8 - The Capabilities Approach

Summary

One of the core ideas of non-coherence theory is that human rights standards offline appear at variance with the online image. Human rights standards change in the course of the transposition, where the online image of offline standards may be widely distorted, given the subject, or only exhibit minor variance. Among several social science theories focusing on how values and expectations become relative once one constructs a theory on the basis of legal subject-hood, the capabilities approach seems to have some similarities with non-coherence theory. Two aspects are of main interest here. The first is related to the dependency of normative standards applied to a legal subject upon this subject’s capabilities. And the second concerns the matter of how the element of normative reasonability is constructed. The first aspect is positivist and the second is purely non-positivist. The unclear causal chains between capability, reasonability and subsequent activity are the weakest elements of the capabilities approach.