John Lunstroth
The increasing popularity of capabilities approach, associated with Sen and Nussbaum, signals a revival of Aristotelianism in the public sphere. I argued in an earlier post this revival has profound implications for “the life sciences.” It also has significant implications for political theory inasmuch as it provides a non-theological basis for thinking of social identity. I am led to make this political statement by a paper by Paulina Ochoa Espejo in which she argues it is not necessary to look to theology for theoretical underpinnings of the state. She is right, but not exactly for the reasons she articulates. There is no question our modern form of corporate sovereign organization has an intimate ideological and temporal relationship with the church (e.g. Berman, Tierney) but in a sense that relationship is accidental, not necessary. Aristotle had already laid the conceptual groundwork on which the church erected its ideology. When the state separated from the church it was on Aristotle’s mostly secular foundation. That foundation serves well as the basis for universal systems of justice such as human rights.
The capabilities approach (CA) people – Finnis, Sen and Nussbaum – quite clearly identify their idea of capabilities with human rights. There are obvious differences in form, but I think their argument(s) that the reasonable theory of human rights is the CA is very hard to dispute. One may argue human rights are grounded in Christian moral theory, but the architects of the UN system and the International Bill of Human Rights were conscious of the dangers of religiosity and made a powerful effort to be secular. Human rights does not work as a concept unless it is fundamentally secular.
The revival I point to is related to the revival of Aristotelian ethical theory; but, as I said, it is being articulated by people who have significant impact in the political realm, and it is a political revival. The Aristotelian ethics revival (e.g., Anscombe, MacIntyre) plays a role, but the purely ethical investigations are often mixed up with Aquinas. Finnis is not secular, but the theory he articulates in Natural Law, Natural Rights is. I think to speak of Aristotle’s ethics without including his biology and politics, at a minimum, is to miss an important element of his theory of human (and animal) identity. Human identity is political, and its potential is inherent in its biology. The linking of the two deterministic elements (biology and politics) with the individual capacity to make decisions is the ethics. The CA reflects the broader holistic image of the Aristotelian vision.
In my research for this in-depth blog posting, I googled “capabilities approach” (44,900 hits); “human rights approach” (66,700 hits); and “Aristotelian revival” (863 hits).
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