4.2: Is everything that's called a capability genuinely a capability?

Since this chapter is the place to collect critiques and debates, let me start with a very basic point of criticism: not everything that is called ‘a capability’ in the capability literature is, upon closer examination, genuinely a capability. The main criticism that I want to offer in this brief section is that we should be very careful in our choices of terms and concepts: not everything that is important is a capability, and it is conceptually confusing (and hence wrong) to call everything that is important a capability. As an interdisciplinary language used in many different disciplines, the capability approach already suffers from sloppy use of terms because of interdisciplinary differences in their usage, and we should avoid contributing to this conceptual confusion. Let me give one example to illustrate the critique.

In her book Allocating the Earth as well as in earlier work, Breena Holland (2008, 2014) argues that the role of the environment in making capabilities possible is so important and central that we should conceptualize environmental ecological functioning (that is, the ecosystem services that the environment offers to human beings) as a meta-capability that underlies all other capabilities. As Holland puts it, “the environment’s ecological functioning is a meta-capability in the sense that it is a precondition of all the capabilities that Nussbaum defines as necessary for living a good human life” (2014, 112). By using this terminology, Holland wants to stress that protecting the ecosystem is not just one way among many equally good ways to contribute to human wellbeing — rather, it is a crucial and non-substitutable precondition for living. Yet one could question whether conceptualizing it as a “meta-capability” is correct. As I have argued elsewhere (Robeyns 2016a), the environment is not a capability, since capabilities are real opportunities for beings and doings. The environment and the services that its ecosystems give to human beings are absolutely necessary for human life to be possible in the first place, but that doesn’t warrant giving it the conceptual status of a ‘capability’. It would have been better, in my view, to introduce a term showing that there are substitutable and non-substitutable preconditions for each capability, and that there are absolutely necessary (or crucial) versus less central preconditions. An environment that is able to deliver a minimal level of ecosystem services to life on our planet is both a non-substitutable as well as an absolutely necessary precondition for human wellbeing understood in terms of capabilities. There are many other preconditions for human wellbeing, but a minimum level of sustainable ecosystem services is one of the very few — perhaps even the only one — that is both non-substitutable and absolutely necessary. That makes it hugely important — perhaps even more important than some capabilities (which could be accommodated by including it in proposition A6), but the absolute priority it should receive does not warrant us to call it a capability.