In this chapter, the author defends the capabilities approach against Pogge's critique, and explains why it is superior to its main rivals, subjective and resourcist approaches. Theories of distributive justice must specify two things: a metric and a rule. The metric characterizes the type of good subject to demands of distributive justice. The rule specifies how that good should be distributed. The fundamental difference between capability theorists and resource theorists lies rather in the degree to which their principles of justice are sensitive to internal individual differences, and environmental features and social norms that interact with these differences. Capabilities and resource theorists agree that principles of justice aim to secure persons' effective access to the means they need to satisfy their objective interests, as defined in terms of needed functionings. The capabilities approach is capable of supplying a public criterion of justice suitable for the basic structure of society.