ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the binding axiological core of Capability Approach (CA) is understandably flexible but also unjustifiably too ‘unmetaphysical’. The problems detected in pragmatism and pluralism jettison, eventually, the very focus of CA. The theoretical rigour, empirical fruitfulness and policy relevance of CA generates a valuable dashboard for improving human life. The spirited defence of human dignity in CA is theorized as a terminus ad quem and less so as a terminus a quo. Behind its emphasis on what people have reason to value, CA makes human priorities an ongoing test but evidently a non-negotiable test. Sociologists too succumbed all too easily to the temptation to denigrate totality and, while wisely avoiding relativism, they adopted ‘middle-range’ positions like relationism, pragmatism, ‘connected histories’ or epistemologies of hybridity. Georg W. Hegel, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and Axel Honneth held fast to the belief that such totality was discernible by rational beings prompted by the reconstructive power of reason.
