I listened yesterday to an EconTalk episode on my computer in which the host Russ Roberts interviewed Martha Nussbaum on the program.  But if you haven’t listened to EconTalk interviews, you are missing a treat.  And if you haven’t heard of Martha Nussbaum, you are forgiven.  Her name is not a household word, thought her husband, Cass Sunstein, is better known.  Even though you might not know the name you should know about her relatively new ethical and philosophical theory which has a direct impact on political and economic policy.  Nussbaum is a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Chicago.  Her view is called the Capabilities approach.  It is not new in essence, as we can see a version of it back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in which talk shifted from negative liberty to positive liberty.  That theory, advanced by British political philosophers such as T. H. Green, R. A. Hobson, and L. T. Hobhouse, long forgotten men, argued that we need to add to the old negative way of talking about rights (life, liberty, property).  We needed to stop emphasizing so much what government could not do and begin to stress what the state ought to do to enable people to achieve a truly fulfilling life.  This was positive liberty emphasizing the positive role of the state, requiring of course the coercion of the state to take from some to redistribute to others.

Fast forward to today and Martha Nussbaum.  Her approach begins with the obvious proposition that not all people are “created equal” in terms of opportunity to achieve a fulfilled life—as defined by Nussbaum’s list of ten elements needed for the “good life.”  From the interview itself, here is how Nussbaum characterizes the Capabilities approach:

“And basically, it involves just saying: look, the real question that [?], what are people actually able to do and to be? And then of course you have to get right away more specific and say, what are the opportunities or freedoms that we really think people should have in a country of decent welfare? And so I’ve produced a list of 10 central capabilities that include life, health, bodily integrity, the development of practical reason, the relationships one has, both political and personal; environmental conditions; labor conditions. So anyway, there’s a whole.” (September 29, 2014, EconTalk)

Nussbaum uses the term “flourishing” to describe what she wants to achieve.  She also adds some elements not mentioned in the interview, for example, emotions and senses.  In her book she defines “capabilities.”  They are, “the answers to the question, ‘What is this person able to do and to be?” (Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach.  Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011, 20)  If some people cannot be or do these things, then we (other humans) ought to help them at least to move toward full flourishing.   Let me say here that I agree, and Christians ought to agree, with much of what Nussbaum wants to achieve, but I will not, as you will see, agree with the means she adopts to attain it.  But ate any rate, what does Nussbaum mean by all this?

Her list is only a little controversial.  We ought to desire that all people have decent health, that life be preserved (including unborn life).  We would desire a proper relationship for all with their governments, meaning justice, an enforceable rule of law, good laws, etc.  We also strongly support flourishing in relationships, but for Christians, this means God-ordained relationships conducted in God-honoring ways.  We also support stewardship of the environment according to God’s command to have dominion.  And we support decent labor conditions for all.  I am not sure what Nussbaum means by “practical reason.”  But I suppose she means that humans should have the opportunity to develop their ability to reason and apply reason to solve real problems.  She also mentioned “bodily integrity,” by which she meant a basic freedom to move and to be secure.  All of these are “goods,” properly defined and limited.  The Scriptures obviously directly sanction many of these elements (“you shall not murder”=life, health, bodily integrity).  In general then we want more of these, not less.

Now Nussbaum does not like the current typical Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measure used by economists to assess well-being.  I agree in part.  GDP does measure total economic health well enough, and therefore average economic health.  It of course cannot measure the intangibles directly, but it does correlate well with many of the elements on Nussbaum’s list.  The problem with Nussbaum’s criticism of GDP is that she really cannot suggest many better measures that are actually feasible for well-being.  Economists are using some newer ones (“happiness literature” for example) and they seem useful, but even so, they can be entirely too subjective.  And it is nearly impossible to measure, say, “practical reason.”  Moreover how does one compare results across individuals?  So I do sympathize, but would not simply jettison GDP.  But at any rate that is not the heart of Nussbaum’s approach.

How do we get more of these elements on her list if they are goods?  How do we promote flourishing as a result of having more of these ten elements?  This is where Nussbaum goes off track.  The interview gets really interesting (it is even before that too) when Nussbaum begins to address the means to her end.  In t=her book she writes:

“The capabilities approach can be provisionally defined as an approach to comparative quality-of-life assessment and to theorizing about basic social justice. It holds that the key question to ask, when comparing societies and assessing them for their basic decency or justice, is “What is each person able to do and to be?” In other words, the approach takes each person as an end, asking not just about the total or average well-being but about the opportunities available to each person. It is focused on choice or freedom, holding that the crucial good societies should be promoting for their people is a set of opportunities, or substantial freedoms, which people then may or may not exercise in action: the choice is theirs.”

