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LIT-287: Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined

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StatusActive — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-259); worth reading as the most systematic single account of what the capability approach is, and of what a capability theory must add. It is the best route to seeing which disputes are about the core and which are about optional choices. Read it as an advocate's reconstruction, not a neutral survey: Robeyns says she takes sides in ch. 4 (p. 19), and her verdicts mostly hold that a critique misfires against the approach.
Version2
Tagsethics, society-and-governance, social-science
ExtendsLIT-289 — Equality of What?
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-259 — Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-025 — Neither utility information nor resource holdings, alone or together, can register claims that arise from how differently people convert resources into what they can do and be: equal resources leave unequal capabilities, and utility adapts to deprivation

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Robeyns (2017), Open Book Publishers, Cambridge UK, 2017 (monograph; open access, CC BY 4.0; ISBN 978-1-78374-421-3 pbk) — DOI-10.11647/OBP.0130

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-09-28 at the owner’s request, as one of nine texts assembled to represent Amartya Sen’s capability approach without a full reading of The Idea of Justice. published: is the first appearance (ADR-002).

It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-259 is the close reading of 2026-09-28, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the most systematic single account of what the capability approach is, and of what a capability theory must add. It is the best route to seeing which disputes are about the core and which are about optional choices. Read it as an advocate’s reconstruction, not a neutral survey: Robeyns says she takes sides in ch. 4 (p. 19), and her verdicts mostly hold that a critique misfires against the approach.

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