Reflection: Your Own Capability Set

Prompts to consider

• Go through Nussbaum's ten central capabilities and assess your own situation honestly. Not your income, your real freedoms. Which capabilities are you above threshold on? Which are you below, or precariously close to the threshold? For the ones where you are well above threshold: how much of that is luck, good health, stable country, supportive family, and how much is genuinely earned? What does your honest answer imply about desert and redistribution?
• The adaptive preferences problem: can you identify a case in your own life where you stopped wanting something, an aspiration, a kind of life, a form of recognition, not because you genuinely decided it wasn't worth wanting, but because you adapted to its absence? How do you tell the difference between genuine preference revision and adaptation to deprivation? Does the distinction matter for how you live?
• Think of a person in your life, or a group of people you have some relationship to, whose capability deprivation is not visible in their income or reported satisfaction. Maybe someone who is materially comfortable but excluded from political voice, or healthy but unable to participate socially due to discrimination or stigma. What would a ==capability approach== to their situation look like, compared to a standard income-or-utility approach? What does the capability lens reveal that the other lenses miss?