438424

8/12/2019 438424

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/438424 1/29

Social Justice and Universalism: In Defense of an Aristotelian Account of Human FunctioningAuthor(s): Martha C. NussbaumSource: Modern Philology, Vol. 90, Supplement (May, 1993), pp. S46-S73Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/438424 .

Accessed: 31/08/2011 16:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

Modern Philology.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/438424?origin=JSTOR-pdf



http://www.jstor.org/stable/438424?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

8/12/2019 438424


Social Justice and Universalism: In Defense of an

Aristotelian Account of Human Functioning

MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

Brown University

It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of

political economy come the rich human being and rich

human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the

human being in need of a totality of human life-activities-

the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner

necessity, as need. [KARLMARX,Economic and Philosophical

Manuscriptsof 1844]

Svetaketu abstained from food for fifteen days. Then hecame to his father and said, "What shall I say?" The father

said: "Repeat the Rik, Yagus, and Saman verses." He

replied, "They do not occur to me, Sir." The father said to

him . . . "Go and eat Then wilt thou understand me." Then

Svetaketu ate, and afterwards approached his father. And

whatever his father asked him, he knew it all by

heart.... After that, he understood what his father meant

when he said: "Mind, my son, comes from food, breath

from water, speech from fire." He understood what he said,

yea, he understood it. [Chandogya Upanishad, 6 Prapathaka,

7 Kanda]

When you love a man you want him to live and when you

hate him you want him to die. If, having wanted him to live,

you then want him to die, this is a misguided judgment. "If

you did not do so for the sake of riches, you must have

done so for the sake of novelty." [CONFUCIUS, nalects,

bk. 12.101

I am very grateful indeed to Norma Field and the Chicago Humanities Institute for

arranging a stimulating occasion for the discussion of these issues and to all the partici-

pants, especially my commentator, David Gitomer, for their helpful comments. I am

sure that I have not answered all the questions they raised, but I shall continue workingon them.

? 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/93/9004-2006$01.00

S46

8/12/2019 438424


Martha C. Nussbaum o Social Justice and Universalism

ANTI-ESSENTIALIST CONVERSATIONS

Ibegin

with threeconversations,

taken frommy experience workingin Helsinki as a research adviser at an international institute affili-

ated with the United Nations,l which brings people from many disci-

plines together to work on problems connected with developmenteconomics.2 Contemporary assaults on 'essentialism' and on nonrela-

tive accounts of human functioning have recently made a dramatic ap-

pearance there, with potential implications for public policy that I viewwith alarm.3

1. At a conference on value and technology, an American economist

who has long been considered a radical delivers a paper urging thepreservation of traditional ways of life in a rural area of India, now un-

der threat of contamination from Western values. As evidence of the

excellence of this rural way of life, he points to the fact that, whereaswe Westerners experience a sharp split between the values that prevailin the workplace and the values that prevail in the home, here, by con-

trast, there exists what the economist calls "the embedded way of life,"the same values prevailing in both places. His example: just as in thehome a menstruating woman is thought to pollute the kitchen and so

may not enter it, so too in the workplace a menstruating woman istaken to pollute the loom and may not enter the room where the looms

1. For relevant publications of the World Institute for Development Economics

Research, see my "Non-relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach," Midwest Studies in

Philosophy13 (1988): 32-53 (for an expanded version, see "Non-relative Virtues: An

Aristotelian Approach," in The Quality of Life, ed. M. Nussbaum and A. Sen [Oxford,

1992]), and "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings," in Human Capabilities:

Women,Men, and Equality,ed. M. Nussbaum and J. Glover (Oxford, in press).

2. A longer version of this article, entitled "Human Functioning and Social Justice:In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism," has appeared in Political Theory 0 (1992): 202-

46. For a closely related discussion, see also "Human Capabilities, Female Human Be-

ings." I have discussed issues related to my argument here in the following articles: "Na-

ture, Function, and Capability," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy,suppl. (1988), pp.

145-84, "Non-relative Virtues" and its expanded version, "Aristotelian Social Democ-

racy,"in Liberalismand the Good,ed. R. B. Douglass et al. (New York, 1990), pp. 203-52,

and "Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics," in a volume on the

philosophy of Bernard Williams, ed. R. Harrison and J. Altham (Cambridge, in press).

