In June 2001, I had the privilege of travelling to Russia. I went as a tourist - to see St Petersburg, the Hermitage, Moscow, and the beautiful church at Kizhi. I found Russia, its architecture, and its people impressive. In pre-communist days, every major public event - the birth or death of a ruler, victory or loss in battle- was commemorated by the building of another church. (Coming from the United States, with its tradition of separation of church and state, this amalgamation of church and state is difficult for me to imagine.) The churches are stunningly beautiful. It is to the credit of the Russian people that they rebuilding so many of their historic churches and cathedrals that were destroyed during the Communist era and by the bombing and looting that Russia sustained in the second world war. The churches are truly unique and unforgettable.

Unforgettable, too, sadly, is another sight that is not unique to Russia: old women in threadbare clothes begging on the streets. Homelessness and extreme poverty are not rarities in our world. They are all too common. In almost any major city in the world today, one can see old women and men begging on the streets, homeless and hungry, starving not just for food but for care and compassion. In Russia, the devaluation of the rouble a few years ago took a particularly hard toll on the elderly who were counting on their savings for their old age when they could no longer work. Many had worked hard and diligently all their lives and had saved and planned carefully. The devaluation of the rouble reduced them to extreme poverty and to the indignity of begging for their daily bread.

(I had taken some US dollars with me, and I gave to a number of these old women. On one occasion I put a single dollar in the woman's hand. She blessed me with a radiant, toothless smile. I hope that my dollar fed her for several days, but I fear what the future holds for her, as I fear what it holds for the homeless on the streets of my own town in the United States.)

There seems to me something so intuitively and obviously unjust and wrong about this picture. How could it possibly be right for an old woman, who has most likely worked hard all her life and saved her roubles (or her American dollars or her French francs or German marks or Greek drachmas) for her old age to be unable to support herself and to be in a position where she must beg for her daily food? The injustices seem to exist on two levels - on the real, material, physical level of her need for food and shelter, and on the symbolic level of her need for dignity and respect. The Old Testament tells us that God wills manna from heaven to meet our daily needs. The New Testament tells us that Jesus wills for us not just our minimal daily needs, but fullness of life. As one early feminist song put it, "give us bread, but give us roses" - food for our bodies and food for our spirits. She is deserving of bread to stave off the hunger. But she is also deserving of the respect due to those who have lived a long life and worked hard and contributed to their society.

The failing economies - and the unjust practices - of so many countries (including my own, I am sorry to say) leave many old women and men today without even basic sustenance, much less respect and fullness of life. Surely justice requires that after a life of hard work, one should be able to live comfortably, maybe even fully, freely, without fear or extreme want, without the indignity of begging.

This deep conviction about what justice requires comes for me directly out of my Christian faith. From the early church fathers to the reformers to later emendations on the church, the founding visionaries of the Christian churches have always been clear that poverty is a sign of injustice. The early church fathers were virtually unanimous in claiming that God made all things for all. As Clement of Alexandria put it, that "it is absurd that one man live in luxury when there are so many who labour in poverty." Giving to the poor, then, was not simple charity but justice: "...if you wish to give to the poor, this mercy is justice," claimed Ambrose. Later thinkers such as John Wesley were also clear about the centrality of economic justice to the Christian agenda. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, declared Wesley; hence, we "are not the proprietors of any thing... [but] only a steward of what another entrusts [us] with...." God entrusts us with economic goods "to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and... to relieve the wants of all mankind." For Wesley, it was the duty of all Christians to bring about justice for the poor. Following this long and venerable tradition, as a Christian I cannot help but see injustice when old women are begging on the streets. My intuition is that it is wrong, and my instinct is to try and fix it.

But here I encounter an ethical dilemma. We live in a pluralistic age. Is there a way to establish standards for justice across nations and peoples without in some way being disrespectful of others? It is perhaps especially risky for someone from the dominant and privileged "first world" to talk about injustices around the world. It smacks of cultural hegemony. It threatens to repeat the cultural or religious imperialism that has so often plagued past history.

