Expanding Nussbaum’s Eighth Capability Using African Environmental Ethics

Abstract

This chapter looks at Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and finds ways that it can benefit from engaging with African environmental ethics. Nussbaum’s approach, which has a growing influence on human wellbeing discourse, lists ten capabilities that she claims all governments must make available to their people at a threshold level (at least) in order for them to lead flourishing lives. Among them, the capability at number eight termed “other species”, refers to the ability to live with concern for and in relation to the world of nature. Nussbaum does not go into much further detail regarding this capability, and so I compare and contrast three ways in which this eighth capability can be conceived; an anthropocentric, an ecocentric and a traditional African environmental way. I find that of the three, African environmental ethics offers the most satisfactory way in terms of its theoretical and practical implications. This view entails acknowledging our situatedness within a community of all living things, and respects the consequent call for harmonious relations. This chapter delivers an exposition of an under-explored capability on Nussbaum’s list and a defence of the advantages that African environmental ethics affords in this regard.