Why should I not do it? "The best answer to attacks on multiculturalism can be found in Martha C. Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity. It was about shrinking and disgust., For the past thirty years, Nussbaum has been drawn to those who blush, writing about the kinds of populations that her father might have deemed subhuman. An elephant roams the streets of Bangkok, Thailand, in 2008. But when we get further down into the nitty gritty of each species, there are tremendous differences. Nussbaums many other works included Loves Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000), Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004), From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010), Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013), Anger and Forgiveness (2016), The Cosmopolitan Tradition (2019), and Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation (2021). . Her younger sister, Gail Craven Busch, a choir director at a church, had told their mother that Nussbaum was on the way. Rachel had a Ph.D. from Cornell University and a J.D. . They need a lot of room to move around. In an interview with a Dutch television station, Nussbaum said that she worked so hard because she thought, This is what Daddys doingwe take charge of our lives. Think about apes. Public culture cannot be tepid and passionless., By the late nineties, India had become so integral to Nussbaums thinking that she later warned a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education that her work there was at the core of my heart and my sense of the meaning of life, so if you downplay that, you dont get me. She travelled to developing countries during school vacationsshe never misses a classand met with impoverished women. (December 2022). Once she began studying the lives of women in non-Western countries, she identified as a feminist but of the unfashionable kind: a traditional liberal who believed in the power of reason at a time when postmodern scholars viewed it as an instrument or a disguise for oppression. Of her mother and sister, she said, I just was furious at them, because I thought that they could take charge of their lives by will, and they werent doing it., Nussbaum attended Wellesley College, but she dropped out in her sophomore year, because she wanted to be an actress. You now begin to see how this lady is, she wrote. Nussbaum also argues that legal bans on conducts, such as nude dancing in private clubs, nudity on private beaches, the possession and consumption of alcohol in seclusion, gambling in seclusion or in a private club, which remain on the books, partake of the politics of disgust and should be overturned.[67]. Saul told me, Of my two children, this is the one thats the underdog, and of course Martha loves him, and they talk for hours and hours. One of her mentors was John Rawls, the most influential political philosopher of the last century. But I think incrementally we can get more and more regulation of that industry, and we can gradually get to a point where we would have adequate protections for the welfare of the animals who are raised. Her work on the philosophical import of literature and the cognitive content of our emotions has reshaped the academic landscape and given us a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. Nussbaum isnt sure if her capacity for rational detachment is innate or learned. In her half-century as a moral philosopher, Nussbaum has tackled an enormous range of topics, including death, aging, friendship, emotions, feminism, and much more. George, Robert P. '"Shameless Acts" Revisited: Some Questions for Martha Nussbaum', Academic Questions 9 (Winter 199596), 2442. The thing that I dont like about utilitarianism is that while I talk about creatures leading a life, utilitarianism focuses on a passive state of satisfaction. Straying from the standard line of feminist thought, Nussbaum defends Sunsteins idea, arguing that there are circumstances in which being treated as a sex object, a mysterious thinglike presence, can be humanizing, rather than morally harmful. [48] Nussbaum received the 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education for Cultivating Humanity. But for each animal, there are things that are important to that type of animal. Nussbaum is drawn to the idea that creative urgencyand the commitment to be goodderives from the awareness that we harbor aggression toward the people we love. Hopkins, Patrick D. "Sex and Social Justice". In another e-mail from the air, she clarified: My experience of political anger has always been more King-like: protest, not acquiescence, but no desire for payback., Last year, Nussbaum had a colonoscopy. Menu. Like Narcissus, she says, philosophy falls in love with its own image and drowns. /Under the bludgeonings of chance/My head is bloody, but unbowed. Her father was a lawyer, her mother an interior designer. He rebukes her for "contempt for the opinions of ordinary people" and ultimately accuses Nussbaum herself of "hiding from humanity". Sure, I could go and move someplace else, she said, interrupting him. Martha Nussbaum, in full Martha Craven Nussbaum, (born May 6, 1947, New York, New York, U.S.), American philosopher and legal scholar known for her wide-ranging work in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, the philosophy of law, moral psychology, ethics, philosophical feminism, political philosophy, the philosophy of education, and aesthetics and for her philosophically informed contributions to contemporary debates on human rights, social and transnational justice, economic development, political feminism and womens rights, LGBTQ rights, economic inequality, multiculturalism, the value of education in the liberal arts or humanities, and animal rights. "[76] These ten capabilities encompass everything Nussbaum considers essential to living a life that one values. Oxford University Press. What can I say or write that will make you stop looking at me that way?. To Devlin, the mere fact some people or act may produce popular emotional reactions of disgust provides an appropriate guide for legislating. She began the book by acknowledging: I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing something wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust ones good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without themall these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of practical wisdom. In her first major work, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Nussbaum drew upon the works of the ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to challenge a middle-Platonic conception of the good life (the life of human flourishing, necessarily encompassing virtuous character and behaviour) as self-sufficient, or invulnerable to circumstances and events outside the individuals control. And of course, when we get to the companion animals that we live with, we observe how they learn norms, they internalize norms, and