Abstract Summary
Recommender systems (RS) increasingly mediate access to crucial life spheres like employment and education, yet most remain optimized for short-term engagement rather than long-term user empowerment. While recent trustworthy RS research has addressed fairness, diversity, andtransparency, these efforts remain fragmented, often targeting specific pipeline stages in isolation and lacking a unifying framework to realize their aggregated potential. This paper argues that the Capability Approach (CA) provides this necessary unifying framework, offering normative common ground to guide concrete interventions. Our contribution is twofold. First, we introduce the first formal mapping between RS components and CA constructs, addressing common critiques of the CA as being too abstrac tfor technical operationalization. This mapping reveals key structural and recursive gaps that systematically constrainusers' substantive freedoms in mainstream RS. Second, we complement this theoretical analysis with actionable design and evaluation implications, such as why capability-aware evaluation must move beyond engagement metrics and how participatory methods are essential to re-orient RS pipelines. We conclude by outlining a research agenda that acknowledges practical implementation challenges and calls for interdisciplinary interventions to pursue genuine user empowerment.
