How politically liberal should the capabilities approach want to be?

Abstract

In this article, I develop a tension in the capabilities approach between committing to political liberalism and ensuring full capability for all persons. In particular, I argue that the capabilities approach can maintain a commitment to full capability only by embracing at least one of three kinds of comprehensiveness: Even if it can avoid comprehensiveness along the dimensions of height and depth, it is committed along the dimension of breadth. In short, because the possession of capability can be hampered either by external obstacles that prevent a person from accessing a good or by internal obstacles that prevent a person from being open to it, the capabilities approach faces a dilemma: Either it can ensure that persons are free of internal obstacles to the possession of capability by pushing them to be open to functionings across a relatively comprehensive set of domains of life (that is, require breadth-comprehensiveness); or else it can side with political liberalism by making options externally available across many domains of life without encouraging internal endorsement – but in this case, it runs the risk that persons will foreseeably and avoidably face internal obstacles to genuine possession of some capabilities.