Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reaching beyond the particular and the immediate to the general and the timeless. Yet such theories, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday (...) life, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation. The idea of the social contract--especially as developed in the work of John Rawls--is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition. But as Nussbaum demonstrates, even Rawls's theory, suggesting a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals, cannot address questions of social justice posed by unequal parties. How, for instance, can we extend the equal rights of citizenship--education, health care, political rights and liberties--to those with physical and mental disabilities? How can we extend justice and dignified life conditions to all citizens of the world? And how, finally, can we bring our treatment of nonhuman animals into our notions of social justice? Exploring the limitations of the social contract in these three areas, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of capabilities. She helps us to think more clearly about the purposes of political cooperation and the nature of political principles--and to look to a future of greater justice for all. (shrink)

Growing out of Nussbaum's years of work with an international development agency connected with the United Nations, this collection charts a feminism that is deeply concerned with the urgent needs of women who live in hunger and illiteracy, or under unequal legal systems. Offering an internationalism informed by development economics and empirical detail, many essays take their start from the experiences of women in developing countries. Nussbaum argues for a universal account of human capacity and need, while emphasizing (...) the essential role of knowledge of local circumstance. Further chapters take on the pursuit of social justice in the sexual sphere, exploring the issue of equal rights for lesbians and gay men. (shrink)

Readers of Sex and Social Justice will find in its essays fresh insights and powerful arguments on such varied topics as pornography, prostitution, gay rights, the tensions between feminist imperatives and respect for cultural and religious differences, the importance to feminism of considering how desires adjust to socially formed expectations, the relationship between narrative, mercy and justice, Kenneth Dover’s memoirs, and Richard Posner’s economic and evolutionary account of sexual behaviour. In her discussions of these highly charged topics, Nussbaum (...) never gives in to the temptation of uncomprehending moral condemnation, but instead approaches the issues with an enviable command of the facts, a sympathetic understanding, and a will to uncover and reason through the best arguments on all sides. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach is an ambitious work of political philosophy that aims to guide constitutional design and social policy. Its four chapters present the capabilities approach in detail, argue for its universal status, and apply it to issues in religion and the family. (shrink)

Not only does a shared expertise in classical philosophy and literature inform the works of Martha Nussbaum and Bernard Williams, each has also written and spoken on contemporary social and political issues. Given such ranges of reference, it is not surprising that their two recent books, Frontiers of Justice, a treatise, and In the Beginning Was the Deed, selected essays, confidently take up fundamental political questions. Yet these books differ in their intentions, organising structures, and discursive strategies, (...) and they have little overlap in topics. What then may be hoped from their juxtaposition? That their moral-political perspectives are strongly anti-utilitarian, somewhat anti-Kantian, and self-professedly liberal are unpromising commonplaces. Their juxtaposition can point, I think, toward an alternative to liberalism that is not anti-liberal. Williams considered himself a ‘critical liberal’. But among his contributions to ‘processes of extension’ of liberalism is enlargement of the category of moral agency to some groups in political contexts. And Nussbaum wants to ‘extend the Rawlsian approach’ to liberalism so as to remain a ‘type of political liberal’. But one of her most important conclusions is that it is ‘easy to extend’ justice as political entitlements to nonhumans. Williams 's move toward nonperson moral agents and Nussbaum's toward nonhuman moral patients do not merely ‘extend’ liberalism but, if taken together, leverage a departure beyond it into postliberalism. (shrink)

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equippedwith a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world (...) of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government,along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. Athird connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in thistroubled domain.The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. Thecumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quitesane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin aconversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature. (shrink)

Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, by Martha Nussbaum, Harvard University Press, 2006. How should we measure human development? The most popular method used to be to focus on wealth and income, as when international development agencies rank countries according to their per capita gross domestic product. Critics, however, have long noted shortcomings with this approach. Consider for example a wealthy person in a wheelchair: her problem is not a financial one, but a lack of access (...) to public spaces. Even if she were to hire porters to carry her in and out of stores and libraries, that would not really address her situation. There is a basic sense of dignity and self-respect that comes with being able to move around on one’s own. Even for a disabled millionaire, that will only be possible when public buildings are wheelchair accessible. To fully grasp what the handicapped need, we have to look beyond purely economic measures of well-being, and take into account the actual capabilities people can exercise in their daily lives. The example of the well-off person in a wheelchair illustrates what Martha Nussbaum calls the capabilities approach to human development. It was first pioneered in economics by Amartya Sen (who came up with the wheelchair example), and Nussbaum has for years been associated with a more philosophical variation, which uses the idea of capabilities to outline basic political principles. In Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership Nussbaum takes this project even further, and applies the capabilities approach to issues of justice involving not only the disabled and the global poor, but animals as well.Yet for a philosophy called the capabilities approach, it is surprising how little theoretical work capabilities do in Nussbaum’s overall account. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum has powerfully argued in Frontiers ofJustice and elsewhere that John Rawls’s sort of social-contract theory cannot usefully be deployed to deal with issues pertaining to justice for the disabled. To counter this claim, this article deploys Rawls’s sort of social-contract theory in order to deal with issues pertaining to justice for the disabled—or, since, as Nussbaum stresses, we all have some degree of disability—for the severely disabled. In this way, rather than questioning one by (...) one Nussbaum’s interpretive claims about Rawls’s view, one can simply see how the Rawlsian framework can work in application to this issue. Following Rawls’s lead, the paper utilizes the idealized “initial choice situation” as an analytic and comparative device for examining alternative principles of justice, developing three different interpretations of the initial choice situation that each correspond to a different set of principles that apply to people of all levels of disability. One of these sets of principles is a simple extension of Rawls’s, one is very close to what Nussbaum herself recommends, and the third is a kind of hybrid. In this way, it is shown not only that Rawls’s social-contract device can usefully be applied to these issues, but also that it is helpful for exploring the deep commitments underlying each of these competing sets of principles. (shrink)

Amartya Sen has made a major contribution to the theory of social justice, and of gender justice, by arguing that capabilities are the relevant space of comparison when justice-related issues are considered. This article supports Sen's idea, arguing that capabilities supply guidance superior to that of utility and resources (the view's familiar opponents), but also to that of the social contract tradition, and at least some accounts of human rights. But I argue that capabilities can help us (...) to construct a normative conception of social justice, with critical potential for gender issues, only if we specify a definite set of capabilities as the most important ones to protect. Sen's "perspective of freedom" is too vague. Some freedoms limit others; some freedoms are important, some trivial, some good, and some positively bad. Before the approach can offer a valuable normative gender perspective, we must make commitments about substance. (shrink)

Using the bench trial of Colorado’s Amendment 2 as an example, this article focuses on the more general question of expert testimony in moral philosophy. It argues that there is indeed expertise in moral philosophy but argues against admitting such expert testimony in cases dealing with what John Rawls terms “constitutional essentials” and ‘matters of basic justice.” Developing the idea of public reason inherent in the Rawlsian concept of political liberalism, the article argues that philosophers can and should speak (...) out on public issues, if they do so with due respect for certain restrictions, but that they should not serve as expert witnesses on core constitutional questions, since doing so suggests that they claim a type of authority that would require fellow citizens to defer to their views. Such claims to authority in basic ethical matters threaten the mutual respect for divergent comprehensive doctrines that lies at the core of political liberalism. Philosophers have a duty to serve the public good, and they perform this service in fruitful ways. But they should refuse a public role that appears incompatible with equal respect for the committed ethical searching of their fellow citizens. (shrink)

Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law.Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated (...) in troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies "magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it." She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls "primitive shame," a shame "at the very fact of human imperfection," and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments.Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Available for the first time in paperback, this volume contains text with translation of De Motu Animalium, Aristotle's attempt to lay the groundwork for a general theory of the explanation of animal activity, along with commentary and interpretive essays on the work.

The cosmopolitan tradition begins with Diogenes, who claimed as his identity "citizen of the world." Martha Nussbaum traces the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient times to the present, weighing its limitations as well as merits. Using the capabilities approach, Nussbaum seeks to integrate the "noble but flawed" vision of world citizenship with cosmopolitanism's concern with moral and political justice for all.--.

Martha Nussbuam is one of the most prolific and original philosophers working today. Influenced by ancient philosophy, she has written on the relationship between fiction, the emotions and moral reasoning. With Amartya Sen she developed the capabilities approach to human well-being, which helped shape the UN’s Human Development Index. She is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

Aristotle's philosophy of mind has recently attracted renewed attention and respect from philosophers. This volume brings together outstanding new essays on De Anima by a distinguished international group of contributors including, in this paperback efdition, a new essay by Myles Burnyeat. The essays form a running commentary on the work, covering such topics as the relation between body and soul, sense-perception, imagination, memory, desire, and thought. the authors, writing with philosophical subtlety and wide-ranging scholarship, present the philosophical substance of (...) Aristotle's views to the modern reader. they locate their interpretations firmly within the context of Aristotle's thought as a whole. (shrink)

Martha Nussbuam is one of the most prolific and original philosophers working today. Influenced by ancient philosophy, she has written on the relationship between fiction, the emotions and moral reasoning. With Amartya Sen she developed the capabilities approach to human well-being, which helped shape the UN’s Human Development Index. She is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

