Social Analysis and the Capabilities Approach : A Limit to Martha Nussbaum's Universalist Ethics

Postcolonial theorists critique modernist universalisms for legitimating structural power. Responding to these critiques, Martha Nussbaum argues that abandoning universalism leads to ethical relativism. Adapting Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, she has proposed a modified universalism that draws on cross-cultural conversations as a non-ethnocentric basis for universal judgment and intervention. This paper takes as its point of departure Nussbaum's (mis)reading of a critique by Nkiru Nzegwu. Working from that conversational failure, the paper identifies the social analysis Nussbaum deploys as a point of ethnocentric breakdown in her universalist approach