3. Much of the material I describe in the following pages has been published in

Frederique Apffel Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin, eds., Dominating Knowledge:Develop-

ment, Culture, and Resistance (Oxford, 1990). On the issue of "embeddedness" andmenstruation taboos, see S. A. Marglin, "Losing Touch: The Cultural Conditions of

Worker Accommodation and Resistance," pp. 217-82. For related general issues, see

S. A. Marglin, "Towardthe Decolonization of the Mind," pp. 1-28. On Sittala Devi, see

F. A. Marglin, "Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge," pp. 102-44; for related argu-

ments, see Ashis Nandy and Shiv Visvanathan, "Modern Medicine and Its Non-modern

Critics," pp. 144-84.

S47

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

are kept. An economist from India objects that this example is repel-lent rather than admirable, for surely such practices both degrade the

women in question and inhibit their freedom. The first economist'scollaborator, an elegant French anthropologist (a woman who would, I

suspect, object violently to a purity check at the seminar room door)addresses the objector in contemptuous tones. Doesn't he realize thatthere is, in these matters, no privileged place to stand? This, after all,has been shown by both Derrida and Foucault. Doesn't he know thathe is neglecting the radical otherness of these village people by bring-ing his Western essentialist values into the picture?

2. The same French anthropologist now delivers her paper. She

expresses regret that the introduction of smallpox vaccination toIndia by the British eradicated the cult of Sittala Devi, the goddessto whom one used to pray in order to avert smallpox. Here, she says,is another example of Western neglect of difference. Someone (it

might have been me) objects that it is surely better to be healthyrather than ill, to live rather than to die. The frosty answer comesback: Western essentialist medicine conceives of things in terms ofbinary oppositions; life is opposed to death, health to disease. But ifwe cast off this blinkered way of seeing things, we will comprehendthe radical otherness of Indian traditions. At this point, Eric Hobs-

bawm, who has been listening to the proceedings in increasingly

uneasy silence, rises to deliver a blistering indictment of the tradi-tionalism and relativism that prevail in this group. He lists examplesof how the appeal to tradition has been used, in history, to defend

various types of oppression and violence. His final example is that ofNational Socialism. In the chaos that ensues, most of the traditional-ist social scientists (above all the ones from abroad, who do not know

who Hobsbawm is) demand that Hobsbawm be asked to leave theconference room. The radical American economist, covered withembarrassment at this evidence of a split between his relativism andhis left-wing affiliations, convinces them, with much difficulty, to letHobsbawm remain.

3. We shift now to a philosophical conference organized by me and

by the objector of my first story, the economist from India who pro-

tested the degradation of women by menstruation taboos. (He alsoholds the unsophisticated view that life is opposed to death.) His paper

contains much essentialist talk of human functioning and human ca-pability; he begins to speak of freedom of choice as a basic human

good. At this point he is interrupted by the radical economist, who

points out, with the air of one in the know, that contemporary

anthropology has shown that non-Western people are not especially at-

tached to freedom of choice. His example: a new book on Japan has

S48

8/12/2019 438424



shown that Japanese males, when they get home from work, do not

wish to choose what to eat for dinner, what to wear, and so on. They

wish all these choices to be taken out of their hands by their wives.4 Aheated exchange follows about what this example really shows. I leave

it to your imagination to reconstruct it; it did have some humorous di-

mensions. But in the end the confidence of the radical economist isunshaken: we are both victims of bad essentialist thinking who fail to

recognize the beauty of otherness.These examples are not unusual; I could cite many more. What we

see in such cases is an odd phenomenon indeed. Highly intelligentpeople-people deeply committed to the good of women and men in

developing countries, people who think of themselves as progressiveand feminist and antiracist-are taking up positions that converge, asHobsbawm correctly saw, with the positions of reaction, oppression,and sexism. Under the banner of their radical and politically correct

"anti-essentialism" march ancient religious taboos, the luxury of the

pampered husband, ill health, ignorance, and death. (And in my own

essentialist way, I say it at the outset, I do hold that death is opposedto life in the most binary way imaginable, and freedom to slavery, and

hungerto

adequatenutrition, and

ignoranceto

knowledge.)Essentialism is becoming a dirty word in the academy, and in those

parts of human life that are influenced by it. Essentialism-which forpresent purposes I shall understand as the view that human life hascertain central defining features-is linked by its opponents with an

ignorance of history, with lack of sensitivity to the voices of women andminorities.5 It is taken, usually without extended argument, to be in

league with racism and sexism, with "patriarchal" thinking generally,whereas extreme relativism is taken to be a recipe for social progress.

