Chapter 6 moves from combatting capability shortfalls to expanding people’s capability development through capability gains. In addition to promoting people’s basic capabilities for what they can be and do, we can also promote their potential enhanced capabilities when societies are democratic and reduce social inequality. I argue this calls for envisioning the economy as a capability generation process rather than as income generation process (or preference satisfaction process) as the mainstream sees it. I address the relationship between democracy and capabilities, explain democracy in the social contract tradition as a system of public reason, discuss the nature of collective capabilities in terms of the idea of people forming collective intentions, and argue that this all entails seeing democratic societies as “open political systems” that allow for constant innovation and evolution in how diverse kinds of people settle upon and consent to rules that govern the decision-making practices they find functional to living together. Finally, I close by arguing that this is all inconsistent with the mainstream conception of private subjectivity. I return to the idea of a person’s self-narratives as a personal identity capability and suggest understanding it requires we rethink how subjectivity is socially embodied and socially situated – a topic taken up in Part III.

Capability theorists disagree on how to determine, for normative purposes, which capabilities are to be treated as basic, with Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen taking opposite views. This chapter will scrutinize this list debate. It has two aims. First, it argues that some distinction between basic and non-basic capabilities is an inherent commitment of capability theories, but that there are many more options for responding to the capability-selection problem than a procedure of democratic deliberation (Sen) or a philosophical criterion of neo-Aristotelian flourishing (Nussbaum). A whole range of possible procedures and philosophical criteria could be combined with the capability metric. Second, it responds to a forceful challenge raised by Ian Carter, who argues that capability theorists should not endorse the selection of specific capabilities as basic (either democratically or philosophically) at all. In his view, this will always have paternalistic implications; instead he proposes that the maximization of ‘capability as such’ should be the goal. In response, I distinguish well-being-based and autonomy-based capability theories, and argue that while Carter’s challenge is valid against the former, it fails against the latter.