The key phrase is “crucial good societies should be promoting.”  Here is the first hint that Nussbaum sees government as a primary mechanism for achieving the Capabilities goals.  The role of government is the crux of the issue.  The host of the program, Russ Roberts, also picked up on that and questioned Nussbaum on it.  In the actual interview, Nussbaum extends her thoughts:

“Now, I don’t actually believe that government ought to do all of it. But I guess what I think it’s in the end, the buck stops there. That is, if we have a society in which people are massively unable to enjoy one of the things on my list, then something is wrong with the institutional arrangements of that society. So if that society wants to delegate a part of that job to private actors or the market, well, fine. Let them try that out and see how it works. But if it doesn’t work, well, then they’d better do something different.” (September 29, 2014, EconTalk)

I find this rather breathtaking if I understand correctly what she said.  If society, really government in a society, believes some have not been sufficiently endowed with the capabilities to thrive, then it is obligated to intervene.  Moreover Nussbaum seems to give massive authority to the state, to the point that it already is able to govern any and all aspects of civil society, only delegating to it what might be done by it, but ready to revoke its delegation.  Civil society is eviscerated.  It is just the individual and the state with no institutions between except those allowed to exist by the all-powerful state.

This omnipotent state would not be so bad if it were ruled directly by God or if humans were morally and intellectually infallible.  They are not, as we know.  That is what makes Nussbaum’s comments disturbing.  It is not her basic goals, but her apparent naivety about human nature and her over-optimistic view of the state as a result as if it can both know what everyone needs at all times and know how to perfectly achieve perfect goals for all those humans.  Let me quote Nussbaum one more time:

“Russ: But if those were all perfect, that wouldn’t change the fact that governments inevitably take stuff from some people and give it to others. And without my consent. Without people’s consent. Guest [Nussbaum]: Are you talking about taxation? Russ: I’m talking about everything that government does. Taxation—Guest [Nussbaum]: Well, you are talking about taxation. I don’t agree. Because we have to first say, what account of ownership do we have? If somebody has inherited wealth, do they actually own that? Such as libertarian liberal as John Stuart Mill thought they didn’t own the money that was just theirs by inheritance. He didn’t even think that they owned all the money that they got through their own work. Because he thought that whatever money is needed to support the basic needs of others is not owned by the person who is sitting on it. They don’t have the right to it, if it’s needed to support the urgent needs of somebody else. So we have to back up, and we have to have a big debate about ownership first, before I would even agree with you that what a tax system does is to take. I think it just actually makes sure that the money that already belongs to all of us, gets into the hands of all of us.”  (Ibid.)

Nussbaum’s argument then is first that we do not actually own much of what we hold.  Who owns it then?  The state has ultimate legal rights over property and allows us to  keep some of it.  The rest it uses to achieve what its political and bureaucratic leaders believe is best to promote capabilities.  This is called redistribution. I should add the corollary: The state controls all of life for its ultimate aims, whether they are well-meaning or not.   Nussbaum calls it social justice.  I prefer to call it potential tyranny.

There are good arguments as to why Nussbaum’s approach is inefficient.  But there are also ethical arguments from philosophy and especially from theology as to why here approach is just wrong in many respects.  Even if we can’t find direct ethical prohibitions, we acknowledge man’s sinful disposition, his “all too human” nature, which should make us pause and ask how Nussbaum expects all this state action to work so well when people are so imperfect.  We may also ask whether it is ethically right to take from some and redistribute to others on the flimsy and subjective grounds that those others don’t have the same capabilities as others.  In some ways, Nussbaum already has what she wants in many nations, but her approach is so radically founded on a subjective base that if we achieved what she wanted, it would be disastrous for everyone, even those she most wanted to help.  Finally, Nussbaum’s ends are consistent with Christianity, but her means are not consistent with what I understand to be a Christian view of politics and economics.

We need to know about this and other such theories.  They are subtly deceptive by appealing to our sense of compassion for those with fewer capabilities.  But we must consider whether these types of approaches are really all that beneficial, not to mention just.  And whether they are actually consistent with Scripture.