Capabilities, Rights, and Responsibilities: Insights from Catholic Social Teaching

Often referred to as the church’s “best kept secret”, Catholic social teaching (CST) has much that commends it to those employing the capabilities approach to frame and justify proposals to both shape structures of solidarity and organise collective decision making with an emphasis on personal participation. The permanent principles of CST – dignity of the human person, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good – correlate to several key features of the capabilities approach’s development ethical landscape, namely dignity, agency, justice, and flourishing. Specifically, by leveraging the notions of solidarity and subsidiarity in CST, development theorists and practitioners can better articulate the necessary relationship between rights and duties especially as they relate to the expansion of capabilities and the promotion of human flourishing. The notion of reciprocal duties to others understood in terms of the virtue of solidarity while promoting agency and the support needed for personal participation through subsidiarity can be a way to articulate the frontiers of capabilities as they interface with rights. Both rights and capabilities imply and necessitate relationships of justice and the recognition of dignity in others and oneself which can help transform institutions, including the Catholic Church itself.