Indeed, a storm of controversy has arisen in contemporary feminism over the question of universal standards. Susan Moller Okin, a well-known feminist philosopher, has argued that cultural practices around the world often have a severe and deleterious effect for women and girls. In many cases, the preservation of tradition is synonymous with the servitude of women. This presents feminists with a dilemma, suggests Okin: because feminists believe that women should not be disadvantaged because of their sex, feminists cannot simply accept cultural practices that do in fact disadvantage women. Hence, Okin sees a potential clash between "multiculturalism" (understood as respect for cultural practices or for sub-groups and their traditions) and the claims of feminism. Feminism pushes in the direction of universal norms, but these will sometimes clash with the acceptance of cultural practices.

Many of Okin's specific claims and interpretations of traditions have been criticized (see the respondents in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?) Nonetheless, many critics acknowledge the basic tension to which Okin points. A firm commitment to feminism or to "liberal" values such as freedom of choice and opportunity does mean that the one so committed cannot simply accept any and all cultural practices or institutional arrangements. As Robert Post puts it, Okin's primary claim of the basic tension between feminism and multiculturalism seems "unambiguously correct".

This same tension will exist for those of us who are not only feminist but Christian and who hold a particular view of justice. My own understanding of justice, articulated some years ago in Justice in An Unjust World, is that justice requires what is usually called a "preferential option for the poor". Where there is systemic poverty or a large gap between rich and poor, there is a presumption of injustice. Such injustices need to be redressed: systems must be replaced with more just practices and institutions. This strong normative claim puts me in a position parallel to Okin's: how can I be respectful of other peoples and cultures with their distinct practices, and at the same time argue that some institutions and practices are better than others? Does holding to a normative view of what justice requires mean that I fail to respect peoples and cultures? If I am to respect others, must I accept a kind of relativism with regard to ethical judgments that undermines my clear Christian convictions about justice?

Those of us who are struggling with such questions have turned with interest to the work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum. By religious affiliation, Nussbaum is a Reform Jew. By philosophical commitment, she is a Neo-Aristotelian. She has had extensive experience living and working in India as well as in the United States. Hence, her philosophy is developed out of a wide range of sources and experiences. Nussbaum argues that it is possible, even in such a pluralistic world as ours, to find universal norms that serve the purpose of providing a standard for measuring the minimum requirements of justice. Nussbaum acknowledges the need for respect for cultural traditions. But she notes that a commitment to respecting people's choices and cultures is not incompatible with an endorsement of universal values. (Indeed, we might note that the very requirement to respect choices may be seen as one such universal value!) While diversity is at root a good thing, this does not mean that all choices are equally worthy. We should follow "the best ideas", she argues, not simply the ideas that are prominent in a given local culture.

But how do we achieve both a respect for local cultures and a set of universal norms to guide international policy and national governments? Drawing on the work of John Rawls, Nussbaum argues that people should be free to form their own conceptions of the good life, so long as certain basic liberties, rights, and capabilities are ensured. That is, different religious and cultural groups may have their own notions of what constitutes a fully good life, but all can agree on a kind of minimum that is needed for political purposes in order to live decently in society. Local cultures will be able to develop and maintain their cultural identities, but they will do so within a framework of basic liberties or capabilities undergirded by social arrangements and political institutions. These basic liberties or capabilities are assumed to reflect a kind of "overlapping consensus". They are norms developed not simply out of Western philosophical or religious tradition, but out of attending to voices of protest from around the world. In fact, Nussbaum proposes that "a remarkable degree of agreement has been found across cultures concerning fundamental rights for women." A list of central elements of "truly human functioning" that has broad cross-cultural consensus thus provides a framework for measuring the quality of life in different societies and for setting a threshold of what justice would require.

Nussbaum frames these minimal elements in the language of capabilities rather than rights, liberties, or functionings. The capabilities approach asks, concretely, what people are able to do and to be. Not all people will choose to develop all their capabilities: women who are able to run for public office may choose to stay home and raise children, for example. This is why it is important to measure capability rather than actual functioning.

The capabilities to which Nussbaum points cover a wide range of basic issues of living. Are people able to have control over access to their bodies? Are they able to make a life plan and to control their environment sufficiently to follow through on that plan? Are they able to form friendships and attachments? Can they seek employment without discrimination, and find work that is not just menial but meaningful? Are they provided the social supports for a life of good health (recognizing that some good health is a matter of luck or of genetics but that much depends on food, shelter, and other goods that can be socially manipulated)? Are they able to participate in political choices that govern their lives? Are they able to hold property? Are they free from unwarranted search and seizure? Are they able to be treated as beings of worth? Are they able to be educated, to produce works that are self-expressive, to express opinions freely? Are they able to play? These are the kinds of "capabilities" that Nussbaum believes are universally affirmed and might provide the basis for a minimal standard of justice to determine what societies and the international order owe to each person.

