individual autonomy and pluralism.

Libertarian minimalism is the view, associated with thinkers such as Nozick, that the state's only legitimate functions are protecting property rights and enforcing contracts, treating redistributive taxation as a violation of individual self-ownership. Nussbaum rejects this as inadequate because it ignores the structural conditions that prevent disadvantaged groups from developing their capabilities.

Moral responsibility is the status of being worthy of praise or blame for one's actions, typically requiring that the agent acted freely, with knowledge of what they were doing, and with the capacity to have done otherwise.

the view that certain moral standards apply to all human beings regardless of their nationality, culture, or historical context. Nussbaum's capabilities approach is a form of moral universalism: it holds that every person is entitled to a minimum threshold of central human capabilities, and that this entitlement cannot be overridden by appeals to cultural tradition.

the principle, central to Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach, that each capability on the list is qualitatively distinct and cannot be replaced or compensated for by a surplus in another capability. Unlike utilitarian frameworks that allow trade-offs between goods, non-fungibility means that a nation cannot satisfy the demands of justice by producing wealth while neglecting bodily integrity or political participation.

Personhood is the status of being a person, typically defined by possessing certain capacities such as self-consciousness, rationality, moral agency, or social recognition, though the criteria vary across philosophical traditions.

Drawing on Rawls, Nussbaum's framework of political liberalism seeks principles acceptable to citizens holding diverse comprehensive doctrines about the good life, remaining neutral between competing religious, moral, and philosophical worldviews. The capabilities list is designed to be endorsed from within many different comprehensive doctrines, making it a genuinely public basis for political justification.

in Nussbaum's capabilities framework, the capability to form a personal conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about how to plan one's own life. She regards practical reason as one of two architectonic capabilities (alongside affiliation) that organise and give structure to all the others: without the ability to deliberate and choose, the other capabilities cannot be exercised in a fully human way.

a French term Nietzsche uses to describe a specific psychological condition of suppressed resentment, envy, and hostility toward those perceived as stronger or more powerful. In his genealogy, ressentiment is the emotional origin of slave morality: the weak invert the values of the strong, redefining their own weakness as virtue and the strength of others as evil.

Social contract theory is a tradition in political philosophy, associated with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, that grounds political authority and justice in a real or hypothetical agreement among individuals to leave a state of nature and form a governed society. Classical versions assume parties are roughly equal in power, which critics such as Nussbaum argue excludes people with disabilities, non-human animals, and citizens of less powerful nations.

the supreme authority within a territory, the final, unchallengeable power to make and enforce law. In political philosophy, debates centre on where sovereignty resides (the monarch, the people, the constitution) and whether it can be divided or shared, as in federal systems.

Nussbaum's threshold principle holds that justice requires securing every person a minimum level of each central human capability, below which no one should fall, while leaving individuals free to pursue their own conception of a flourishing life above that floor.