After looking at how several languages talk about power, my tentative takeaway is that what we often mean by “power” can be described (at least analytically) as two intertwined themes: ability and influence. I cannot speak for all languages, and I do not want to overgeneralize from a small sample. Still, it seems telling that people routinely talk about what can be done, what is possible, what someone is able to do, what others can do to them, and how actions lead to effects—even in contexts where the word power never appears. In English, this shows up not only in the noun ability, but also in the sheer prevalence of can, possible, and the -able suffix (as in "capable," "manageable," "avoidable"). We are constantly mapping the terrain of “what can happen” because we are social beings trying to survive, coordinate, anticipate, protect ourselves, and make sense of each other.
This page is going to zoom in on power as ability, with two caveats. First, I’m separating “ability” from “influence” only to clarify what I mean; in lived reality, they braid together. People act; actions land; effects ripple outward; other people respond; conditions change. Ability and influence are two ways of describing a single moving system. Second, I’m using power as an analytical category, not a substance that people “have” in a simple, wallet-like way. I’m talking about people, their actions, their relationships, their constraints, and the meanings that shape how those actions and constraints are interpreted.
So what are we talking about when we talk about ability? In everyday speech, ability often sounds like an attribute of a person or a body: I can lift a heavy stone. I can run fast. I can understand what you meant. I can remember names. I can calm myself down. This is the “power as ability” register: a focus on capacities—physical, cognitive, emotional, social, spiritual, practical. It’s tempting to treat these capacities as stable properties of an individual. But as soon as you look closely, that stability dissolves. Ability depends on context (sleep, stress, training, injury, time), on environment (tools, ramps, noise, communication access), on social conditions (support, stigma, fear, resources), and on the presence or absence of other people. Even an ability that feels “internal” is often scaffolded by external structures we stop noticing because they are familiar.
This is one reason I want to isolate ability as a lens: our judgments about ability are tightly tied to responsibility, accountability, blame, and the real actions we take in response. Much of our moral life runs on an implicit question: “Could they have done otherwise?” If we assume the answer is yes, we tend to assign responsibility, and often blame. If we assume the answer is no, we tend to soften, to reframe, to problem-solve instead of punish, or at least to redirect our anger. The difficulty is that we rarely pause long enough to ask what “could” actually means in a given case. We treat can as self-explanatory when it is anything but.
A small domestic example makes the point without requiring grand theory. Imagine being woken up very early by a young child who cannot fall back asleep and cannot stay quietly in bed for a long stretch, even after being asked. If I read the situation through a quick moral script—“He can go back to sleep himself; he’s choosing not to”—anger comes easily. If I slow down and ask a more literal question—“Can he, in fact, do something different right now, given his age, his nervous system, his exhaustion, his restlessness, his limited self-regulation?”—the emotional landscape changes. The point isn’t that children are never responsible for anything. The point is that responsibility judgments depend on an accurate model of ability, not a convenient one.
This is where language both helps and misleads. Can is a workhorse word. It compresses a complicated set of conditions into a single syllable. “Can you do this?” might mean: do you have the physical capacity; do you know how; do you have the time; do you have the permission; do you have the emotional bandwidth; are you safe; are you willing; are you allowed; are you socially able to do it without unacceptable consequences? We slide among these meanings fluidly, often without noticing the slide. And once we slide, we may start blaming someone for not doing what they were never able to do in the first place—or excusing what they did intentionally do by pretending it “just happened.”
To make sense of that, I find it useful to talk about intentionality as a dimension of power-as-ability. By intentionality I mean something like deliberateness: the degree to which an action involves choice, awareness, and purposive direction. This is not a binary switch. Human life is full of partial intention, mixed motives, compulsions, habits, social scripts, and automatic responses. But the question still matters, because powerlessness often hides inside what we casually label as ability. Sometimes what looks like “I can” is closer to “my body does” or “my mind does,” without much steering available from the inside.
Breathing is a clean example. If I’m alive, I cannot permanently opt out of breathing just by deciding to. In that sense, breathing is not a “power” I wield; it is a condition of staying alive, a process that happens with or without my consent. And yet breathing can become something I learn to shape: slowing the exhale to calm myself, noticing how my breath changes when I’m angry, using breath as an anchor for attention. When breathing becomes something I can modulate with awareness, it starts to resemble an ability in the ordinary sense—something I can do, not just something that happens. The same human function can sit closer to compulsion at one moment and closer to choice at another. The boundary is not sharp, and that blurriness is exactly why quick judgments are risky.
This also explains a small linguistic oddity: we sometimes call basic functions “power” in poetic or conventional phrases (“the power of sight”), while other functions sound strange in that frame (“the power of breathing” in general, as opposed to breathing in a particular way). Meanwhile, “the power of speech” tends to imply intentional use—persuasion, expression, naming, framing—more than mere vocalization. Language is not a neat taxonomy; it is a living set of shortcuts. It offers hints, but it also creates illusions of clarity. If I take the shortcut too literally, I may treat “ability” as a single, uniform thing, when it is really a layered phenomenon with different degrees of agency, constraint, and powerlessness braided through it.
This is why power as ability is not only an abstract idea for me. It shapes how I interpret people’s actions, how quickly I reach for blame, and what kinds of responses feel justified. If I assume too easily that someone “could have” done something else, I risk turning complexity into accusation. If I assume too easily that someone “couldn’t have,” I risk erasing their agency and excusing harm. The more careful move is to keep asking, in a grounded way: what exactly was possible here, for this person, in this moment, under these conditions—and which parts of what happened were chosen with awareness, and which parts were carried by habit, constraint, fear, limited development, or lack of internal access? I don’t always know the answer. But admitting that I do not know can be more honest—and often more humane—than letting the word can smuggle certainty into my judgments.