Distributive Justice + the Capabilities Approach

Cheryl Harris’ Whiteness as Property is a critical argument on racial privilege as a function of property rights. Buried in her final sections on affirmative action, however, is an argument about justice that shifts the lens from corrective to distributive: from asking who sinned to what people are genuinely owed.


Harris says that corrective justice is “the claim to compensation for discrete and 'finished' harm done to minority group members or their ancestors”, while distributive justice is “the claim an individual or group has to the positions or advantages or benefits they would have been awarded under fair conditions” (1781). Under the corrective justice framework, affirmative action seems like burden shifting onto the shoulders of the innocent. Under the distributive justice framework, however, affirmative action seeks to determine the share of society’s goods that black Americans would have secured, if racial subordination was not prevalent. 


I believe this argument works hand in hand with Amartya Sen’s capabilities framework. He insists that formal resources (income, etc), cannot be straightforwardly correlated with real freedom. Instead, he says, we must look at what an individual can be offered to place them at par to access similar opportunities to those around them. Essentially leveling the playing field. Harris makes a similar point when dismantling the 'meritocracy': “Merit criteria are in fact selected in relation to certain ‘merit’ objectives, and those choices are heavily influenced by subjective factors” (1771). The score, just like income in Sen’s framework, could conceal a deeper problem, such as the structural barriers that determine the formal qualifications for genuine access to opportunity. 


Sen warns that when formal resources are treated as measures of well-being, it conceals deeper conversation regarding what actually determines whether such resources produce real freedom. Harris identifies something similar, saying that the existing distribution of goods, produced by “institutionalized white supremacy and economic exploitation” is considered neutral, or “the natural order of things that cannot legitimately be disturbed” (1778). Once whiteness-as-property is naturalized, she says, departure from it can be seen as preferential treatment as opposed to correction. Therefore in both distributive justice and the capabilities approach, we must not assume the baseline is neutral – any framework which assumes neutrality will misdiagnose the problem entirely. 


Harris proposes affirmative action is a tool for producing real equality, as it “[equalizes] treatment by redistributing power and resources in order to rectify inequities and to achieve real equality” (1788). As she argues, affirmative action “creates a property interest in true equal opportunity — opportunity and means that are equalized” (1786). 


Such “true equality opportunity” is fundamental to both Harris and Sen. Distributive justice, properly understood, lies side-by-side with the capabilities framework. 


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