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One of the strengths of a capability account of wellbeing is that it allows us to theoretically and empirically analyze at a quite practical level why certain things matter to people - such as their housing, their jobs, and their friendships. A capability account of wellbeing is also very well suited to understand the importance of place for wellbeing. Some dimensions of wellbeing are constitutively place-related, such as "feeling at home". Other dimensions of wellbeing are affected by what the places and locations in which we live mean to us. Taken together, we call them "place-based capabilities". Using a capability account of wellbeing allows us to use social scientific research to investigate the role of social, economic, demographic, political, ecological and technological processes on wellbeing. This paper illustrates this by investigating the role of recent technologies in enabling and expanding capabilities. On the one hand, technological change has dramatically expanded those capabilities. On the other hand, the use of those technologies has unintended consequences for other capabilities. The conceptual as well as empirical relationships between (place-based) capabilities and technology is therefore a complex one.

This paper offers a critique of Martha Nussbaum's description of the capability approach, and offers an alternative. I will argue that Nussbaum's characterization of the capability approach is flawed, in two ways. First, she unduly limits the capability to two strands of work, thereby ignoring important other capabilitarian scholarship. Second, she argues that there are five essential elements that all capability theories meet; yet upon closer analysis three of them are not really essential to the capability approach. I also offer an alternative description of the capability approach, which is called the cartwheel view of the capability approach. This view is at the same time radically multidisciplinary yet also contains a foundationally robust core among its various usages, and is therefore much better able to make the case that the capability approach can be developed in a very wide range of more specific normative theories. Finally, the carthwheel view is used to argue against Nussbaum's claim that all capabiliarian political theory needs to be politically liberal.

The capability approach is one of the most recent additions to the landscape of normative theories in ethics and political philosophy. Yet in its present stage of development, the capability approach is not a full-blown normative theory, in contrast to utilitarianism, deontological theories, virtue ethics, or pragmatism. As I will argue in this chapter, at present the core of the capability approach is an account of value, which together with some other (more minor) normative commitments adds up to a general normative framework that can be further developed in a range of more specific and detailed normative theories. The aim of this chapter is both to describe the capability approach, as it has been developed so far, as well as briefly exploring how a capabilitarian ethical theory could look like if we were to develop it in full. So what is the capability approach? In its most general description, the capability approach is a flexible and multi-purpose normative framework, rather than a precise theory of well-being, freedom. At its core are two normative claims: first, that the freedom to achieve well-being is of central moral importance, and second, that freedom to achieve well-being is to be understood in terms of people's valuable capabilities, that is, their real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value. This framework can be used for a range of evaluative exercises, including most prominent the following: (1) the assessment of individual well-being; (2) the evaluation and assessment of social arrangements, including assessments of social and distributive justice; and (3) the design of policies and proposals about social change in society, which is at the core of social ethics. In all these normative endeavors, the capability approach prioritizes (a selection of) peoples' beings and doings and their opportunities to realize those beings and doings, for example their genuine opportunities to be educated, their ability to move around or to enjoy supportive social relationships. This stands in contrast to normative frameworks which endorse other accounts of value, like mental states or which focus on instrumental values (e.g. resources).

In this chapter I ask what the impact a regime-shift from a capitalist welfare state to a property-owning democracy would have on gender justice and on caregivers and dependents. Would property-owning democracy serve the interests of caregivers' and their dependents better and would it be a more gender-just economic system than current forms of capitalism and the different varieties of the welfare state that we currently know?

In contemporary political philosophy, it has recently been proposed that upper limits should be put on individual wealth acquisition. In this article, we discuss the arguments made by canonical writers in the history of economic and political philosophy about ideas that can be considered prototypes of limitarianism. In contemporary discussions, a distinction has been made between intrinsic and non‐intrinsic limitarianism, whereby it has been doubted that, in present‐day pluralistic societies, the former can be justified. We have found proto‐limitarian claims or justifications for limitarianism in four moral domains: moral psychology, moral reasoning, virtue ethics and political morality. While in the present‐day context, the view that there should be an upper limit to wealth may sound much too radical, we show that throughout history, many influential philosophers made limitarian or proto‐limitarian claims, including many intrinsic arguments for wealth limitarianism. We end the article by outlining the implications of those historical insights for systematic contemporary discussions of limitarianism.