The Capabilities Approach, as it is often known, has become the standard way of theorizing poverty and other forms of socio-economic injustice. According to this perspective, poverty is ethically objectionable broadly because, when one is poor, one cannot avoid living a life that is objectively bad, and, more specifically, because one lacks the abilities to act and relate in particular ways that one has good reason to seek out. Such an understanding of poverty contrasts with two major rivals. On the one hand, there are those who conceive of poverty or its wrongness in terms of lacking money or primary goods, resources that are generally useful for achieving ends, not ones particularly designed to make a life go well. On the other hand, there are those who agree that poverty is wrong insofar as it involves people being unable to avoid a bad life, but who conceive of such a life subjectively, as a matter of experiencing displeasure or preference dissatisfaction.