In this article I shall question these connections. I shall grant thatsome criticisms of some forms of essentialism have been fruitful andimportant: they have established the ethical debate on a more defen-sible metaphysical foundation and have redirected our gaze fromunexamined abstract assumptions to the world and its actual history.But I shall argue that those who would throw out all appeals to adeterminate account of the human being, human functioning, and

4. See S. A. Marglin, "Toward the Decolonization of the Mind," pp. 1-28, citing

Takeo Doi, TheAnatomyof Dependence Tokyo, 1971).5. For this reason, I generally prefer not to use the vocabulary of "essentialism" in de-

scribing my view of the central human functions. I do so here on account of the occa-

sion, and in the expectation that my account of 'essentialism' will be closely examined

for what my recommendations, in fact, entail. For my preferred formulations, see "Aris-

totle on Human Nature," "Aristotelian Social Democracy," and "Human Capabilities,

Female Human Beings."

S49

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

human flourishing are throwing away far too much-in terms even,and especially, of their own compassionate ends.

I shall argue, first, that the legitimate criticisms of essentialism stillleave room for essentialism of a kind-for a historically sensitive ac-count of the most basic human needs and human functions. I shallsketch such an account, showing how it can meet the legitimate objec-tions. I shall then argue that without such an account we have no ade-

quate basis for an account of social justice and the ends of socialdistribution. With it, on the other hand, we have what we urgently needat this time-the basis for a global ethic and a fully international ac-count of distributive justice. Finally, I shall argue that without essential-ism of a kind we are deprived of two moral sentiments that are

absolutely necessary if we are to live together decently in the world:

compassion and respect.6

THE ASSAULT ON ESSENTIALISM

Many contemporary attacks on essentialism are attacks on metaphysicalrealism-on the idea, that is, that there is some determinate way the

world is, apart from human history and human interpretations. (Theconnection with essentialism comes from the claim that a normative ac-count of "human nature" is part of this independent structure of the

universe.) Recent heavy attacks on such conceptions, mounted fromthe philosophy of language and the philosophy of science, have been

sufficiently strong and the realist answers to them sufficiently problem-atic thus far that it would be unwise to base a contemporary ethical con-

ception on the truth of this sort of realism.Such realist conceptions, however, have been rejected by many phi-

losophers who, nonetheless, do not abandon a kind of essentialism.7For one might believe that the deepest examination of human historyand human cognition from within still reveals a more or less determi-nate account of the human being, one that divides its essential from

6. It is important to note that my account of Aristotle is very different from someother well-known ones in current political thought-in particular the Aristotle criti-cized in Bernard Williams's Ethics and the Limitsof Philosophy Cambridge, Mass., 1985);and the Aristotle of Alasdair Maclntyre's Whose ustice?WhichRationality? Notre Dame,

Ind., 1988). I discuss Williams's Aristotle in "Aristotle on Human Nature," and Mac-Intyre's in a review in the New YorkReviewof Books December 7, 1989), pp. 36-41.

7. In this category, as close relatives of my view, I would place the "internal-realist"

conception of Hilarv Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981), The ManyFaces of Realism (La Salle, Ill., 1987), Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.,

1990); and Charles Taylor, Sourcesof the Self:The Making of ModernIdentity Cambridge,

Mass., 1989).

S50

8/12/2019 438424


Martha C. NRussbaumo SocialJustice and Universalism

its accidental properties. Such an account would say:Take away prop-erties Xand Yand Z (a suntan, let us say, or a knowledge of Chinese,

or an income of $40,000 a year) and we will still have a human beingon our hands. On the other hand, take away properties A and B and C

(the ability to think about the future, say, or the ability to respond to

the claims of others, or the ability to choose and act) and we no

longer have a human life at all. Since I wish to defend a sort of essen-

tialism that is not based on the truth of extreme metaphysical realism,I shall focus here on the charges against essentialism that are likely to

be brought against this sort of "internalist"position, as well as againstessentialisms of the metaphysical-realist sort.

Neglect of historical and cultural diJfferences.The opposition charges

that any attempt to pick out some elements of human life as more fun-

damental than others, even without appeal to a transhistorical reality,is bound to be insufficiently respectful of actual historical and cultural

differences. People, it is claimed, understand human life and human-

ness in widely different ways; any attempt to produce a list of "essential

properties" is bound to enshrine certain understandings of the human

and to demote others. Usually, the objector continues, this takes the

form ofenshrining

theunderstanding

of a dominantgroup

at the ex-

pense of minority understandings.

