 We should note that Nussbaum’s attempt to define a determinate list of key or basic capabilities like the above is controversial. Critics object that the approach is too rooted in a theorist’s specific vision of what is valuable in a human life, and that it may therefore be not sensitive enough to reasonable differences of view (for discussion, see Robeyns 2005, 2006). Similar approaches to Nussbaum’s, which employ the notion of “human needs”, have similarly controversial elements (see especially Doyal and Gough  1991).[1]  But some disagreement of this kind seems unavoidable when we try to specify a standard for judging whether people enjoy a “minimally decent life”. Along with the problem of limit-setting, this creates a potential problem of political legitimacy in the specification and enactment of the social minimum to which we shall return below (see section  3.3).  An important challenge in practice is to steer a course between an overly prescriptive listing of desirable capabilities by, say, academic philosophers and an overly subjective listing that might be prone to problems such as adaptive preferences (for helpful discussions, see Robeyns 2005, 2006, Wolff and De-Shalit 2007, and Claassen 2020).