Responsibilities for Human Capabilities: Avoiding a Comprehensive Global Program |
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Authors: | Ville Päivänsalo |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Systematic Theology, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 33, Aleksanterinkatu 7, 00014 Helsinki, Finland |
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Abstract: | Violence, poverty, and illness are all too prevalent in our world. In order to alleviate their hold systematically, we need
normative schemes with a global reach and with definite responsibilities. Martha Nussbaum’s human capabilities theory (Martha
Nussbaum 2006) provides us with an insightful example. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (The United Nations 1948), however, already includes most of the human capabilities central to Nussbaum’s theory, and violence, poverty, and illness
usually appear as objectionable enough without any additional reference to capabilities. In the current article, the author
argues that the primary global responsibilities can mainly be established without Nussbaum’s account of capabilities. The
human rights-based approach is more promising for this purpose (Jack Donnelly 2007; Abigail Gosselin, Human Rights Review 8:35–52, 2006; Ivar Kolstad, Human Rights Review, doi:, 2008). However, the author also contends that Nussbaum’s theory may be very instructive as a relatively comprehensive moral approach
that supplements the human rights view and inspires its adherents to assume secondary responsibilities in addition to the
primary ones. Once we learn to see Nussbaum’s agenda in this way, not as the global program, but as one of the many reasonable and relatively comprehensive views in the global background culture, we
can also learn to cultivate the responsibilities it implies in a duly dialogical way. |
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