Towards a Justice without Frontiers? The Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach and the Limits of Justice

This paper aims to focus our attention on the "capabilities approach", a concept that is promoted by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. This approach is structured as an answer to a set of urgent contemporary polemics and is presented as the philosophical basis for a theory that relates to basic human rights. Nussbaum maintains that respect for such rights is the minimum requirement of, what she interprets as, human dignity. "Human capabilities" are defined as the very competences of humankind, that which we are actually capable of doing. This perspective proposes that when these capabilities are put in the context of dignified human life, the idea of basic social justice is raised.