This article argues that political liberalism, of the type formulated by John Rawls and Charles Larmore and further developed in Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach, is superior to more comprehensive political views both in domestic and in global affairs. Perfectionist liberalism as advocated by John Stuart Mill and Joseph Raz attempts to erase existing religions and replace them with the religion of utility or autonomy. This is wrong, because in the ethico-religious environment of reasonable disagreement that (...) we inhabit all comprehensive forms of political morality pose a threat to people's liberty and equality. Only thin and narrow conceptions of value like the ones suggested by Rawls, Larmore, Sen, and Nussbaum can guarantee the respect for diversity that is needed in a pluralistic world. Although Rawls famously failed to extend this idea from domestic to transnational matters, the argument of the article is that not only do the principles of political liberalism apply to global mat.. (shrink)

Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in modern political philosophy, John Rawls's _Political Liberalism_ defended a powerful vision of society that respects reasonable ways of life, both religious and secular. These core values have never been more critical as anxiety grows over political and religious difference and new restrictions are placed on peaceful protest and individual expression. This anthology of original essays suggests new, groundbreaking applications of Rawls's work in multiple disciplines and contexts. Thom Brooks, (...) class='Hi'>Martha Nussbaum, Onora O'Neill, Paul Weithman, Jeremy Waldron, and Frank Michelman explore political liberalism's relevance to the challenges of multiculturalism, the relationship between the state and religion, the struggle for political legitimacy, and the capabilities approach. Extending Rawls's progressive thought to the fields of law, economics, and public reason, this book helps advance the project of a free society that thrives despite disagreements over religious and moral views. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1. Frontiers of Justice and the Challenge of Disability 2. The General Approach of Frontiers of Justice 3. Equality and Adequacy 4. Social and Economic Entitlements 5. Equality in Education 6. Equality in Political Entitlements Acknowledgments References.

Since Rawls's Political Liberalism is by now the subject of a wide and deep philosophical literature, much of it excellent in quality, it would be foolhardy to attempt to say something about each of the major issues of the work, or to sort through debates that can easily be located elsewhere. I have therefore decided to focus on a small number of issues where there is at least some chance that a fresh approach may yield some new understanding of (...) the text: Rawls's distinction between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” comprehensive doctrines; the psychological underpinnings of political liberalism; and the possibility that political liberalism might be extended beyond the small group of modern Western societies that Rawls's historical remarks suggest as its primary focus. I also include a discussion of the much-debated issue of civility and public reason, which could hardly be avoided given its prominence in the book's reception. This paper should therefore be read not as a comprehensive account of the work but as one person's attempt to grapple, very incompletely and imperfectly, with a book that is as great as any philosophy has seen on this topic of great human urgency. (shrink)

Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in modern political philosophy, John Rawls's _Political Liberalism_ defended a powerful vision of society that respects reasonable ways of life, both religious and secular. These core values have never been more critical as anxiety grows over political and religious difference and new restrictions are placed on peaceful protest and individual expression. In her introduction to the volume, Martha Nussbaum discusses the main themes of _Political Liberalism _and puts them into the (...) context of contemporary philosophical debates. (shrink)

John Rawls argues, in The Law of Peoples , that a principle of toleration requires the international community to respect `decent hierarchical societies' that obey certain minimal human rights norms. In this article, I question that line of argument, using women's inequality as a lens. I show that Rawls's principle would require us to treat the very same practices of the very same entity differently if it happens to set up as an independent nation rather than a state within a (...) nation, and I criticize the consequences to which this asymmetry leads. I argue that Rawls gives us no good reason to think that we cannot justify a much richer set of norms for all the world's societies. I argue, however, that issues of justification should be sharply distinguished from issues of implementation, and that respect for the moral significance of national sovereignty ought to restrain us from intervention in all but the most extreme cases. Key Words: Rawls • women • equality • international relations • justice. (shrink)