they know when theyre violating them. Among other things, they hadnt captured her devotion to teaching and to her students. [10] At Brown, Nussbaum's students included philosopher Linda Martn Alcoff and actor and playwright Tim Blake Nelson. (When a conductor recently invited her to join a repertory group for older singers, she told him that the concept was stigmatizing.) Her self-discipline inspired a story called My Ex, the Moral Philosopher, by the late Richard Stern, a professor at the University of Chicago. [73][74] One conservative magazine, The American Spectator, offered a dissenting view, writing: "[H]er account of the 'politics of disgust' lacks coherence, and 'the politics of humanity' betrays itself by not treating more sympathetically those opposed to the gay rights movement." A portion of this testimony, dealing with the potential meanings of the term tolmma in Plato's work, was the subject of controversy, and was called misleading and even perjurious by critics. Second, likeness to us is just not a good reason to treat a being well or poorly. Emotions, she held, involve judgments about important things, judgments in which, appraising an external object as salient for our own well-being, we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world that we do not fully control. Thus, the emotions are not only cognitive in themselves but also essential to ethical thinking, and any normative ethical theory that fails to account for themthat does not encompass a realistic theory of the emotionswill be untenable. He was prejudiced in a very gut-level way, Nussbaum told me. She identifies the "politics of disgust" closely with Lord Devlin and his famous opposition to the Wolfenden report, which recommended decriminalizing private consensual homosexual acts, on the basis that those things would "disgust the average man". Her pregnancy, in 1972, was a mistake; her I.U.D. It does sound a little bit final, she went on, and one rarely dies when one is out of useful ideasunless maybe you were really ill for a long time. She said that she had been in a hospital only twice, once to give birth and once when she had an operation to staple the top of her left ear to the back of her head, when she was eleven. And I have no idea what Id do. Her father, who thought that Jews were vulgar, disapproved of the marriage and refused to attend their wedding party. Her work includes lovely descriptions of the physical realities of being a person, of having a body soft and porous, receptive of fluid and sticky, womanlike in its oozy sliminess. She believes that dread of these phenomena creates a threat to civic life. When her thesis adviser, G. E. L. Owen, invited her to his office, served sherry, spoke about lifes sadness, recited Auden, and reached over to touch her breasts, she says, she gently pushed him away, careful not to embarrass him. : The more localized you are, the easier it is to make progress. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is an excellent law, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The sense of concern and being held is what I associate with my mother, and the sense of surging and delight is what I associate with my father., She said that she looks to replicate the experience of surging in romantic partners as well. Die Zeit Interviews Martha Nussbaum About 'Justice for Animals' Because They Feel Elisabeth von Thadden January 22, 2023 Die Zeit DIE ZEIT: You wrote a book of love, as you say, after your daughter died. The numbers say it all: Nearly two-thirds of global mammalian biomass is currently made up of livestock, the majority raised and killed in intolerably cruel factory farms. She began studying classics at New York University, still focussing on Greek tragedies. The first aria she practiced was Or sai chi lonore, from Don Giovanni, one of the few Mozart operas that she has never run to, because she finds the rape scene reprehensible. We sat at her kitchen island, facing a Chicago White Sox poster, eating what remained of an elaborate and extraordinary Indian meal that she had cooked two days before, for the dean of the law school and eight students. At the same time, Nussbaum argues in support of the legalization of prostitution, a position she reiterated in a 2008 essay following the Spitzer scandal, writing: "The idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque. Or I might just get depressed., Martha, its too autobiographical, Epstein said. So my idea was that the theory of justice for animals would contain many different lists of central capabilities for each type of animal, and that an animal would be treated with minimal justice if its put above a reasonable threshold for the central capabilities for its kind. The 2021 Holberg Prize was awarded to Martha C. Nussbaum for her ground-breaking contributions to research in law and philosophy. : What Amartya Sen and I thought when we dreamed up the Capabilities Approach is that the basic question that ought to be asked in the human realm is, What are people actually able to do and to be? Do you feel that you have such a plan? she asked me. Animals do need freedom from pain, but they also need community of species-specific types. She has 64 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia, including:[79][80][81][82]. Her husband took a picture of her reading. She told me, I like the idea that the very thing that my mother found cold and unloving could actually be a form of love. student, who was Jewish, a religion she was attracted to for the same reason that she was drawn to theatre: more emotional expressiveness, she said. But that is the kind of thing that the law should say. Genre. Of course, its easier when youre dealing with coastal waters, where American law governs or another countrys law can govern. : In the book, you describe yourself as a liberal reformist with a revolutionary streak. Can you explain what you mean and how that applies to what you believe must be done to achieve justice for animals? These discussions will be known as the Martha C. Nussbaum Student Roundtables. The core of my argument is when those characteristic life activities are wrongfully curtailed, that is injustice, and we should move to correct it. [11] In 1987, she gained public attention due to her critique of fellow philosopher Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. He liked to joke that he had been wrong only once in his life and that was the time that he thought he was wrong. The next aria was from the final act of Verdis Don Carlos, which Nussbaum found more challenging. I just enjoyed having this big bandage around my head, she said. The capabilities theory is now a staple of human-rights advocacy, and Sen told me that Nussbaum has become more of a purist than he is. After Women and Human Development and Frontiers of Justice [1], two books in which she has been developing the capabilities approach as a partial theory of justice, Martha Nussbaum has now written a third book on her capabilities approach.