Capability as ‘Samarthya’ and ‘Sakshamta’: exonerating the discourse on justice

ABSTRACT This research paper will commence with an attempt to bifurcate the traditional theories of justice from its modern counterparts. Under the former category, works of the Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle will be analysed. The modern theories, on the other hand, would comprise of the utilitarian metric of Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill along with Rawls’ difference principle and justice as fairness and would further bring out the differences in theories and approaches in general. In contrast to all this, the last few sections of this paper will be dedicated to Amartya Sen’s approach to freedom, equality and justice and the reasons it provided for being a better metric for evaluating social justice as compared to former archaic alternative conceptualizations. It will try to determine the authenticity of the differentiation between ‘transcendental institutionalism’ and ‘realization-focused comparison paradigms’, the attributes or focal variables of the capability approach and its linkage to public reason, development and deliberative democracy. Thus, the paper will try to map the linear progression of the concept of justice along with its kindred concepts of liberty and equality and how this eventually resulted in the conceptualization of capability as ‘Samarthya’ and ‘Sakshamta’.