Nietzsche claimed to be a political thinker in Ecce Homo and elsewhere. He constantly compared his thought with other political theorists, chiefly Rousseau, Kant and Mill, and he claimed to offer an alternative to the bankruptcy of Enlightenment liberalism. It is worthwhile re-examining Nietzsche's claim to offer serious criticisms of liberal political philosophy. I shall proceed by setting out seven criteria for serious political thought: understanding of material need; procedural justification; liberty and its worth; racial, ethnic and religious difference; gender (...) and family; justice between nations; and moral psychology. I shall argue polemically that on the first six issues Nietzsche has nothing to offer, but that on the seventh, moral psychology, he makes a profound contribution. Serious political theory, however, needs to forget about Nietzsche and turn to those thinkers he found so boring - the liberal Enlightenment thinkers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum FICTIONS OF THE SOUL* Gertrude says, "O Hamlet speak no more. / Thou turnst mine eyes into my very soul." He made her see her soul, then, with a speech. And many types of speeches try to do what Hamlet did here. They present us with accounts or pictures of ourselves, attempting to communicate to us some truth about what we really are — or (to (...) use what is already a certain sort of picture) to show us die insides of our human souls. These truths about ourselves are delivered in many different styles and forms: some through structured argument, some through more devious or more violent strategies. One distinguished thinker compared his discourse about the nature of the soul to dry translucent shafts of sunlight diat disperse the dark shadows of false belief. Another represents the recipient of a true account of the inside of her soul as crying out in pain: "These words like daggers enter in my ears." Clearly there ought to be connections between the way a drinker or writer conceives of the soul and the way he or she constructs a discourse to convey important trudis to such a soul — including, and especially, the truth about the nature of the soul. Whether we are to be approached with sunbeams or with daggers, whether we need light or violent motion to show us what we are: this seems to depend upon what, in fact, we are. On the answer to questions such as: Are our souls transparent? opaque? open? thick-skinned? And: is getting in touch with a human soul like shining light through a diamond? Like embracing a friend? Like drawing blood? To speak more prosaically, on die answers to questions such as: How does a soul arrive at truth? What elements does it have that promote and impede understanding? What is die subject matter or content of the most important truths about it? And in what sort of activity does knowing it consist? A story or account of die soul is, then, told. The telling, if the story is a good one, is not accidentally connected with the content of the told. And this * Editor's note: This article, as well as the contributions by Joseph Margolis, Félix MartínezBonati, and Sanford Freedman which follow it, grew out of a symposium on "Styles of Fictionality," held at Harvard University in 1981. Other papers from that symposium appeared in the April, 1983 issue of Philosophy and Literature. 145 146PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE ought to be so whether die teller is a literary artist, whom we suppose always to be conscious of the nature of the stylistic choices, or a philosopher, whom we often think of as avoiding or eschewing style altogether. No stylistic choice can be presumed to be neutral — not even the choice to write in a flat or neutral style. My aim in this article is to begin working on the complicated connections between a view of what a human soul is and a view about how to address that sort of soul in writing, in die communication of die view.1 I have chosen two very different views, associated with two extremely different styles. One will be an intellectualistic view of die person, expressed in a style commonly associated widi philosophical writing; the other, expressed in a literary narrative, will be severely critical of intellectualism. The philosophical view is associated with a harsh criticism ofliterary art, the literary view widi an equally harsh criticism of philosophical investigation. In each case, I want to ask how the story that is told engages, in the telling, widi the reader's soul, and how the telling and the told are matched. I have chosen two extremes not because I wish to suggest diat these positions somehow express the essence of the philosophical or the literary, but because diey speak to and criticize one another in an illuminating way. By seeing their opposing elements starkly and schematically set out, we will be in a better position, should we wish to, to imagine an alternative between them. My philosophical protagonist will be Plato — or certain aspects of Plato; the literary opponent will be Proust. I shall, in... (shrink)

The essays in this volume were written to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of G. E. L. Owen, who by his essays and seminars on ancient Greek philosophy has made a contribution to its study that is second to none. The authors, from both sides of the Atlantic, include not only scholars whose main research interests lie in Greek philosophy, but others best known for their work in general philosophy. All are pupils or younger colleagues of Professor Owen who are (...) indebted to his practice of philosophical scholarship as a first-order philosophical activity. At the heart of G. E. L. Owen's work has been a preoccupation with the role of philosophical reflection on language in the metaphysics and epistemology of Plato, Aristotle and other ancient Greek thinkers. This is accordingly the general topic of the present volume, which includes five papers on Plato's critical dialogues and seven on Aristotle, prefaced by two on Heraclitus and followed by a study of the debate in Hellenistic philosophy on the sorites. This is a book for specialists in Greek philosophy and philosophers of language which will also be of interest to some linguists. (shrink)

John Fischer challenges me to defend my arguments regarding the badness of death; I sharpen my position, but make some concessions, discussing the possibility of postmortem harm. In response to John Deigh, I defend the account of disgust given in Hiding from Humanity, together with the research of Paul Rozin that I follow there, I discuss Patrick Devlin's conservative position, agree that we need to object to its emphasis on solidarity, not only to its emphasis on disgust, and argue that (...) Deigh's statement of Devlin's position is too kind to Devlin. In response to Henry Richardson, I summarize my reasons for thinking that the classical social contract tradition cannot handle well the problems posed by the issue of justice for people with disabilities, and that even Rawls's position requires major modification if it is to do so. I explore differences between Richardson's position and my own on the issues of self-respect, liberty, and primary goods. (shrink)

: In this commentary on Eva Feder Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, I focus on Kittay's dependency theory. I apply this theory to an analysis of women's inadequate access to high-quality, cost-effective healthcare. I conclude that while quandaries remain unresolved, including getting men to do their share of dependency work, Kittay's book is an important and original contribution to feminist healthcare ethics and the development of a normative feminist ethic of care.