These capabilities have an "internal" aspect, in that they depend to some extent both on the physical state of the person and on his/her personal development. For example, some people suffer from severe depression that may have a genetic base, and may not be able to laugh or play because of their depression. Others fail to exercise even when they have the capability to do so, and thus may contribute to their own depression. In both such case, "capabilities" are limited by personal circumstances. What concerns Nussbaum as a matter of justice, however, is neither the physical substratum nor the personal mistakes and choices that limit development, but the external conditions that are under some social control and that affect the development of capabilities. External conditions such as lack of employment opportunities can contribute to depression and hence lack of ability to play or enjoy recreation; these are the sorts of matters that rightly fall under the purview of a concern for basic justice. Where political structures fail to provide basic education, where they fail to ensure meaningful work opportunities, where they fail to protect rights to bodily integrity or to ownership of property (women in many countries cannot by law own property), there we have reason to say that justice has not been done. Hence, the capabilities list does not provide an absolute rule, but gives an indication of when basic justice is present and when it is absent.

As Nussbaum herself acknowledges, the "capabilities" approach to establishing a minimum set of requirements for political justice is a "good idea" but one that will not be implemented unless nations embrace it. While capabilities might provide a "set of goals for cooperative international action," the adoption and implementation of this approach is a long ways off. Nonetheless, the growing interest in her theory among religious and philosophical ethicists suggests that she may have found a beginning point for further dialogue on justice. Minimally, she may be able to provide a set of shared basics on which people around the world are largely in agreement, thus avoiding the problems of imperialism that threaten to undermine cross-cultural judgments about justice. The fact that Nussbaum uses the language of "capabilities" rather than "rights" will keep her approach from becoming entangled in the arguments about whether "rights" are too Western a concept to be useful elsewhere. The fact that her categories of capabilities are drawn already from an international arena will also help to keep those categories more truly universal. For churches looking for a way to translate basic theological convictions about what it means to be made in the image of God into language that is concretely useful in establishing cross-cultural notions of justice, Nussbaum's theory offers some helpful possibilities.

This is not to say that it does everything necessary. For example, those of us in Reformed church tradition hold clearly and carefully to notions of sin. As a Neo-Aristotelian, Nussbaum puts a lot of trust in human reason and its ability to discern what is right. Those of us from reformed church tradition might challenge whether our reason is sufficient to discern the basic "capabilities", or whether we are given by faith an alternative vision of those capabilities. For example, Nussbaum argues for "affiliation" and "friendship" as key capabilities. We would probably not disagree with her on this, but we might want to extend each of these, holding out "compassion" and even "sacrifice for the sake of others" as the truly human expression of these capabilities.

Similarly, those of us who believe that humans are created good but are living in "sin" may also not be as sanguine as Nussbaum is with regard to the role of political and other institutions. Nussbaum offers a "political" conception of justice, arguing that there cannot be one standard of justice for all people, but only a sense of those capabilities that must be provided for on a political, institutional level. It was none other than the great American thinker Reinhold Niebuhr who cautioned us about the immorality of groups and institutions. Niebuhr's insight has been carried forward in liberation theology's emphasis on the sinfulness of systems and institutions. Where Nussbaum appears rather sanguine about political structures, therefore, those of us from Reformed tradition may wish to be a bit more sceptical, operating out of a "hermeneutic of suspicion" toward institutions and structures that claim to be doing justice. For example, the old women who lost their life savings in the devaluation of the ruble are the victims of entire international systems of economic restructuring.

Finally, those of us who come out of religious tradition will acknowledge that no system based on political liberalism alone will ever offer true "fullness" of life. Political justice can offer the minimum of capabilities for all people, and this is good. But the minimum is not yet the fullness of life that we are offered in the gift of Jesus Christ. It takes more than systems and structures to ensure that all people have a chance at that fullness of life. There is work to be done!

Karen Lebacqz is professor of Christian ethics in the Pacific School of Religion. She delivered this paper to a meeting of the Warc executive committee in Holland, Michigan, in 2001