Capable or Incapable? Disability and Justification in Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article evaluates Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach for its treatment of disability and philosophical grounding. A summary of Nussbaum’s claims on how her theory includes people with disabilities is followed by Eva Kittay’s demonstration that in Nussbaum’s approach exclusion results from the ambiguous role of human dignity. The argument then shows that Jean Porter’s appeals to virtue and human nature provide stronger philosophical grounding for making judgments about human flourishing than Nussbaum’s non-metaphysical liberalism, insufficient to account for her theory of capabilities. While Porter’s account of human nature does not escape Shane Clifton and Hans Reinders’ concerns about the exclusion of people with disabilities from the human ideal, her and John Berkman’s recovery of Thomistic ideas of infused virtue and grace do provide a more inclusive concept of the human telos.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".