Human Capabilities and Pandemics

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the course of nations, and threatens to erase significant achievements in development. These achievements have been partially motivated by the Capabilities Approach. To stem the widening and entrenchment of inequalities as so happens after epidemics and pandemics reflected in history, policy makers must understand and apply the CA to the COVID-19 response. Three aspects of the CA, including its critique of dominant paradigms and policies affecting human wellbeing, the conception of wellbeing as capabilities, and normative argument for every human being's equal moral claims to capabilities are discussed in relation to the spread of COVID-19 and the spectrum of social responses.