The classical utilitarian legacy of Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, James Mill, and Henry Sidgwick has often been charged with both theoretical and practical complicity in the growth of British imperialism and the emerging racialist discourse of the nineteenth century. But there has been little scholarly work devoted to bringing together the conflicting interpretive perspectives on this legacy and its complex evolution with respect to orientalism and imperialism. This volume, with contributions by leading scholars in the field, represents the (...) first attempt to survey the full range of current scholarly controversy on how the classical utilitarians conceived of 'race' and the part it played in their ethical and political programs, particularly with respect to such issues as slavery and the governance of India. The book both advances our understanding of the history of utilitarianism and imperialism and promotes the scholarly debate, clarifying the major points at issue between those sympathetic to the utilitarian legacy and those critical of it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wuthering Heights: The Romantic AscentMartha NussbaumI“If I were in heaven, Nelly,” she said, “I should be extremely miserable.”“I dreamt, once, that I was there.... [H]eaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I (...) woke sobbing for joy.” 1Cathy’s soul cannot live in the Christian heaven. For her soul, she explains, is the same as Heathcliff’s soul, and the heavenly soul of Linton is as different from theirs “as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire” (p. 95). Much later, as she lies on her deathbed, now the wife of Edgar Linton, thinking the Linton thought that what she wants is an escape into “that glorious world” of paradise and peace, Heathcliff watches her with burning eyes. At last she calls to him:In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes, wide and wet, at last flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species: it appeared that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity.(pp. 188–89) [End Page 362]Brontë’s description alludes to the imagery of the Christian ascent tradition. As in Augustine and Dante, love is a flame that animates the eyes, a lightning bolt that pierces the fog of our obtuse daily condition; as in that tradition, love’s energy causes the lover to leap away from the petty egoism of the daily into an ecstatic and mutually loving embrace. But we know we are far from the world of the Christian ascent, even its erotic Augustinian form. Cathy’s spring is not an upward, but a horizontal movement—not toward heaven, but toward her beloved moors and winds, severed from which she would find heaven miserable; not toward God but toward Heathcliff, the lover of her soul. Nor is there redemption into heaven in this work; there is, if anything, a redemption from a world dominated by the imagination of heaven, into a world that the pious Ellen Dean can recognize only as an animal world, a world inhabited by creatures of a different species, who probably do not understand language, so thoroughly are they identified with the energy of the body. A few hours after Cathy’s death Heathcliff, as Ellen Dean tells us, in a sudden “paroxysm of ungovernable passion,” dashes his head against the knotted trunk of a tree, splashing the bark with blood, “and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears” (p. 197). It is in his world alone, it would seem, that flame is truly found. As Cathy said to Edgar Linton, “Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever: your veins are full of ice-water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.”Brontë’s novel situates itself within a long tradition of writing about love and its ascent or purification. This tradition, inaugurated by Socrates’ description of the ladder of love in Plato’s Symposium, is continued by later Platonists, and radically reformulated by Christian thinkers, who stress, against Plato, the soul’s receptivity and vulnerability to the inscrutable operations of grace. In both the Platonic and... (shrink)

John Fischer challenges me to defend my arguments regarding the badness of death; I sharpen my position, but make some concessions, discussing the possibility of postmortem harm. In response to John Deigh, I defend the account of disgust given in Hiding from Humanity, together with the research of Paul Rozin that I follow there. I discuss Patrick Devlin’s conservative position, agree that we need to object to its emphasis on solidarity, not only to its emphasis on disgust, and argue that (...) Deigh’s statement of Devlin’s position is too kind to Devlin. In response to Henry Richardson, I summarize my reasons for thinking that the classical social contract tradition cannot handle well the problems posed by the issue of justice for people with disabilities, and that even Rawls’s position requires major modification if it is to do so. I explore differences between Richardson’s position and my own on the issues of self-respect, liberty, and primary goods. (shrink)

