Justice and the Environment in Nussbaum's " Capabilities Approach " Why Sustainable Ecological Capacity Is a Meta-Capability (original) (raw)
Related papers
Justice and the Environment in Nussbaum's “Capabilities Approach”
Political Research Quarterly, 2008
What principles should guide how society distributes environmental benefits and burdens? Like many liberal theories of justice, Martha Nussbaum's “capabilities approach” does not adequately address this question. The author argues that the capabilities approach should be extended to account for the environment's instrumental value to human capabilities. Given this instrumental value, protecting capabilities requires establishing certain environmental conditions as an independent “meta-capability.” When combined with Nussbaum's nonprocedural method of political justification, this extension provides the basis for adjudicating environmental justice claims. The author applies this extended capabilities approach to assess the distribution of benefits and burdens associated with climate change.
Environment, justice and the capability approach
Ecological Economics, 2013
In recent years, several studies have attempted to combine the capabilities approach with sustainable development. However, critics have pointed out that although the capability approach takes the environment into account, it has its shortcomings for not being a complete ethical theory. Our article attempts to go beyond these criticisms, and show that the capabilities approach provides a good analytical framework for an environmental justice approach.
The main objective of this paper is to analyze the challenges in applying Nussbaum's capability approach to animals, as refracted through the lens of environmental justice (justice among humans on environmental issues and risks) and ecological justice (justice to non-human nature) in Schlosberg's sense. Comparing and contrasting intra-and intergenerational justice for animals within the environmental and ecological justice frameworks, I demonstrate why capabilities-based multispecies justice can provide some benefits in overcoming ecological vulnerability. In this context, I point out the methodological pitfalls that environmental and ecological justice face in their attempts at eradicating unequal vulnerabilities embedded into some either-or dilemmas by exploring how the vulnerabilities in question negatively affect animals' positive and negative rights.
Human impacts on large-scale ecological interactions effectively confer fundamental advantages of wealth and power to some members of society and not to others. As illustrated here by reference to a 1993 cholera outbreak resulting from degradation of aquatic ecosystems, these impacts can pose barriers to the normal channels through which one might pursue individual advantage, thereby raising tensions for liberal theories of justice that are committed both to basic liberties and to distributive fairness. I first illustrate these tensions by reference to John Rawls’s theory. I then argue that although Nussbaum’s theory, which emerged in dialogue with Rawls’s, improves upon it in this regard, it remains subject to the same basic tensions. Instituting ‘capability ceilings’ that impose a limit on the set of basic opportunities available to people would help resolve this tension. Thus, in addition to Nussbaum’s proposal for establishing capability thresholds, I defend capability ceilings as a friendly amendment to her theory.
Justice, Ecological Integrity, and Climate Change
The "restoration" of humanity-or, more directly, humanity's adaptation to a coming world of climate change-will come only with recognition of the human place within the rest of the natural world. In line with the themes of this volume, one key element of our adaptation to a changing climate will be a rethinking of ourselves as we interact with, and relate to, the nonhuman realm. Restoring humanity entails changing how we understand and how we relate to the lives and functioning of othersfrom individual animals to large-scale ecosystems-with which we are embedded in the world.
TRACE ∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies
The main objective of this paper is to analyze the challenges in applying Nussbaum’s capability approach to animals, as refracted through the lens of environmental justice (justice among humans on environmental issues and risks) and ecological justice (justice to non-human nature) in Schlosberg’s sense. Comparing and contrasting intra- and intergenerational justice for animals within the environmental and ecological justice frameworks, I demonstrate why capabilities-based multispecies justice can provide some benefits in overcoming ecological vulnerability. In this context, I point out the methodological pitfalls that environmental and ecological justice face in their attempts at eradicating unequal vulnerabilities embedded into some either-or dilemmas by exploring how the vulnerabilities in question negatively affect animals’ positive and negative rights.
The Capabilities Approach and Environmental Sustainability: The Case for Functioning Constraints
Environmental Values, 2015
The capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has become an influential viewpoint for addressing issues of social justice and human development. It has not yet, however, given adequate theoretical consideration to the requirements of environmental sustainability. Sen has focussed on the instrumental importance of human development for achieving sustainability, but has failed to consider the limits of this account, especially with respect to consumption-reduction. Nussbaum has criticised constraining material consumption for its paternalistic prescription of one particular conception of the good life, without considering it as an imperative of justice. We discuss two possible extensions of the capabilities approach. First, the concept of capability ceilings contains several attractive elements, but it also suffers from some shortcomings. Therefore, second, we advocate constraining people’s combinations of functionings in accordance with a personal budget which consists of a fair share of environmental resources.
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics
Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is today one of the most influential theories of justice. In her earlier works on the capabilities approach, Nussbaum only applies it to humans, but in later works she extends the capabilities approach to include sentient animals. Contrary to Nussbaum’s own view, some scholars, for example, David Schlosberg, Teea Kortetmäki and Daniel L. Crescenzo, want to extend the capabilities approach even further to include collective entities, such as species and ecosystems. Though I think we have strong reasons for preserving ecosystems and species within the capabilities approach, there are several problems with ascribing capabilities to them, especially if we connect it with the view that species and ecosystems are subjects of justice. These problems are partly a consequence of the fact that an ascription of capabilities to species and ecosystems needs to be based on an overlapping consensus between different comprehensive doctrines, in accordance wit...
Climate Justice and Capabilities: A Framework for Adaptation Policy
Ethics and International Affairs 26, No. 4: 445-461, 2012
W e are already living with climate change. While the political arguments about causes and responses drag on, the people who are directly affected by its very real and increasing effects are beginning to face the urgent new reality of adaptation. As has been well documented, actual trends for a number of indicators-warming, rising sea levels, and extreme weather, for example-have far exceeded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) predictions of just a few years ago. At the same time, one of the major political discourses surrounding climate change policy, at both the global and local level, has been that of climate justice. Climate justice theorists, governments of the most vulnerable nations, and activists and organizations in both local and global civil society have articulated a range of frameworks for understanding the relationship between the effects of climate change and conceptions of justice and fairness. These approaches include fairly straightforward polluter pays models (based on historical responsibility), fair share models (based on the equal allocation of emissions), and various rights-based models (such as development rights, human rights, and environmental rights). The strong assumption behind these models is that normative theories of climate justice can ground global climate policies. The question here is how those can be applied to the reality and necessity of adaptation.