Martha Nussbaum is a philosopher and Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She has taught at numerous universities including: Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Brown, and Stanford.
Nussbaum has been the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. This past spring she received a Doctor of Laws from the University of British Columbia. She has also written over 12 books, including: Upheavals of Thought, Hiding From Humanity, Women and Human Development, Cultivating Humanity, and Sex and Social Justice.
Nussbaum's new book Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership was recently published by Harvard University Press. I reached her in Chicago to speak about the book.
Gerry McCarthy: In Frontiers of Justice you write that: "Ideas shape the way policymakers do their work. That is why, from its very inception, the capabilities approach has contested the idea of development as economic growth, insisting on the idea of 'human development.' Re-conceiving development as 'human development' does influence the goals that policymakers pursue and the strategic ones they choose." Are you hopeful more North American politicians will re-conceive development as human development? Could this lead to a reduction in poverty, an improvement in education, and a better health care system in the U.S.?
Martha Nussbaum: This approach is a way of packaging information and expressing goals and policy. It doesn't make people do anything. It just lays things out in a new way and emphasizes new factors. In my version it offers a series of strong recommendations, saying that a society is not a decent one if it hasn't met several goals in the area of human development. Whether people are going to care about that is a complicated thing.
The human development approach has had a strong influence on many countries in the developing world. India is one example. You could say that the 2004 election in India was all about whether we think of development as economic growth or human development. The current government is big on the human development approach. They offer a lot of support to the agencies in India who are working on it.
Canada has been receptive to this approach, and ready to think of development in those terms. Whenever I'm in Canada I find public servants are curious about this approach. I've addressed audiences of politicians and public servants. It makes me encouraged to think there is an open-minded exchange going on, and that people are ready to start expressing their political goals in those terms.
The United States is a much tougher nut to crack, partly because of the pervasive anti-intellectualism. Unfortunately I don't think any intellectuals' ideas have a whole lot of influence on U.S. policy --certainly not with the current administration.
But it goes much further back. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't have a domestic human development report. Most nations don't just look at the international comparisons in the United Nations Human Development reports, but they make their own. They compare different regions in their own nation. The U.S. hasn't done that.
The parts of the U.S. that deal with the rest of the world --such as the World Bank-- have definitely been influenced by this approach. Over the past 10 years, things at the World Bank have improved greatly in that regard. Because activists from developing countries are always coming in there and pushing and pressing. While Paul Wolfowitz was head of the World Bank, he did a good job in shifting attention to attention to those goals. So far the evidence is that Wolfowitz actually does care about these things. People are surprised to see that's the case.
I have some hope for international agencies that the U.S. is a part of today. But so far in domestic thinking it takes constant pressure from people who are suffering to get those issues on the table. Hurricane Katrina made people aware of how our social safety net has slipped. People were shocked and ashamed to see the conditions in which people were living without an adequate social safety net. Let's hope this gets back on the political agenda. But then the Democrats are going to have to talk about it. So far they've been afraid of being accused of class warfare, and they haven't been talking about it nearly enough.
GM: In the book you write that: "The world community has been very slow to respond to the problem of differential care for girls and boys, precisely because both Western and non-Western traditions have constructed the home as an inviolable domain of personal prerogative. Finding a new approach to the family that is both respectful of associational liberty and protective toward the capabilities of children should be a priority of the global public sphere, as of domestic political debate in each nation." Can you talk to me a little more about this? I see this as an extremely important development. Are there international bodies making this a priority?
MB: This has been a priority of the international women's movement for a long time. The slogan "The personal is political" has expressed the idea that what goes on in the home is not a domain that's off-limits to justice. But it's a fundamental issue of justice.
In concrete ways there has been a campaign for years to get domestic violence thought of as a crime, to have police take it seriously, and to enforce it. That's made tremendous inroads and progress. In North America and most of the nations of Europe, the police are doing things completely differently and they will respond to women's complaints about domestic violence. They take it seriously as a crime.
It's less true in India (which is the only developing country I have deep experience in), because police education has not been a top priority of government. We have to rely there on the local activism of women in each region who certainly make this a top priority. Every woman's group I visit in India make this a major priority, because it's such an epidemic.
I wrote an article in the Journal of Human Development about domestic violence as a worldwide scourge. The data on that is terrible. Even in the state of Kerala --which is often cited in the development literature as India's most progressive region-- we have something like 40 percent of pregnant women who report being beaten by their husbands. Things are bad all around the world in this regard. They are getting better. But we need to keep harping on it.
Another area where there is at least some progress is rape within marriage. Now most nations at least think of that as a crime. Whether it's actually prosecuted is another matter. Whether it's prosecuted as a crime of the same sort as stranger rape is another matter. But at least there's some awareness that the husband doesn't have limitless access to his wife's body.