I am extremely grateful to Rick Furtak and Alison McQueen for their valuable and challenging comments. My book is long and complicated, and it can hardly have been easy to internalize its details, both philosophical and political. The two authors have a very accurate grasp of my views, and I am delighted by that. I actually do not need to spend my time correcting misstatements of what I say. Both authors offer really interesting challenges to my views, about which it’s (...) a pleasure to think further.Reply to Rick FurtakFurtak is a very subtle thinker about the emotions. What makes his remarks especially illuminating is that he not only understands the nuances of my own position on emotions, especially as I develop it in Upheavals of Thought , but also has a wide-ranging grasp of the philosophical literature on emotions more generally. He poses questions of two sorts. One set concerns emotions of which I suggest that there is something .. (shrink)

In Frontiers of Justice, Martha Nussbaum applies the “Capabilities Approach,” which she calls “one species of a human rights approach,” to justice issues that have in her view been inadequately addressed in liberal political theory. These issues include rights of the disabled, rights that transcend national borders, and animal rights issues. She demonstrates the weakness of Rawlsianism, contractualism in general, and much of the Kantian tradition in moral philosophy and shows the need to move beyond the (...) limitations of narrow rationalism, nationalism, and speciesism. Nevertheless, Nussbaum fails to elaborate adequately the grounds for her own capabilities position or to face fundamental theoretical questions about the nature and implications of that position. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum on Dickens's Hard TimesPaulette KidderAt the heart of Martha Nussbaum's work in capability ethics is a rejection of utilitarianism. Nussbaum has repeatedly recounted a pivotal moment in Dickens's Hard Times (1854), in which the young Sissy Jupe delivers an innocent but devastating critique of the utilitarian system.1 Nussbaum's most extended and compelling reading of Hard Times appears in Poetic Justice: The (...) Literary Imagination and Public Life.2 Nussbaum convincingly shows that Dickens's novel is a "deep attack" on utilitarianism, going to the heart of the assumption that the human good consists in maximizing the satisfaction of preferences of the greatest aggregate of persons.In what follows, I will review Nussbaum's philosophical reading of the novel and its critique of utilitarianism, and then return to Hard Times to show that Nussbaum has systematically omitted references to the Biblical themes and references that pervade the novel. Arguing that Dickens's attack on utilitarianism draws much of its power from the resonance of these historically rooted symbols of transcendence, I will conclude with a reflection on the reasons for Nussbaum's avoidance of these themes in her own reading of the book.Hard Times, which focuses on a set of characters living in the polluted and class-divided manufacturing city of "Coketown," is known as Dickens's most polemical novel. The novel announces its central theme immediately in the opening speech by Thomas Gradgrind to the young students of the Gradgrind School: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach [End Page 417] these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else...."3From the youngest age, the children in Gradgrind's school are taught to avoid wonder and imagination and only to focus on science and mathematics—the study of what is observable and measurable. This education leaves his two eldest children, Tom and Louisa, miserably unequipped for the choices they face as adults. Young Tom Gradgrind grows up to be an undisciplined wastrel, incurring gambling debts that lead him to embezzle money and then to frame a factory worker, Stephen Blackpool, for the crime. Louisa Gradgrind endures a miserable marriage to her father's wealthy friend, Josiah Bounderby.At the moral center of the novel is Sissy Jupe, a girl who proves impervious to Gradgrind's educational system. Sissy, the daughter of a horse trainer who works for Sleary's Circus, is abandoned by her father and taken into the Gradgrind home. Sharing the moral center with Sissy is Stephen Blackpool, a weaver whose honesty and conviction cause him to run afoul of both his employer Bounderby and the demagogic Slackbridge, organizer for the trade union.In her reading of Hard Times, Nussbaum identifies four elements of utilitarianism: commensurability, aggregation, maximizing, and exogenous preferences, all of which are both dramatized in the novel and critiqued by it (PJ, p. 14). Commensurability means that "all the valuable things under consideration [are regarded as] valuable because they contain some one thing that itself varies only in quantity" (PJ, p. 14). Characters that Dickens presents as memorable individuals are seen by Gradgrind's system as "parcels of human nature." Students in Gradgrind's School are called by number instead of name, and the workers of Coke-town are seen as "hands and stomachs," and are likened to "ants and beetles." Individuality is erased by what Nussbaum terms Gradgrind's "abstracting mathematical mind" (PJ, p. 21).Aggregation, the second utilitarian element, means that data about individual lives is pooled, "without regarding the boundaries between lives as especially salient for the purposes of choice" (p. 14). Louisa Gradgrind is taught, for example, to view the working classes as "Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and overate itself when wheat was cheap... But, she had scarcely thought more of separating [End Page 418] [the people of Coketown] into units, than of separating the sea itself into its... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum on Dickens's Hard TimesPaulette KidderAt the heart of Martha Nussbaum's work in capability ethics is a rejection of utilitarianism. Nussbaum has repeatedly recounted a pivotal moment in Dickens's Hard Times (1854), in which the young Sissy Jupe delivers an innocent but devastating critique of the utilitarian system.1 Nussbaum's most extended and compelling reading of Hard Times appears in Poetic Justice: The (...) Literary Imagination and Public Life.2 Nussbaum convincingly shows that Dickens's novel is a "deep attack" on utilitarianism, going to the heart of the assumption that the human good consists in maximizing the satisfaction of preferences of the greatest aggregate of persons.In what follows, I will review Nussbaum's philosophical reading of the novel and its critique of utilitarianism, and then return to Hard Times to show that Nussbaum has systematically omitted references to the Biblical themes and references that pervade the novel. Arguing that Dickens's attack on utilitarianism draws much of its power from the resonance of these historically rooted symbols of transcendence, I will conclude with a reflection on the reasons for Nussbaum's avoidance of these themes in her own reading of the book.Hard Times, which focuses on a set of characters living in the polluted and class-divided manufacturing city of "Coketown," is known as Dickens's most polemical novel. The novel announces its central theme immediately in the opening speech by Thomas Gradgrind to the young students of the Gradgrind School: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach [End Page 417] these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else...."3From the youngest age, the children in Gradgrind's school are taught to avoid wonder and imagination and only to focus on science and mathematics—the study of what is observable and measurable. This education leaves his two eldest children, Tom and Louisa, miserably unequipped for the choices they face as adults. Young Tom Gradgrind grows up to be an undisciplined wastrel, incurring gambling debts that lead him to embezzle money and then to frame a factory worker, Stephen Blackpool, for the crime. Louisa Gradgrind endures a miserable marriage to her father's wealthy friend, Josiah Bounderby.At the moral center of the novel is Sissy Jupe, a girl who proves impervious to Gradgrind's educational system. Sissy, the daughter of a horse trainer who works for Sleary's Circus, is abandoned by her father and taken into the Gradgrind home. Sharing the moral center with Sissy is Stephen Blackpool, a weaver whose honesty and conviction cause him to run afoul of both his employer Bounderby and the demagogic Slackbridge, organizer for the trade union.In her reading of Hard Times, Nussbaum identifies four elements of utilitarianism: commensurability, aggregation, maximizing, and exogenous preferences, all of which are both dramatized in the novel and critiqued by it (PJ, p. 14). Commensurability means that "all the valuable things under consideration [are regarded as] valuable because they contain some one thing that itself varies only in quantity" (PJ, p. 14). Characters that Dickens presents as memorable individuals are seen by Gradgrind's system as "parcels of human nature." Students in Gradgrind's School are called by number instead of name, and the workers of Coke-town are seen as "hands and stomachs," and are likened to "ants and beetles." Individuality is erased by what Nussbaum terms Gradgrind's "abstracting mathematical mind" (PJ, p. 21).Aggregation, the second utilitarian element, means that data about individual lives is pooled, "without regarding the boundaries between lives as especially salient for the purposes of choice" (p. 14). Louisa Gradgrind is taught, for example, to view the working classes as "Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and overate itself when wheat was cheap... But, she had scarcely thought more of separating [End Page 418] [the people of Coketown] into units, than of separating the sea itself into its... (shrink)

