This chapter further develops the framework presented in the previous chapter. It does so by elaborating upon the value pluralism involved in the umbel view and the substantial interior of the framework. The chapter begins by accounting for the pluralism involved in the umbel view and discussing what that implies for political priority-setting. It then argues that the capability approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, provides the best available currency of justice for a multiple threshold sufficientarian theory. The chapter then moves on to provide a suggested index of eight spheres of capabilities relevant for sufficientarian justice. The index includes the following items: Basic Needs, Health, Education, Meaningful Work, Political Equality, Community, Social Status, Reasonable Autonomy. The purpose of the index is to serve as input into the further interdisciplinary and public debate on the identification of the justice-relevant threshold. The chapter ends by emphasizing that public policy should give particular priority to manifest deficiencies, such as cases of deficiency clusters, where the same group of people face insufficiency in several value spheres.

Remote working – strongly widespread during the covid-19 pandemic –is today one of the main forms of innovation in the world of work. As always, within innovation phenomena we have static elements, from the past, and dynamic elements, looking to change the status quo. Consequently, the evaluation of remote work may be either conservative or innovative. Remote work can be considered as a simple re-proposition of the Fordist-Taylorist Enterprise that does not actually change the characteristics of employment as a not democratic relationship involving the worker submission to the employer managerial, control and disciplinary power. On the other hand, remote work can be recognized as the symptom of a broader cultural, organizational and process change in the firm, allowing the worker to conquer new spaces of freedom and autonomy, which not only allow for a new balance in the relationship between work and life, but also redefine both the factual and juridical connotations of subordination. This chapter analyzes this second perspective and, on the basis of legislation and collective bargaining, tries to define the elements of change in the concept and morphology of subordination within the employment relationship.

What are the core capacities that make for a flourishing life? It is an incredibly difficult question to answer. Every philosopher, public commentator, and backyard critic seems to have a different view on the matter. Occasionally the terms of what makes for a good life are developed explicitly, but mostly the grounding of such claims is either left implicit or undeveloped, as if we all agree and spelling out the terms of a good life is unnecessary. In the Global North, the most common appeals assume some variation on the capacities for freedom, connectivity, democracy, and inclusion, with the ideology of freedom usually prevailing. The dominant approach to human development, called the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and expressed in the Human Development Index, appeals to these liberal notions. This chapter sets out an alternative framework for understanding human capacities. It builds a matrix of capacities around the domains of vitality, relationality, productivity, and sustainability. These are seen as basic to a flourishing human condition.

Here I move from historical analysis to philosophical explication of the concept of liberty, and I introduce the main conceptual components of the idea of freedom I defend.

Here I defend the view that freedom requires more than merely opportunities to act but also the provision of resources needed for agents to enjoy capabilities to pursue valued activities and ways of life.

This chapter introduces basic concepts of AI to lawyers, deals with key concepts, the capabilities and limitations of AI, and identifies technological challenges which might require legal responses.

This chapter offers a rereading of Amartya Sen’s capability approach (CA) from the perspective of the Andean region that highlights their differences. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the engagement of the CA with indigenous philosophies, and to use the latter’s insights to push the former’s boundaries. In particular, the authors discuss the differences between the relational ontology that underpins the BV framework with the dualistic ontology upon which Sen’s CA is built. While Sen’s ethical considerations in development remain of paramount importance for contemporary thinking and practice, the focus on individual freedom within the CA is embedded within a dualistic ontology that separates humans from nature and individuals from their societies. A consideration of the challenges associated with the BV framework allows the authors to address some of the most contentious areas within the CA literature: those relating to collective capabilities and sustainability issues.

The aim of this chapter is to explore how social choice theory and the capability approach can help in clarifying important ethical dilemmas and issues of injustice that need to be addressed for cities to become sustainable cities. Six types of important injustices are identified, covering both intra- and intergenerational fairness. Some important criticisms of smart cities are considered and important safeguards and policy priorities for smart cities from the social choice and capability approach framings are identified. The main message of this chapter is that the sustainability of cities is an ethical issue and not one of technology or measurement, and it is all about the six types of injustices, with cities needing to tackle all six of them in their quest to become sustainable. Nudging and smart cities can help, but these must be contextualized to prioritize participation and equality. Social choice theory as formulated by Amartya Sen provides important insights to understand and deal with conflicts between the different demands on the freedoms of different individuals.

This chapter provides an overview of the books main issues and how they constitute a key narrative for understanding the links between Amartya Sens social choice theory (SCT) and other elements of his capability approach. It invites its readers to a long interdisciplinary journey, from an acknowledgement of the SCT features in Sen’s work to rich analytical categories that expand the core of SCT towards new forms of social theorizing. More specifically, it reviews the main features of Sen’s SCT and discusses a wide range of issues related to collective choices and individual values, such as those of consensus building, institutional change, identity perceptions, inclusiveness, notions of agency, the role of moral sentiments and emotions in shaping social choice, an ethics of sufficiency versus an ethics of optimal social capability, the influence of psychological aspects on individuals’ choices and the role of social structures in shaping people’s social priorities. It covers a wide range of empirical cases, and advances a proposal for a broader notion of social choice that can be richer, more interdisciplinary and more useful to human development theory and policies.

After evaluating the different elements explaining the power structure, the final chapters of the book are devoted to policy strategies. As an introduction to these, the chapter considers ethical issues: the individual-society opposition, the notion of the common good, the debate concerning the notion of justice (deontological versus consequentialist conceptions, meritocratic versus equalitarian views, equality of starting points versus equality of points of arrival), the different notions of freedom (such as positive versus negative freedom. Rossellis liberal socialism is illustrated, together with Croces criticism. Finally, a distinction is drawn between fanciful and realistic utopias.

Public education is crucial to the health of democracy. Recent educational initiatives in many countries, however, focus narrowly on science and technology, neglecting the arts and humanities. They also focus on internalization of information, rather than on the formation of the student’s critical and imaginative capacities. This chapter argues that such a narrow focus is dangerous for democracy’s future. Drawing on the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, the chapter proposes a three‐part model for the development of young people’s capabilities through education, focusing on critical thinking, world citizenship, and imaginative understanding.

In this chapter, the philosophers Oliver Mueller and Boris Essmann address AI-supported neurotechnology, especially Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCIs) that may in the future supplement and restore functioning in agency-limited individuals or even augment or enhance capacities for natural agency. The authors propose a normative framework for the evaluation of neurotechnological and AI-assisted agency based on ‘cyberbilities’. These are capabilities that emerge from human–machine interactions in which agency is distributed across human and artificial elements. The authors conclude by providing a list of cyberbilities that is meant to support the well-being of individuals.

The social welfare function (SWF) framework includes a well-being measure w(∙), for converting outcomes into vectors (lists) of well-being numbers.These well-being numbers are interpersonally comparable.This chapter discusses the construction of the well-being measure.It supposes that w(∙) operates on individual “histories,” a history being a combination of an attribute bundle a and a preference R.That is w(∙) = w(a, R).This setup is quite general.It encompasses preference-based well-being measures (namely those that assign well-being numbers to histories containing different bundles but the same preference in deference to that preference), as well as non-preference based measures.The chapter covers both, although mainly focusing on the former.Here, two approaches are discussed: the “equivalence approach,” whereby an individual’s well-being hinges on her attributes and her ordinal preference; and the “vNM approach,” which uses lottery preferences rather than ordinal preferences.