Then there's differential nutrition and health care of boys and girls. In India that's been a tremendous problem. In my book Women and Human Development, I provide a lot of data about the differential sex ratios that you see, which result from the fact that girls don't have equal chances to grow up to adulthood. There have been a lot of laws passed that attempt to deal with this problem. For example: Laws having to do with dowries, child marriage --all the things that affect the worth of a girl child in the family.
But interestingly the thing that's done the most good has been an experiment that Kerala conducted, which was to get all the schools to offer a nutritious mid-day meal to any child who is in school. That led to girls coming into school in much greater numbers, because instead of being a drag on their parent's income, they were receiving an important benefit in the school. That has led to equal literacy among males and females all the way up to adolescence in Kerala. But it also led to a better health status for girls. The Indian Supreme Court ordered that program to be implemented in every Indian state --and it's now being implemented.
But at the same time there is progress there is also regress. Because now that access to information about the sex is so easy to get through amniocentesis, the sex ratio of boys to girls that are born is shifting in a lot of countries. Instead of neglecting the girl, you can get in months earlier and just prevent the birth of the girl. In India that's a tremendous problem. Now we have laws against making the information about the sex of the fetus available without any good medical reason. Last March a doctor went to jail for 10 years for collaborating in a sex-selective abortion, by giving out this information. Typically a woman comes in and they try to skirt the law in clever ways. For example: If a doctor finds out that it's a female fetus they'll write the result of the amniocentesis in read ink. If they think it's a boy, it will be in blue ink. They're not saying anything, but they're giving the information.
It's a complicated issue, because people in India tend to think we better crack down on abortion, because abortion is being used to murder girls. In America the feminist community is focused on maintaining abortion rights. Indian feminists are moving in the opposite direction for different reasons.
GM: At one point, you write that: "Adult freedom of association still supplies substantial limits to state interference with family life. Thus it would not be acceptable for the state simply to mandate that husbands and wives divide care labor equally. But recognition of the political nature of the family institution is the beginning of progress, for it immediately leads us to ask: What laws are implicated in the problems we currently we have before us, and how might law do its job better?" Can you talk to me about this?
MB: We would definitely want to distinguish the idea that there are protected spaces for personal choice and personal relationship, from the idea that the home is a privileged domain into which justice doesn't enter. They are not the same notion, because you want to protect intimacy whether it's in the home or it isn't. That's a problem too, because intimate sexual relationships have often been thought fair game for the police the minute they're not in somebody's home. I'm not too happy with the recent decision that invalidated the sodomy laws, because they did it on the grounds that the home is a protected space.
Just this morning one of our federal courts said that President George W. Bush's telephone spy program was unconstitutional. That's a good decision. But it's not just informational privacy we want, but privacy from the intrusions of the government in general. Then the question is: How does that relate to the legitimate interest we have in protecting children from damage done to them. We have to work that out. Unlike some feminists I think parents ought to have broad latitude to direct religious upbringing of their children, in such a way that they may be imparting to them gender norms we feminists don't like. What can we do about that? That's where public schools come in. We should also strengthen the requirements for accreditation for private and home schooling so that people do receive adequate information about women as political equals in society, and the history and achievement of women.
But we do want to allow parents broad latitude to direct their children's education --so long as they're not engaging in violence or abuse. That's hard to draw those lines.
GM: In your chapter "Capabilities across National Boundaries" you write about international bodies such as the United Nations. In some circles the United Nations is severely critiqued for its defects. What are your thoughts? Is the United Nations a place to get things done?
MB: When people make those criticisms they're focusing on the Security Council and the General Assembly. I'm focusing on completely different parts. The one I've worked with the most is the United Nations Development Programme both in the U.S. and India, because it has independent regional offices. Some of those are first rate. The American part that did the Human Development reports has made a wonderful set of contributions. There are other excellent agencies. For example: United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), International Labor Organization (ILO), and the World Health Organization (WHO). All of these do valuable work.
The International Labor organization used to be indifferent to the problems of poor rural people who work in the informal economy, and women who are working out of their homes. But they've also become much more sensitive to those issues. They're putting standards for labor in the informal economy. All those agencies make a difference.
Where Amartya Sen and I did our work on the capabilities approach was an agency called the World Institute for Development and Economics Research. For various reasons it was organized under the United Nations University which is an umbrella of various educational programs that the UN runs. That proved to be unfortunate, because the UN University is not a distinguished agency within the UN. Our institute (which was distinguished) was the target of envy and suspicion. In the end it was stopped in 1993. It still exists, but in a much reduced form.
I did see up-close what some of the internal corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency of the UN can be like. It can be bad. People are often appointed to these posts out of nepotism, and not because they have any competence. One just has to look agency-by-agency in order to see how to make each one better.