Book review of Martha Nussbaum's book Frontiers of Justice.

Martha Nussbaum’s new book Political Emotions is a contribution to political philosophy and, simultaneously, a moral-psychological study of the emotions. In it, she revisits some of the most prominent themes in her 2004 book Hiding from Humanity and her 2001 treatise, Upheavals of Thought. As Nussbaum points out in the opening pages of Political Emotions, one of her goals in this work is to answer a call issued by John Rawls for a “reasonable moral psychology” that would be (...) conceptually refined and empirically grounded, since a complete theoretical account of the just society must be informed by a suitably complex, accurate conception of human emotions. On the whole, Political Emotions is a remarkably successful book that combines several areas of philosophical research in which the author’s proficiency is well known. It shows how problems that lie on the more intimate side of ethics, pertaining for instance to friendship and family life, have relevance for social justice and publi .. (shrink)

This paper argues that the future of capabilities approach lies on the theoretical development of the democratic political structure. For this purpose, we take into account Martha Nussbaum’s late theoretical works. Firstly, we argue that the capability approach can be divided into two main models: the top down and the bottom up. Nussbaum, for example, endorses a top-down model, which it begins from an abstractive theory of partial justice and then draws the issue of institutional implementation. On the (...) other hand, Amartya Sem advocates the bottom-up model, which starts from the immanent demands of justice from public sphere and then up to normative and abstract questions (like his “idea of justice”). In the second part of this paper, we present Nussbaum’s partial theory of justice, arguing that it is mainly composed by four issues: (a) the elaboration of the list of capabilities, (b) the process of normative evaluation, (c) arguments for stability, (d) the implementation of the model. About this last topic, we argue in the third part that the current theoretical advance of the capabilities approach lies on the issue of the democratic political structure. In other words, the future of capabilities approach depends on the interaction between its own theory and a theory of democracy. Finally, in the last section we provide a re-elaboration of Nussbaum’s threshold level of capabilities (the list) in order to make it more adherent with the democratic political structure. (shrink)

