AS the activities of people on one side of the world increasingly affect the lives of those on the other, it becomes ever more urgent to develop ways of reasoning together about our values and priorities. This article discusses some approaches to moral reasoning recently proposed by Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum's views on moral reasoning are presented in the context of defending the theory of capabilities associated with her name and that of Amartya Sen. Sen originally defined capabilities as socially available opportunities for valuable functioning and proposed them as a standard for measuring levels of development worldwide.1 Nussbaum has developed Sen's idea by offering an explicit and wide-ranging (though not exhaustive) list of capabilities, which she offers as a solution to central questions in moral, social and political philosophy.2 Nussbaum presents the list of capabilities as a concrete alternative to moral relativism, establishing a universal moral standard for assessing local ways of life. The list provides a partial answer to the question of the good life, since it gives more determinate specification to such notoriously vague concepts as human well-being, flourishing and quality of life. It also contributes to a theory of justice, since it identifies the primary goods available for just distribution and sets a threshold that must be reached by all citizens before any society can be considered just (WHD 12, 75, 86). Finally, Nussbaum proposes the capabilities as an ideal for practical politics. "My central project is to work out the grounding for basic political principles to which all nations should be held by their citizens" (WHD 116). The theory of capabilities deserves careful attention. It makes an original contribution to several central philosophical questions and it has been enormously influential in drawing philosophers' attention to previously neglected issues of global development and justice, especially justice for women. Moreover, capabilities theory is not simply a topic for philosophy seminars. It is now used by numerous international agencies and nongovernmental organizations, including the United Nations Development Program, which focuses its statistical tables on countries' score on the Human Development Index using a capability metric developed in collaboration with Sen.3 Despite capabilities theory's enormous popularity, questions have been raised about the value of this theoretical approach in general and Nussbaum's list in particular. However, the present article focuses not on the substance of capabilities theory but rather on the types of reasoning that Nussbaum utilizes in its defense. Critics have charged that two of Nussbaum's methods of reasoning are flawed by covert reliance on her own moral authority. I argue that the same problem emerges in two other approaches to moral reasoning utilized by Nussbaum. Nussbaum's most systematic treatment of the capabilities and of the philosophical reasoning that supports them appears in her recent book, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Here, she provides not only an up-dated list of ten capabilities (WHD 78–80) but also extensive discussion of moral epistemology.4 My present concern is not with the content of the capabilities list but rather with Nussbaum's claims about its metaphysical status and the methods of argument she uses to defend it. Nussbaum originally presented the capabilities list as a development of Aristotle's ideas of human functioning. It offered "a thick vague theory of the good," grounded in a conception of human beings that was not metaphysical but both empirical and normative.5 The conception "aims to be as universal as possible and its guiding intuition . . . directs it to cross religious, cultural, and metaphysical gulfs."6 The thick vague theory of the good was intended as an "internal-essentialist . . . account of the most important functions of the human being," revealing "what the most central features of our common humanity are."7 Thus, Nussbaum's early capabilities theory was explicitly essentialist and boldly universalist. It presented the capabilities as values that have been, and deserve to be, accepted in all societies at all times. The earlier Nussbaum insisted on an essentialist account of the capabilities because she thought that only essentialism could resist moral relativism. Opposition to relativism has been a central theme in her work on the capabilities, partly because relativism often rationalizes injustice to women in cultures across the world.8 Nussbaum's early work on the capabilities attributed relativist views to postmodernist scholars, who rejected metaphysical realism, and to post-colonialist scholars, who challenged the imposition of Western standards on Nonwestern societies. She argued that, in rejecting "essentialist" conceptions of human nature, both groups typically lapsed into "an extreme relativism, or even subjectivism, about all questions of evaluation."9 