Opportunity Design, Human action, and Justice: towards a more coherent view of vulnerable Citizenship

Abstract

The thesis defended in this essay is that ethical deliberation on balancing between different individual claims for opportunity is not only a question of resource distribution and barrier deconstruction, but a question of how we construct opportunity design through the validation of activity itself. This article focuses on the relation between capability, fair opportunity, and normative views of activity in Nussbaum’s, Daniels’ and Ricoeur’s ethics. Drawing out main theses and comparing them, I show how different notions of just distribution of activity meet, overlap and interfere so that it is possible to extend discourse on the relation between opportunity and vulnerable citizenship; citizenship being thought of in analogy to how disability occurs through person’s lifespan. Ricoeur presents a view which integrates accounts of fair opportunity and capability into an expanded framework of justice.