All over the world people are struggling for lives that are worthy of their human dignity.

Creating Capabilities is intended as an introduction to the capabilities approach to ethics and political philosophy, aimed at the undergraduate or non-philosopher reader. Per Nussbaum herself, during her APA Eastern Division Author Meets Critic session, she intended to provide a broad overview of capabilities which instructors can use in their lower-level classes, thus obviating the need to read portions of various articles and books throughout which the theory has been spread over the course of Nussbaum’s 20-some years of developing the position.

My biggest concern about this book relates to just this: who constitutes the appropriate audience. As an instructor of undergraduate courses, I would not feel comfortable teaching capabilities to students on the basis of this book. This is primarily because although Nussbaum devotes a great deal of space to summarizing the positive commitments of the capabilities theorist, she does not provide much exposition of the arguments for this position in this book. Rather, she frequently and consistently will reiterate a position, then reference some other paper or book in which the position is actually argued for. In teaching undergraduates, especially non-majors, I find it is imperative to present them with, and in fact place most of the emphasis on, the arguments provided for the positions we discuss. This is generally what I consider to be the most important aspect of an undergraduate philosophy course: teaching students how to argue for positions. If Nussbaum doesn’t present those arguments in this book, then I can’t do that without sending students off to find arguments which are spread out among other papers and books – precisely the action this volume purports to relieve them of.

On the other hand, this book will also be highly unsatisfactory to those who do have a background in philosophy – for precisely the same reason. If a philosopher or other academic is looking to educate herself on the fundamentals of capabilities theory, she will certainly be looking for the normative foundations of the theory, and not a brief and un-filled-out recap. This book takes too much for granted to be instructive to non-specialists, while simultaneously not presenting nearly enough to be valuable to specialists or more fluent readers.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution made by this book is in situating Nussbaum’s version of capabilities theory in the context of the simultaneously-developed but importantly different version of capabilities promoted by Amartya Sen. Here Nussbaum does some work in defending her commitment to a deep political liberalism, as opposed to the perfectionist liberalism which she believes characterizes Sen and others of his ilk. Overall, this book is not recommended, even at its very affordable cover price of ~$15. Readers would do better to invest the time and money into reading Nussbaum’s Women and Human Development and Frontiers of Justice, and Sen’s Development as Freedom, Poverty & Famines, and Hunger and Public Action, along with various papers. ( )

Nussbaum lays out the capabilities approach to human development, which she has developed jointly with Amartya Sen, in this monograph. This provides an alternative to rights-based theories of change and development for the non-Western world.