As for the practical contribution, CA has been instrumental in redirecting attention towards a normative stance of economic behaviour. People are entitled to the experience of a 20 good life and freedom should make their most desirable aim a reality. If freedom is what development advances (Sen 1999, 3), one should focus on this universal objective rather than on a list of specially chosen instruments of economic policy. The focus is operationalized by the concept of individual functionings, which is actual beings and doings ... one has reason to value (Staveren 2008). This intellectual revision has eventually proved to be of great practical importance. Notable CA-based initiatives, such as the launch of the Human Development Index in 1990, as well as the formulation of international development goals (UN-DESA 2016), serve as a benchmark to assess the wellbeing of a country beyond the goal of economic growth alone

Whereas the CA has made a convincing case for redressing reductionism (Nussbaum 1993, Natarajan 2014), it has not been though equally successful in establishing a theoretical framework within which values can coexist with economic analysis. Even its adherents acknowledge that the normative decision, say, about the minimum threshold for each capability, is left to political communities themselves (Staveren 2008; see also Wilkinson 2022). Scanlon observes that the CA suffers from an embarrassing richness of possibilities and notes that a particular system of values can be expected to yield different outcomes in different social settings, since the activities and pursuits which are important to individual lives will vary from society to society. (Scanlon 1993) The third approach to the value debate apparently surmounts the shortcomings of the CA,

It originates in Veblens quest for a genetic account of an unfolding process (Veblen 1901) which places man at the seat of a process of living (Veblen 1898). The CA stresses the goal of comprehensive outcome as necessary of decisionmaking and makes assumptions about what could make its multivariate choice valuable to a good 21 life (Nussbaum 2011, Dalziel et al. 2018). Veblen also deals with the conditions of a good life or welfare (Veblen 1904, Ch. 7), only that he does not make assumptions but looks at the historically determined conditions that explain the structure and function of economic society as to why it was created (Veblen 1901). A keen observer and critic of the German Historical School, Veblen transforms their method of narration along Darwinisms evolutionist line into a method of introspection of social reality as it historically evolved. Thus, in his genetic account of liberty, it is not the

He qualifies the pure system of natural liberty a (divinely instituted) order of nature, the keynote of which is an inalienable freedom and equality of the individual (Veblen 1904, 338, n. 18) with exemptions in favor of property held by certain privileged persons, and especially by certain sacred corporations (Veblen 1904, 69). The perpetual presence of exemptions did not in effect annihilate an open field of free competition in the days of the small industry and petty trade (Veblen 1904, 271). At that stage of social organization, the nature of imperfections did not traverse the prescriptive rights of property in an economic system dominated by matters of personal efficiency rather than comprehensively organized processes of an impersonal character (Veblen 1904, 272). With the