Neglect of autonomy. A different objection is pressed by liberal oppo-nents of essentialism; usually these opponents themselves are willing

to be essentialist about the central importance of human freedom and

autonomy.8 They object that, by determining in advance what ele-

ments of human life have most importance, the essentialist fails to re-

spect the right of people to choose a plan of life according to their

own lights, determining what is most central and what is not. Such

evaluative choices must be left to each citizen. For this reason, politicsmust refuse itself a determinate theory of the human being and the

human good.Prejudicial application. If we operate with a determinate conception

of the human being that is meant to have some normative moral and

political weight, we must also, in applying it, ask which beings we take

to fall under the concept. And here the objector notes that, all too eas-

ily, the powerless can be excluded. Aristotle himself, it is pointed out,

held that women and slaves were not full-fledged human beings; and

since his politics was based on his essentialism, the failure of these

8. See John Rawls, A Theoryof Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). I discuss Rawls'sposi-

tion and its relationship to the Aristotelian view in detail in "Aristotelian Social Democ-

racy," "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings," and "Human Functioning and

Social Justice," with references to later articles in which Rawls further develops his posi-

tion on the role of a conception of the good in his theory.

S51

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

beings (in his view) to exhibit the desired essence led to their politicalexclusion and oppression.

Each of these objections has some force. I shall ask later how muchforce each of them has, and whether there is a version of essentialismthat can survive them. But what is alarming about the current debate is

that, all too often, this further inquiry has not taken place. Very often,as in my Helsinki examples, the collapse of metaphysical realism istaken to entail not only the collapse of essentialism about the human

being but also a retreat into an extreme relativism about all questionsof evaluation. For some anti-essentialisms, evaluation becomes a matterof power; for others, it becomes a matter of play and arbitrary self-

assertion; for still others, it collapses into maximization of utility. Nor-mative accounts of the human being go the way of everything else: givethe one you like, and let's see who is influenced by it. None can be saidto be better than any other, for any good reasons.

The proponents of these extreme anti-essentialist views usually takethemselves to be politically progressive and compassionate, moved byconcern for women and minorities, poor and excluded people every-where. Much of their rhetoric trades on this, suggesting that if onedisagrees with them, one is manifesting at best callousness, at

worstracism or sexism. But consider for a moment what the conclusions ofthese allegedly compassionate critics seem to entail. Stanley Fish saysthat all judgment is a matter of power-no good and bad reasons.9This implies that one can never give a good reason for criticizing theverdicts of established authority: when one does so one is by defini-tion just playing for power and is thus no better, morally, than one'sopponent. And where the game is power, weakness is worse. The poorare losers, and that's that. For Jacques Derrida, it is a matter of free

play.10 But doesn't this imply that if I want to play around with tor-ture and slavery and you want to stop me, nothing can be said aboutyour moral superiority to me? You have your way of playing; I havemine. Derrida plainly would not like this political conclusion, buthis position, I think, leaves him no way to rule it out. For BarbaraHerrnstein Smith, all evaluation becomes a matter of self-interestedmaximizing of expected utility.1' Social choices become a matter ofaggregating such preferences. But then for Smith, as for the ChicagoSchool economists on whom she explicitly relies, there is no room

9. For a discussion of Fish's views, see Martha Nussbaum, "Sophistry about Conven-tions," in my Love's Knowledge:Essays on Philosophyand Literature(New York, 1990),

pp. 220-29, as well as "Human Functioning and Social Justice," pp. 210-11.10. Ibid.

11. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies f Value (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), whichI discuss in "Human Functioning and Social Justice," pp. 211-12.

S52

8/12/2019 438424


Martha C. Nussbaum o SocialJustice and Universalism

for criticizing the social status quo. If people want to oppress other

people or deny them resources, let's see if that's the way the social ag-

gregation comes out.Now we are in a better position to understand why alleged radicals

nearly threw Eric Hobsbawm out of the room. The commitment that

he, as a socialist, has to a determinate conception of human need and

human flourishing is profoundly at odds with the new relativism, which

takes itself to be the truly progressive and compassionate force. To this

company, Hobsbawm and Amartya Sen (who was, I now reveal, the ob-

jector of my first two examples, and the speaker in the third) lookedlike unfashionable paternalistic authorities, insensitive to the play of

difference. On the other hand, Hobsbawm and Sen saw what the rela-tivists did not, perhaps, so clearly see-that to give up on all evaluation

and, in particular, on a normative account of the human being and hu-

man functioning is to turn things over to the free play of forces in a

world situation where the social forces affecting the lives of the poor,women, and minorities are rarely benign.

But, fortunately, we do not have to give up on evaluation. The new

relativists believe that the rejection of metaphysical realism entails

their extreme position, in which good reasons cannot be given for

evaluative choices. But this is false. When we get rid of the hope ofa transcendent metaphysical grounding for our evaluative judg-

ments-about the human being as about anything else-we are not

left with free play. For we have everything we always really had all

along: the exchange of reasons and arguments by human beings

within history, in which, for reasons that are historical and human

(but not the worse for that), we hold some things to be more valu-

able than others, some more important than others, as constituents

of thelife

wecall our

own.12I shall now

proposesuch an

accountof

the human being; later I shall show how it responds to the three

objections.

