The quintessence of poverty: from epistemological difficulties to revisiting Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capabilities theory

Abstract

Considering poverty as a philosophical, political, and epistemological problem, this text examines the difficulties in its definition and measurement. To this end, we will focus on the thought of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, particularly their capability approach, which expands traditional considerations of poverty to include the deprivation of freedoms and fundamental circumstances for a dignified, good, and just life. In the pursuit of visibility and resolution, the phenomenon of poverty faces the dilemmaof representation: while efforts are made to give voice to its victims, there is an increasing risk of normalizing the problem as an inevitability or even instrumentalizing real people as objects of study and statistics. It is the role of political philosophy to recognize the lived experiences of those affected, integrating their narratives into the study of the problem to avoid the abstraction that obscures real suffering. In an attempt to avoid such abstraction, we will complement Sen and Nussbaum’s reflections with Kafka’s parable Before the Law, which illustrates how a legal-political system can, in practice, prevent access to capabilities.