Habilitation, Health, and Agency: A Framework for Basic Justice

Lawrence C. Becker introduces an unconventional set of background ideas for future philosophical work on normative theories of basic justice. The organizing concept is habilitation -- the process of equipping a person or thing with functional abilities or capacities. The specific proposals drawn from the concept of habilitation are independent of any particular set of distributive principles. The result is a framework for theory that includes a metric for the pursuit of basic justice, but not a normative theory of it.