Conclusion
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Sen and Nussbaum introduced the notion of capability and, since then, the capability literature has increased and diversified enormously. In this chapter, we have asserted the origins of the capability approach as a constructive alternative to the informational poverty of welfarist welfare economics and as a way to address problems of the informational space of utilitarianism and resource-based theories in political philosophy.
The focus on freedom rather than on utility or resources was meant to overcome the issues of preference adaptation and diversity neglect. To say this differently, we expect the capability approach to be able to respect three different desirable criteria: moving beyond welfarism (or attaching an intrinsic value to freedom), solving the issue of preference adaptation, and the luring risk of paternalism. However, we have shown that if one attaches an intrinsic value to freedom, thereby moving beyond welfarism, then one faces a tension between preference adaptation and the risk of paternalism.Whether the capability approach does overcome the problems it was meant to solve will depend on the way the notion of freedom underlying capability is conceptualised. To put it differently, we need to appreciate more specifically what constraints on freedom or capability are relevant, why one values the availability of additional options and how their value should be identified. One promising route to escape the highlighted tension and move beyond welfarism is a focus on agency, understood as a person's capacity to reflect on the preferences she would like to be hers and to revise and change them if needed. Identifying the value of the available functionings in this light can provide a route to escape the highlighted tension.
We have shown how the underspecification of the capability approach allows it to be completed in different ways to address specific problems. When different problems and applications of capability theories are considered separately, the focus is often on overcoming one of the highlighted problems, losing sight of the others. Thus, even if each criterion is satisfied by some of the existing contributions, it remains to be shown how all of them can be satisfied. The diversity of variants of capability theory has blurred the picture, but our analysis supports the conclusion that it remains to be shown that the capability approach can indeed live up to its promises. One promising route is to take the notion of agency more seriously in theory and practice. We need to check systematically whether the desired properties are still respected when we apply these policies to real settings, and under which conditions non-welfarist approaches may overcome issues of adaption or paternalism. How agency can play a crucial role in this endeavour is the concern of the next chapter.