Harnacke Caroline
Ph.D. researcher in philosophy at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.
J Law Med Ethics. 2013 Winter;41(4):768-80, Table of Contents. doi: 10.1111/jlme.12088.
I explore the usefulness of Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach in regard to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The CRPD aims at empowering people with disabilities by granting them a number of civil and political, but also economic, social and cultural rights. Implementing the CRPD will clearly be politically challenging and also very expensive for states. Thus, questions might arise as to whether the requirements set in the CRPD can be justified from an ethical perspective. I will first investigate if Nussbaum's capabilities approach provides support for the rights claimed in the CRPD. Second, I will investigate to what extent Nussbaum's capabilities approach is a useful tool to set priorities among rights in the course of the implementation of the convention. This is an urgent question because seen realistically, it will not be possible to realize all rights at once and thus some rights need to receive greater priority than others. I will argue that the capabilities approach can be regarded as supporting the rights specified in the CRPD, but that it proves unable to guide the implementation process due to an insufficient grounding of the capabilities. Employing the capabilities approach thus leads to only limited results.
我探讨了玛莎·努斯鲍姆的能力方法在《联合国残疾人权利公约》（CRPD）方面的实用性。《联合国残疾人权利公约》旨在通过赋予残疾人一系列公民权利、政治权利以及经济、社会和文化权利来增强他们的权能。对各国而言，实施《联合国残疾人权利公约》显然在政治上具有挑战性，而且成本也非常高昂。因此，可能会产生这样的问题：从伦理角度来看，《联合国残疾人权利公约》所设定的要求是否合理。我将首先研究努斯鲍姆的能力方法是否为《联合国残疾人权利公约》所主张的权利提供支持。其次，我将研究努斯鲍姆的能力方法在多大程度上是在实施该公约过程中确定权利优先次序的有用工具。这是一个紧迫的问题，因为现实地看，不可能同时实现所有权利，因此有些权利需要比其他权利获得更高的优先地位。我将论证，能力方法可以被视为支持《联合国残疾人权利公约》所规定的权利，但由于能力的基础不足，它无法指导实施过程。因此，采用能力方法只能产生有限的结果。