Theories of distributive justice are most severely tested in the area of disability. In this book, Mark Stein argues that utilitarianism performs better than egalitarian theories in this area: whereas egalitarian theories help the disabled either too little or too much, utilitarianism achieves the proper balance by placing resources where they will do the most good. Stein offers what may be the broadest critique of egalitarian theory from a utilitarian perspective. He addresses the work of egalitarian theorists John (...) Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Bruce Ackerman, Martha Nussbaum, Norman Daniels, Philippe Van Parijs, and others. Stein claims that egalitarians are often driven to borrow elements of utilitarianism in order to make their theories at all plausible. The book concludes with an acknowledgment that both utilitarians and egalitarians face problems in the distribution of life-saving medical resources. Stein advocates a version of utilitarianism that would distribute life-saving resources based on life expectancy, not quality of life. Egalitarian theories, he argues, ignore life expectancy and so are again found wanting. _Distributive Justice and Disability _is a powerful and engaging book that helps to reframe the debate between egalitarian and utilitarian thinkers. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to argue that pragmatists interested in social justice ought to be committed to certain objective transcultural ethical ideals. In particular, I argue that we need an objective moral account of what counts as harm and flourishing for human beings. Pragmatists are usually characterized as rejecting the tenability of, or the need for, such objective standards. Instead, the question of whether a person's life is going well or badly is supposed to be answered by (...) appealing to the standards of that person's community, appealing to ever-wider communities if necessary. The problem with this approach, I believe, is that it is far too easy to find historical and contemporary examples of communities .. (shrink)

ExcerptThe reasons why individual nations and even individual people subscribe to notions of human rights vary enormously. Rationales range from idealism to realpolitik and sound in competing registers of theology, social contract, nature, utility, and game theory.1 Pervasive in discussions of human rights is the dignity of each person as both a reality and a normative guide. Capacious and ambiguous, this notion of dignity may invite agreement precisely because different people project different meanings onto it. Its recognition, though, can inspire (...) attitudes of respect and civility even when we disagree. Dignity thus serves less as a foundation and more as a lodestar, an aspiration. Justice Thurgood Marshall once explained, “A child born to a [B]lack mother in a state like Mississippi… has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.”2. (shrink)

This paper endorses the idea that an ethical and political perspective on precariousness would be informed by a social theory. Nancy Fraser’s Critical Theory of Justice is a good sample of this requirement. The aim of her critical account consists in to identify the social contradictions of capitalism to make a proper diagnosis of our current era. The diagnosis is the beginning to analyze the emancipatory options, entangled with those contradictions, to find out the society’s sense of justice. (...) According to that, this paper deals with the recent adjustments in Fraser’s Social Critical Theory of Justice that focuses on the new orders of subjection in our current societies. So, I will reenact her work from her debate with Habermas on gender in the ‘80s to her current theorization of capitalism as an institutionalized social order. (shrink)

The ethics of Aristotle , and virtue ethics in general, have enjoyed a resurgence of interest over the past few decades. Aristotelian themes, with such issues as the importance of friendship and emotions in a good life, the role of moral perception in wise choice, the nature of happiness and its constitution, moral education and habituation, are finding an important place in contemporary moral debates. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a close analysis of central arguments in Aristotle's (...) Nicomachean Ethics and show the enduring interest of the questions Aristotle raises. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding (...) which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a Thomistic alternative to Martha Nussbaum’s justice for animals as outlined in Frontiers of Justice. I argue that an account of analogous justice between humans and animals can generate real and robust obligations towards animals. I first show how Aquinas’s treatment of nonhuman animals in the questions on law evince a wider, shared community between humans and animals by which we see animals and humans as equally under divine providence. (...) I then argue that while Aquinas’s definition of justice excludes animals in its proper sense, his treatment of animals in questions such as those on theft and charity prove that there is room to understand at least an analogous or metaphorical sense by which we can see them as recipients of justice. Finally, I examine Nussbaum’s own account and illustrate key similarities between her view and that of Aquinas. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Why Philosophy and Cognitive Disability? Historical Overview Discussion of Themes and the Chapters Concluding Remarks References.