Nussbaum condemned moral relativism as philosophically incoherent and politically reactionary.10 In WHD, Nussbaum's account of the capabilities is less uncompromising. She no longer postulates some real essence of humanity and she no longer presents the capabilities as universal in the sense of articulating a timeless ideal of well-being; now they are universal only in the weaker sense of offering an ideal for the modern world (WHD 77).11 Nussbaum weakens her claim that the capabilities are universally accepted but she is hopeful that universal agreement may be achieved in the future (WHD 103–4). She asserts that the values embodied in the capabilities are grounded in a basic intuition of individual human dignity, worth and agency that Westerners associate with Kant but which also has broad cross-cultural resonance (WHD 71–2). Because the list has cross-cultural appeal, she believes that it "can be the object of an overlapping consensus among people who otherwise have very different conceptions of the good" (WHD 5, italics in original). Although the list of capabilities offers primarily a vision of the good rather than the right, Nussbaum asserts that the theory presented in WHD is "closely allied to a form of political liberalism" (WHD 5). The new capabilities theory still does not prioritize any capability, including political liberty, but it is liberal because it gives "a more prominent place" than previously to "traditional rights and liberties".12 It is also liberal in being non-aggregative, treating "each person as an end and as a source of agency and worth in her own right" (WHD 69). Finally, the theory presents the capabilities not as "a complete account of the good or of human flourishing, but (as) a political account, specifying certain capacities, liberties, and opportunities that have value in any plan of life that citizens may otherwise choose" (WHD 148). It resembles Rawls's list of primary social goods and "is offered in a similar political-liberal spirit" (WHD 74). Because capabilities theory offers only "a partial, not a comprehensive, conception of the good life, a moral conception selected for political purposes only," Nussbaum says that it is not "dictatorial about the good" (WHD 74, 69). It proposes an ideal of human functioning but does not insist that (adult) citizens actually function in any particular way: "Capability, not functioning, is the appropriate political goal" (WHD 87, italics in original). Despite changes in her account of the capabilities' status, Nussbaum's opposition to cultural relativism remains strong (WHD 13). The first hundred pages of WHD argue for the importance of defending a set of universal values able to provide a cross-cultural standard for assessing local practices. However, Nussbaum is concerned to rebut any suspicion of "imposing something on people who surely have their own ideas of what is right and proper" and denies that "all this philosophizing (is) simply one more exercise in colonial or class domination." (WHD 35). First, the capabilities can be realized in different ways according to individual tastes and local traditions. Second, they are goals that citizens may choose not to pursue. Third, their emphasis on liberties and practical reason gives a central role to choice. Fourth, they offer only a political conception of the good life. Fifth, the capabilities offer only the philosophical grounding for constitutional principles, whose implementation is left "for the most part" to the nation in question (WHD 105). Thus, although Nussbaum recognizes that "theorists often come from nations that have been oppressors, or from classes in poorer nations that are themselves relatively privileged" she denies "that the list is imperialistic in . . . that it imports a Western account of value that derives from discredited colonialist projects" (WHD 149). Nussbaum notes several differences between her work and Sen's, one of which is that she gives more attention to "the critique of relativism" and to "issues of justification, realism, and objectivity" (WHD 11–15).13 In what follows, I outline four approaches to moral reasoning that Nussbaum invokes in defending her list of capabilities. Nussbaum uses the term "approaches" to signify broad reasoning strategies, each identified by its epistemological assumptions and each of which may include several specific methods. Nussbaum originally sought to validate the capabilities via an "evaluative inquiry" modeled on Aristotelian practical reasoning, "the exchange of reasons and arguments by human beings within history." She described this as the Aristotelian approach of critically refining the eudoxa or reputable beliefs.14 The Aristotelian approach was said to require examining "a wide variety of self-understandings of people in many times and places," drawing especially on "myths and stories that situate the human being in some way in the universe: between the beasts, on the one hand, and the gods, on the other."15 Nussbaum asserted