Teoria parcial de justiça e estrutura política democrática na teoria de Nussbaum

This paper argues that the future of capabilities approach lies on the theoretical development of the democratic political structure. For this purpose, we take into account Martha Nussbaum’s normative model. Firstly, we argue that the capability approach can be divided into two main models: the top down and the bottom up. On the one hand, Nussbaum endorses a top-down model, given that it begins from an abstractive theory of partial justice and then it draws the issue of institutional implementation. On the other hand, Amartya Sen advocates the bottom-up model which starts from the immanent demands of justice from public sphere and then up to normative and abstract questions. In the second part, we present Nussbaum’s partial theory of justice, arguing that it is mainly composed by four issues: (a) the elaboration of the list of capabilities, (b) the process of normative evaluation, (c) arguments for stability, (d) the institutional implementation of a threshold level of capabilities. About this last topic, in the third part, we focus on the function that a conception of the democratic political structure employs on Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. Finally, in the last part, we provide a reformulation of Nussbaum’s threshold level of capabilities (the list) in order to make it more adherent with the democratic political structure.