Educating responsible moral agents is a central goal of democratic societies committed to the values of justice, equality, and the promotion of individuals’ well-being. How best to pursue the goal through formal schooling is, however, highly debated in moral education, due to reasonable disagreement on values and how to impart them. This chapter suggests that the core concepts of the capability approach provide an ethical framework which can fruitfully inform moral education. The approach’s core idea of evaluating individual well-being and the justice of society in terms of capability, or the substantive freedom to choose one’s valued life, together with the concept of agency and the importance of rational deliberation, set the ethical foundations for educating morally responsible citizens, who consider and treat other people as moral equals, care for social justice, and value their own and others’ well-being.

This chapter describes different ways to identify outcome measures once the outcomes that matter most are identified. These outcome measures can be used to see if outcomes are improving or not. The chapter also gives an example of how to organize chosen outcome measures using the Capability, Comfort, and Calm framework. Guiding principles for narrowing an outcome measure set to a small set of actionable measures are outlined.

This chapter describes what it means to measure the outcomes that matter most to people and describes the Capability, Comfort, and Calm outcome measurement framework developed by Elizabeth Teisberg and Scott Wallace.This framework orients measurement and improvement efforts around achieving health and the outcomes that matter most to patients. It also helps reframe existing measurement efforts into a framework that facilitates measuring the results of health care. This chapter outlines the following key principles in measuring health outcomes: measure at the individual patient level and measure during the course of care.

One of Florence Nightingale'slegacies was her advocacy for, and establishment of, a formal system of training for nurses. This vocational or apprenticeship model of training rapidly spread, with hospital-based training schools being set up across the country.This chapter introduces you to core elements and considerations in ‘contemporary’ nursing education. We link this to the notion of ‘capability in nursing’ and provide an overview of what you can expect in your degree program, with links to other chapters where these concepts and ideas are explored in more depth. We conclude the chapter with a brief look at some of the resources and strategies that can be used to optimise your learning success.

Chapter 3 analyzes military intervention into Africa by former colonial powers and the European Union. It shows that their supportive and neutral interventions have been much more frequent than hostile interventions. Among these powers, France has remained the most interventionist state in Africa because close ties with Francophone governments have helped to provide successive French leaders with a global status and a mission beyond Europe. Consistent with quantitative and historical treatments, qualitative comparative analysis emphasizes the impact that capabilities and national roles have had on interventions by former colonial metropoles in Africa, while the European Union has intervened into Africa for humanitarian motives. Chapter 3 also demonstrates that supportive and neutral military interventions by former colonial powers into Africa correspond with high levels of mass unrest at home. As a result, this chapter contends that many French and other colonial military interventions failed to produce stability in African polities in part because the military actions were motivated by domestic concerns. Thus, some combination of national role, capabilities, and domestic political pressures help to explain many military interventions by former colonial powers, and none of these conditions seem likely to result in operations that put African populations’ interests at the forefront.

This chapter provides a detailed guide for determining gaps within an organization’s capability and capacity to perform an emergency response.

This chapter provides a strategic view of planning within the context of a comprehensive emergency preparedness program.

How does representative government function when public administration has the authority to reshape democracy? This chapter sets up the problem of value reinforcement as an additional element to the traditional narrative of control and capability for legitimatingpublic administration.

Most Ruskin studies deal with his art theory and economic theory separately. This chapter intends to interpret both discourses in a unified way from the viewpoint of romanticism. While his economic theory is famously summarized in a thesis ‘No wealth but life’ the art theory he worked on can be formalized as a thesis ‘No beauty but life’. Thus we have a unified thesis, ‘Neither wealth nor beauty but life’, which may be called ‘Ruskin’s triangle’. I argue that the concept of life is vital for Ruskin’s unified knowledge. It is identified with its three aspects (capability, composition, and labour) and linked with its six symbolic determinants (admiration, hope, and love; air, water, and earth).

This chapter provides an overview of econometric and statistical methodologies that have been proposed in the literature for operationalizing the capability approach. It covers descriptive as well as modelling approaches, the former focusing on developing a full picture of the well-being situation using many indicators, and the latter going further to determine possible ‘causes’ for the situation, and hence leading to potential actions for improvement. It also highlights how the capability or freedom aspect is modelled using latent variables in the explanatory frameworks. Finally, it mentions some promising directions for future research in this domain and suggests combining the different approaches to obtain an optimal well-being output integrating both the descriptive and explanatory properties and allowing for informed policy decisions.

Social choice is concerned with the selection of an ideal (or social) option, which can be a so-called ‘social state’, or a social ‘utility’, or a social ‘preference’, or a social choice ‘set’, on the basis of individual utilities, or individual utility functions, or individual preferences, or individual choice sets, or individual choice functions. A number of scholars have outlined the limited aspect of the notion of utility, including, notably and pre-eminently, Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum. Although they did not put it in such a strong phrase, the basic idea is to replace the notion of utility by the notion of capability (leaving aside ‘happiness’, a notion which for many is hardly distinguishable from utility). As has been remarked by Mozaffar Qizilbash, the development of the capability approach has been focused on the capability of an individual; and the idea of amalgamating or aggregating individual data is consubstantial with social choice. The purpose of this text is to propose some preliminary ideas regarding the aggregation of individual capabilities.

When Amartya Sen defends his capability approach to well-being, he contrasts it with the utility theory advocated by the classical utilitarians, including John Stuart Mill. Yet a closer examination of the two views reveals that they are much more similar than they appear. Each can be interpreted in either a subjective or an objective way. When both are interpreted subjectively the differences between them are slight, and likewise for the objective interpretations. Finally, whatever differences may remain are less important than they might seem, since the two theories are developed by Sen and Mill for different purposes and, in that sense, are not genuine alternatives.

Sen considers Adam Smith an ally in the illustration of the logic of the capability approach — i.e. to be ‘able to appear in public without shame’ is a cross-cultural, cross-time capability, while the specific forms of consumption that it requires are variable. The chapter problematizes that Smith’s vision of the market and poverty is consistent with Sen’s. Sen uses that paragraph of The Wealth of Nations as an example of Smith’s general attitude towards wealth, commodities and the market, but such attitude is hard to find in Smith’s whole works. In particular, the chapter does not deny the legitimacy for Sen to quote that particular passage of Smith to show an illustrious antecedent of his capabilities approach. It claims that to have a full idea of Smith’s vision on necessities we need to consider Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, and that Smith’s general philosophy of the market is significantly different from Sen’s, as it emerges from the analysis of Smith’s general vision of commodities and luxury, and then enters into his theory of the market. Such an extension claims to contribute to a more general discussion on the connections between Sen’s and Smith’s vision of political economy.

This chapter is concerned with the measurement of an individual’s capability or freedom of choice in the functioning space. We discuss the link between the problem of measuring an individual’s freedom of choice and the problem of how we formulate the notion of such freedom. We present several approaches to the problem of measuring capability and freedom of choice, and discuss the issue of interpersonal comparisons of capability. In the process, we also clarify the concept of capability.

The capability approach gives rise to the question of how capabilities are developed. In this chapter I look at the idea of ‘social patterning’ by which children and adolescents may well develop some capabilities but neglect others. In particular, I argue that individuals typically become acculturated into patterns of affiliation and behaviour, and those patterns can be very fateful for other aspects of their lives. The behaviours and unconscious attitudes that children and adolescents may need to follow in order to fit in with those they most care about can stunt their opportunities to develop other capabilities, or, at least, damage their ability to take advantage of other opportunities. Hence it is critical that capability theorists pay attention to the conditions of capability development.