If some unsheltered indeed homeless destitute Paris street children are understood as nonetheless persons, and as such necessarily embodying at least the potential (the “capacities” in Sen’s usage) for exhibiting certain basic minimum capabilities along the lines that Sen and Nussbaum propose, then among the most essential capabilities they may be said clearly to lack is the individual and communal self-understanding of persons already endowed, whatever their destitution, with an inalienable public sovereign good.

Consequently, if they are to be fi nally effi cacious with respect to social justice,204 any attempts to remedy such an essential lack must start not just from yet another inventory. Th ey must not start just from a list, this time not of the primary social goods these persons lack nor even of the more basic capabilities they are missing. Rather, they must start from the realization of what these persons essentially have yet to realize, their basic capacities. For what so many destitute street children today essentially lack is the capacity for a proper and eff ective self-understanding of themselves precisely as persons.