GM: You explain that a society aspiring to justice in the three areas you discussed (Disability, Nationality, Species Membership) must devote "sustained attention to the moral sentiments and their cultivation --in child development, in public education, in public rhetoric, in the arts." This would require a transformation of the prevailing culture wouldn't it? At one point you write how social conceptions of manliness can be taught differently.
MB: This is my next big project, as you can tell at the end of the book, I was looking forward to something that would bring together the work I've done on emotions over the years with the work I've done on political philosophy.
As far as education: First of all it requires an effort of preservation. Because progressive educators like Dewey in the U.S. and Tagore in India had understood that we have to cultivate the moral sentiments in order to have a decent society, and the education of sympathy was a big part of decent primary education. And it had to be done by a significant use of the arts in education.
All of the education systems around the world were shaped and transformed by progressive educational thinking. But now those developments are being rolled back under the tremendous pressure for economic success in the global market. In India it has come to the point where parents hate it if their children spend anytime doing arts or even humanities, because they want them all to get into the institutes of technology and management. That's where all the emphasis is going.
In the U.S. it hasn't gone that far. Fortunately this is one thing where my own country has done things well on the whole. Because we still have a robust focus on the humanities all through education and into university education where we have a liberal arts systems. This is important, because even if a person is going to study commerce, they're taking courses in philosophy and literature. They're learning arts of critical thinking and imagining which are crucial for the health of democracy.
But we're under pressure too. On my campus is where John Dewey did his work. It's called the Laboratory School, because it was Dewey's laboratory. I went over there recently and talked with them. They feel under pressure to cutback on the arts and things like critical thinking in order to stuff in more of the useful material that will get people to be profitable in the global market.
This is a big issue in --first of all-- preserving what we already have had and then building on that. Also: Expanding it further, and thinking how we can challenge, as you mentioned, images of gender that have been pernicious.
GM: In a recent article for The New York Review of Books -- Stanley Hoffman writes that national and international action to prevent the destruction and mass migration expected from global warming should become an urgent priority. He further explains that: " An issue that threatens all countries, it requires energetic, diverse, and imaginative measures for the curtailment of CO (2) emissions. A revised and strengthened version of the Kyoto Protocol would be the beginning. Most other problems shrink compared to this one." What are your thoughts?
MB: I'm no expert. In fact, my partner Cass Sunstein has an Opinion-Editorial piece in The Washington Post today about this problem. He's the one that knows all the facts. But I do view it as a tremendously important problem. The part that I've become involved with personally has been the animal rights issue --where one of the terrible devastations of global warming is animal habitats. Polar bears and elephants --for example-- have been suffering greatly.
What I'd like to emphasize is that it's the responsibility of the rich countries to aggressively take the lead here, because when I'm in India I see that, when your children are starving, you don't have much leisure to think about which fuels you're using, how bad it might be to burn cow dung, and how people are doing in some distant part of the world.
It's reasonable to think that poorer countries have to --first of all-- address the problems of human suffering in their own nation. Meanwhile the richer countries that haven't got such acute problems of hunger to deal with should be taking the lead in doing all this.
Any fair solution is obviously one that protects the poorer countries whose failure to industrialize before this was the fault of Western colonialism.
GM: Have there been any reviews of Frontiers of Justice that surprised you? The reviews I saw appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. Is that right?
MB: Yes. I particularly like the one in The Times Literary Supplement, because he spent a lot of time with the argument. He did seem to be grappling with the argument, and trying hard to get it right. It's rare, but I wrote to the person (because I hadn't heard of him before) and said: Thank you for taking so much time to get the argument right, because reviewers often don't do that.
John Gray in The Nation did harp obsessively on his vendetta against John Rawls. But once I knew that it was Gray reviewing the book that's what I would have expected, because he wrote an extremely vicious review of Rawls book Political Liberalism earlier. So that didn't surprise me.
The one thing that surprised me was that in Alan Ryan's review in The New York Review of Books I'm taken to task for being too academic. That's odd. It comes out of the anti-intellectualism of America and its publishing and media. Even though Ryan is now in England, he's part of the American scene as well.
When you think about it, public intellectuals of the past have been rigorous in their arguments --and they've been intellectuals. Rousseau was a public intellectual. Mill couldn't hold an academic job, and he had to work at a desk job in the East India Company. But it would have been better if Mill's books had been academic. We would have all spent much less time understanding what he actually meant by certain phrases that he didn't explain.
My aspiration has always been to write clearly and accessibly so anyone can understand who's not a specialist, but still to maintain rigour and argument. I was a little surprised that Ryan thought these two things couldn't go together. They must go together.
Gerry McCarthy is Editor of The Social Edge.
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