Professor Martha Nussbaum: Capabilities Approach and The Role of Public Services

This is a transcript taken from the Youtube presentation ‘Professor Martha Nussbaum: Capabilities Approach and The Role of Public Services. It’s specific focus is the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore’s work and the Human Capabilities approach developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen.

Professor Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago is one of the world´s leading thinkers on multiculturalism, humanities and human development. She is widely recognized for her work on the capability approach, a theory on good life focusing on what individuals are actually able to be and do which has been highly influential amongst others in development policy.

Nussbaum (2000) frames basic principles for good life in terms of 10 capabilities, i.e. real opportunities. She claims that a political order can only be considered as being decent if this order secures at least a threshold level of these 10 capabilities to all citizens.

The ten capabilities are:

1. Life

2. Bodily Health

3. Bodily integrity

4. Senses, Imagination and Thought

5. Emotions

6. Practical Reason

7. Affiliation

8. Other Species

9. Play

10. Control over one´s Environment

Professor Nussbaum´s adaptation on the capability approach forms the basis for City of Helsinki´s work with young people. Helsinki publishes annually a report on young people´s capabilities, which leads to priorisation on young people´s services. Helsinki´s Director of Youth Affairs Tommi Laitio interviews Professor Nussbaum on the role of public services in fostering decent life and on the role of arts and culture.

The event is hosted by the Helsinki Youth Department in collaboration with the University of Helsinki and ArtsEqual research project (University of the Arts Helsinki). The audience is encouraged to participate in the discussion. The event is held in English but questions and comments can be raised in Finnish. The event can be followed live online and can be watched afterwards by going to the website of the ArtsEqual project (www.artsequal.fi)

The below transcript is made from 33 min 7 secs to 39 min 49 secs.

Interviewer: There’s been some critical voices saying that the capabilities approach or the other list is a Western concept of good life; how do you answer that crisis ?

Martha Nussbaum: Well you know I mean of course it’s just factually false. It was made up by an Indian, namely Amartya Sen, and in our association we have people from 80 countries and the intellectual leaders have also come from many, many countries and we deliberately have the meeting in different countries.

The chief economist of the World Bank right now Kaushik Basu, is a Capability economist who’s Indian; again a lot of South Asians, just because that discourse was especially well developed in Bangladesh in India and Pakistan. Mahbub ul Haq who created the Human Development List was a Pakistani economist so you know, that just happens to be a particularly large home for that and I think there’s a very clear reason for that…

…because in the Bengali Enlightenment Rabindranath Tagore was a leading theorist who already had these concepts well developed – I think much more than any Western philosopher – but so it’s factually false; but it’s also important to us to constantly seek out new inputs from other places and this is why last year we had our meeting in the US; that’s the first time in ages we’ve done that because it’s very difficult for people from other countries to get visas to come so it’s not a good place to have a meeting but anyway this year it’s in Japan, next year its in South Africa we’ve had meetings, two meetings, in Latin America; we’ve had meetings in India – yeah so we move around and we really, really try not to stick to Europe and North America.

The other thing is that I know that criticism I think is not correct, even about human rights – and you hear it much more often with the Human Rights approach – Amartya has written very well about how the idea of Human Rights has its roots in Indian traditions and Chinese traditions and so on, but the idea of capabilities is even more obviously not tainted in that way because it’s just this human idea – ‘What am I able to do in what country ?’; may I ask, does somebody not ask that question ?

…and it’s a question you know I go around and I talk to women in development projects; women who haven’t learned to read and write; they couldn’t be influenced by any particular kind of philosophy, but of course they want to know what they could do and what good activists typically urge them to do is – I mean this is pre-theoretical – entirely because these activists themselves are not trained in philosophy; they ask them to draw a map of the power structure of their village and showing where what they can do, and what they can’t do and that’s just a very natural human question.

Interviewer: Do I sense that you’re slightly frustrated by this crazy

Martha Nussbaum: No, I mean, I don’t think it’s a very helpful criticism. I mean the further thing to say is that if something originates in one place that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t borrow it and adapt it to their own cultural context. Obviously a lot of our ideas are Indian and Rabindranath Tagore was a particularly large source of inspiration in fact for the Handbook on Capabilities I’m writing about; and you know, insofar as Aristotle comes into it, Aristotle is mediated by the humanists Marxists and by Tagore and lots of other people in different countries but why not borrow something if you think that it’s good ?

…and I certainly do that all the time so I don’t really, no. I think no one really believes that it’s right for people to use only those ideas that their local culture already has, even to the extent that they would try to say that. Of course most cultures have a lot more ideas than you would recognize, if you only read the dominant male writings of those traditions because women’s voices have not been recorded, poor people’s voices have not been recorded; and so before they could even phrase their objection they would have to try to hear all the voices and then they would get a tumultuous debate; they would not just get a single view that looks very different from the Western view

Interviewer: This kind of the standard or the dominant well kind of approaches to well-being and they dominate our politics in most countries put a lot of emphasis on let’s say health services and social services you’ve talked a lot about the arts and the importance of the Arts how do you how do you think that the the arts create capabilities ?

Martha Nussbaum: Well I think any political culture needs human beings to care about it if it’s ever going to come into being, and once it comes into being, if it’s ever going to remain stable over time; I think you can’t even say that this is a good political conception without showing that it has ingredients in it that make it possible for it to sustain itself over time – and so this is really what my book ‘Political Emotions’ is about, that all decent societies need to attend to the emotions. Now it’s obvious in a context of coming into being – let’s say Gandhi’s Freedom Movement – that the arts play a huge role. I mean Gandhi knew you didn’t just give people little sermons but you engaged with them in singing, dance was not his particular thing, but he did turn to Tagore for the songs that the people in his movement use.

Tagore believed that dance was the great source of empowerment for women because until they could move their bodies freely they wouldn’t be able to be free citizens and so he wrote very well about that. In fact Amartya Sen’s mother was one of his leading dancers and she wrote a whole book about that which is only available in India, so I try to quote large chunks of it in the things that I write.

Yes, so the arts in many ways; now there are lots of different arts that play a role and obviously music is great because everyone can join in near and far and it’s possible to go outside the local culture and everyone is singing the same song. Visual art obviously has spatial limitations but I talk a lot in the book about how cities in particular can use powerful examples of public sculpture and public art or festivals that bring people together and use the arts in order to sort of affirm the values of the political culture.