Response to Walsh- George Ashford

 Hi Walsh, I appreciated this elucidation of the capabilities framework, and I want to answer your question about the 'subject change' challenge to the constructivist view as well as drill down on the idea of capabilities and its relationship to Taiwo's understanding of freedom, equality, and domination.

Taiwo presents the 'changing the subject' challenge to the constructivist view mostly in response to anticipated objections from actual reparations advocates who do think of their work as addressing a particular wrong that was done to their community. I think the reason it appears somewhat frail at this stage in the book is that he has already done such a good job of showing how these particular wrongs are all just manifestations of a general wrong, that of global racial empire.

As for capabilities, this was definitely the most interesting part of these chapters for me, and I share your affinity for the concept as Taiwo describes it. After the section you quote, Taiwo goes on to describe the kinds of capabilities he wants his worldmaking project to promote, which is what he believes social justice to be. He builds off of Anderson's idea of equal standing through promotion of capabilities along the key dimensions of "biological existence, economic power, and political agency" extending these notions beyond the artificial limitation of states (102). At the end of Chapter 3, he describes the resulting order as one "thoroughly structured by non-domination."

This raised the same alarm bells for me that Marx did, and that I wrote about for the last tutorial. Namely, a focus on 'democratic equality' deals only on the forms of domination that people impose on each other, and not those imposed on all of us by the physical world. Consideration of the latter requires a focus on *creating* capabilities, not just *distributing* them. Perhaps this is not an oversight, and Taiwo merely views the creation of capabilities as a separate question from that of 'justice' per se, leaving areas where the goal of capability creation and just capability distribution come into conflict  outside the scope of the book. However, when he talks of 'worldbuilding' the lack of even a reference to this problem certainly feels like an omission. For instance, he claims that this new world must be "fundamentally incompatible with the one we are in now," (98). I would argue that there are many things about the world order (namely the allocative role of markets) that a recognition of the need for capability creation requires us to preserve.

The disability example you brought up here is a great illustration of this. Increasing the capabilities of disabled people has far more to do with technological development than just distribution. Taiwo starts to acknowledge this with the eyeglasses example, but then refutes it , saying that "the same is not true for every biological difference" and referring to the example of someone unable to use their legs (92). How many physical or biological constraints have humans said this of only to be proven wrong just decades later? Indeed, neurologists and bio technicians are making progress towards a cure for paraparesis, which could conceivably one day go the way of near-sightedness. Of course, we can and should do more to improve accessibility rooted in current technology (e.g. wheelchairs), as well as improve distribution of that technology, but it is undeniable that the more technology develops, the easier this becomes. Moreover, what about addressing issues unrelated to physical or biological *difference*, but rather deriving from pure physical scarcity? We might have enough resources right now to feed and house everyone on the planet through a purely distributive approach, but what about house them comfortably, feed them well, allow everyone the ability to take vacations without risking either of those two things, etc.? That would require us to increase our aggregate capabilities, not just redistribute them.

All this is to say that I think Taiwo, like Marx, over-relies on the idea that our limitations are first and foremost "social limitations.," (92). Overcoming social limitations matters a lot, as the fact of near-sightedness's continued deleterious impacts in the Global South shows, but it must be weighed alongside overcoming physical limitations, as the fact of its *lack* of impact in the Global North shows. Imagine if the primary response to near-sightedness was to just make all signs much larger, a distributive approach tackling society's privileging of 20/20 vision, rather than to make eyeglasses as cheap as possible to produce. I think that ignoring the power of the latter, technological solution, and the role that markets have in driving it, risks a world where capabilities are justly distributed but not abundant. I worry that Taiwo's primary concern with domination, and not a broader concept of well-being, prompts him to make this mistake.