that such an inquiry revealed a "great convergence across cultures" and thought that this provided "reason for optimism that, if we proceed in this way, using our imaginations, we will have in the end a theory that is not the mere projection of our own customs but is also fully international and a basis for cross-cultural attunement."16 The supposition that every society has subscribed to a single conception of the human good, even a vague one, is implausible and Brooke Ackerly has challenged Nussbaum's attempts to establish it through Aristotelian reasoning.17 First, Ackerly argues that "deep beliefs," which the approach takes as its primary data, often fail to support the list of capabilities; in fact, people's deep beliefs seem often to be racist or otherwise discriminatory.18 Second, the Aristotelian approach fails to require that all available data be collected and, third, it provides no safeguard against misinterpretation. Ackerly notes, "Nussbaum's approach allows her to import her own values into her analysis of practices unfamiliar to her by inadvertently attributing to the essential list characteristics that are familiar to her through her own society's means of promoting the basic capabilities."19 It may be possible to develop the Aristotelian method so as to avoid these problems but Nussbaum does not address this in her more recent work; instead she suggests several alternative approaches to moral reasoning. In WHD, Nussbaum employs a "narrative method," which emphasizes "the political importance of the imagination and the emotions" (WHD 15). Using the narrative approach, Nussbaum introduces readers to two poor Indian women, Vasanti and Jayamma, returning to them constantly and seeming to confirm her ideas about human capabilities against their experience.20 Susan Okin has recently challenged Nussbaum's use of the narrative method, claiming that it does not exemplify the "dialogue" with poor women that Nussbaum explicitly recommends (WHD 7). Okin observes that, although Nussbaum aims to enable Vasanti and Jayamma to speak for themselves, she directly quotes the words of each only once in a three hundred page book; otherwise, Okin asserts, the women's lives and even their thoughts, perceptions and emotions are filtered through Nussbaum.21 Okin charges that Nussbaum has failed to avoid the error of imposing on Vasanti and Jayamma categories that "reflect (her) own immersion in a particular theoretical tradition" (WHD 39) and that as their interpreter she has allowed her own voice to dominate.22 Nussbaum has responded to Okin's challenge by asserting that she intends the narrative method as a heuristic device rather than as an independent approach to justifying the capabilities.23 If the role of the narrative method is indeed so limited, its use is unobjectionable and certainly enriches Nussbaum's writing. I therefore turn to two other approaches to justifying the capabilities that Nussbaum invokes in WHD and which also raise concerns about the dominance of the authorial voice. Sen originally designed the capabilities as an alternative to measures of development that relied exclusively on success in meeting people's expressed preferences. He charged that such subjective welfarist measures of development were wrong not only in neglecting the values of choice and agency but also in assuming that mental states of satisfaction provided an adequate measure of well-being. He observed that extremely deprived people may take great joy in small mercies and/or accept the legitimacy of social orders in which they are severely exploited. Nussbaum also believes that subjective preferences are often mistaken or corrupt and she is consequently reluctant to rely on "preference-based" approaches to moral reasoning, which validate moral claims and principles by reference to existing desires.24 Nevertheless, Nussbaum is unwilling to discard all reference to desire and so she endorses a modified version of preference-based reasoning, which she calls the informed-desire approach. The informed-desire approach assesses preferences with a view to eliminating those that are corrupt or mistaken. In this assessment, it utilizes "a proceduralist approach with Kantian features," which Nussbaum credits to Jean Hampton.25 Because "Hamptonian proceduralism" imposes normative constraints on justificatory procedures, Nussbaum calls it a "morally laden" or "intelligently normative" form of proceduralism. Because it encourages the critical scrutiny of desires, she also calls it an informed-desire or a sensible informed-desire approach (WHD 136, 158, 161). Despite the merits of this proceduralist approach, Nussbaum is concerned by its inability to guarantee success in eliminating corrupt or mistaken preferences and so she asserts that reliance on it must be limited. The informed-desire approach provides some "limited and ancillary" support for the capabilities but Nussbaum justifies the list primarily by what she calls a non-platonist substantive-good approach (WHD 76, 152). Substantive-good approaches validate moral claims and principles by appealing to some independent standard of value. Nussbaum's standard is the capabilities and she often speaks as though "the substantive-good approach" is identical with the capabilities approach (e.g. WHD 165). This conflation obscures the distinction between substantive-good approaches in general and the capabilities approach in particular, making it difficult to examine Nussbaum's moral epistemology separately from her substantive claims about the capabilities.26 However, my discussion will focus on the methodological aspects of the substantive-good approach and specifically on Nussbaum's non-platonist version. Nussbaum's substantive-good approach is a type of intuitionism. "The primary weight of justification remains with the intuitive conception of truly human functioning and what that entails" (WHD 76). However, the intuitions on which we should rely are not naïve or untutored. Since the intuitive conception of human functioning and capability demands continued reflection and testing against our intuitions, we should view any given version of the list as a proposal put forward in a Socratic fashion, to be tested against the most secure of our intuitions as we attempt to arrive at a type of reflective equilibrium for political purposes.27 Because reflective equilibrium is designed to achieve coherence among people's beliefs and values, rather than to guarantee their correspondence with some independently existing moral reality, Nussbaum calls her substantive-good approach non-platonist rather than platonist (WHD 158). Although Nussbaum contrasts the non-platonist substantive-good approach with the informed-desire or proceduralist approach, she says that the two should be combined when possible, both because good procedures are constrained by substantive values and because intuitions about substantive goods are more credible if they express the intuitions of more and more varied people (WHD 151). She writes, "Proceduralism of a suitably norm-laden sort proves an essential complement to the substantive-good approach" and predicts "a long-term consensus between informed desire and the substantive good" (WHD 160, 165). Despite asserting the desirability of bringing the two approaches "into dialogue," Nussbaum regards them as sufficiently distinct that their practical recommendations will frequently diverge in the short term; when this happens, "we need to choose between relying on an informed-desire approach and relying on a substantive-good approach to guide us" (WHD 160, 165). When the two generate divergent conclusions, Nussbaum regards the non-platonist substantive-good approach as the more reliable and recommends that it should always trump proceduralism (WHD 165).28 As we have seen, Nussbaum identifies the informed-desire approach with a morally-constrained version of proceduralism, which justifies moral claims by reference to some procedure rather than by reference to their substance. Nussbaum's description of the sort of proceduralism that she endorses is vague and her allusions to the work of Rawls, Hampton, Habermas, Dworkin and Elster are confusing, since their methods vary considerably; for instance, Rawls recommends a hypothetical thought experiment whereas Habermas insists that actual discourse must occur. However, Nussbaum's main model is Jean Hampton, who proposes that procedures should be constrained by a Kantian conception of human worth that includes the ideas of equal worth and non-aggregation and also by a conception of a person's legitimate interests (WHD 159). Hampton's ideas remain unfortunately undeveloped, as Nussbaum notes, but they seem somewhat in the spirit of Kantian discourse ethics. This requires that all those affected by a normative proposal be included or represented in the discourse and that their interactions be characterized by universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity.29 Nussbaum asserts that Hampton's Kantian proceduralism is very much like a substantive-good approach because it incorporates ideas of equal worth, and which she says are all on the capabilities list (WHD 159). As we have Nussbaum's main reason for proceduralism as is that she that it may to the mistaken or corrupt of those who in the She this problem in of that of people their to the status Nussbaum asserts that women are because of "the weight of and and the of when we about who are not or frequently resist . . . changes women's that they women as (WHD 161). all actual desires, including the corrupt or when we the list of basic and opportunities put the political and the liberties of on much a (WHD It also be to an status (WHD Despite her of existing desires, Nussbaum that requires respect for the preferences of and she recognizes that, if the capabilities approach is to be with it simply some as mistaken or She this problem by asserting her to take account of in the
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