AN ESSENTIALIST PROPOSAL: THE BASICHUMAN FUNCTIONS

Here, then, is a sketch of an account of the most important functions

of the human being, in terms of which human life is defined within his-

tory. The idea is that, once we identify the most important functions ofhuman life, we are then in a position to ask what social and political in-stitutions are doing about them. Are they giving people what they need

in order to be capable of functioning in all these human ways?

12. See esp. Taylor.

S53

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

Elsewhere I have called this account of the human functions the

"thick, vague theory of the good."13 The point of this name is, first,

to insist on the normative character of the list. We are not pretend-ing to discover some value-neutral facts about ourselves, indepen-dently of all evaluation; instead, we are conducting an especially

probing and basic sort of evaluative inquiry. The name is also cho-

sen to contrast the account with John Rawls's "thin theory of the

good," which insists on confining the list of "primary goods" used bythe members of the Original Position to a group of allegedly all-

purpose means that have a role in any conception of the human

good whatever. By contrast, my Aristotelian conception is concernedwith ends and with the overall shape and content of the human

form of life. Finally, the list is "vague," deliberately so, for it aims to

leave room for nmuchmultiple specification in accordance with var-

ied local and personal conceptions.This conception is not metaphysical in the realist sense, nor extra-

historical, nor peculiar to a single metaphysical or religious tradi-

tion. It aims to be as universal as possible; indeed, its guidingintuition directs it to cross religious and cultural gulfs. For it begins

from two facts: first, that we recognize others as human across manydivisions of time and place. The account attempts to describe the

bases for these recognitions by mapping out those features that are

thought to constitute a life as human, wherever it is. Second, we do

have a broadly shared, general consensus about the features whose

absence means the end of a human form of life. In medicine and

mythology alike, we have an idea that some transitions or changesjust are not compatible with a being's continued existence as a mem-ber of the human kind. This is, really, just another way of coming at

the first fact noted above, for it is another way of identifying the mostcentral features of our common humanity. The account emergesfrom a wide variety of self-understandings of people in many timesand places, from the stories people tell themselves when they askwhat it is to live as a being with certain abilities that set it apart from

the rest of the living beings in the world of nature, and with, on the

other hand, certain limits that derive from membership in the worldof nature.'4 I claim that we do share at least the very general outlines

of such a conception; and convergence across cultures gives us rea-

sons for optimism that if we proceed in this way, using our imagina-

13. See Nussbaum, "Aristotelian Social Democracy."

14. For fuller development and further discussion of the relationship between spe-

cies identity and personal identity, see Nussbaum, "Aristotle on Human Nature."

S54

8/12/2019 438424



tions, we will have a theory that is not the mere projection of our

own customs but is also fully international and a basis for cross-

cultural attunement.The list of features we get if we reflect in this way is, and should be,

open-ended. For we want to allow the possibility that we will learn from

other societies to recognize things about ourselves that we had not

seen before. The list, moreover, is heterogeneous, for it contains bothlimits against which we press and capabilities through which we aspire.This is not surprising, since we begin from the intuitive idea of a crea-

ture who is both capable and needy.Here, then, as a first approximation, is a story about what seems to

be part of any life we will count as a human life.l5

Level 1 of the Thick, Vague Conception: The Shape ofthe Human Form of Life

1. Mortality.All human beings face death and, after a certain age,know that they face it. This fact shapes more or less every other ele-

ment of human life. Moreover, all human beings have an aversion to

death. Although in some circumstances death will be preferred to the

available alternatives, the death of a loved one or the prospect of one'sown death is an occasion for grief and/or fear.

2. The human body.We live all our lives in bodies of a certain sort,whose possibilities and vulnerabilities do not, as such, belong to one

human society rather than another. These bodies, far more similar

than dissimilar (given the enormous range of possibilities), are ourhomes, so to speak-opening certain options and denying others, giv-

ing us certain needs and also certain possibilities for excellence. The

fact that any given human being might have lived anywhere and be-

longed to any culture is a great part of what grounds our mutual recog-nitions; this fact, in turn, has a great deal to do with the general

humanness of the body, its great distinctness from other bodies. The

experience of the body is, to be sure, culturally shaped; but the bodyitself-not culturally variant in its nutritional and other, related re-

quirements-sets limits on what can be experienced, ensuring a greatdeal of overlap.

Under the body, we can enumerate several additional features that I

shall not discuss further here: the need for food and drink, a need for

15. For methodology and a fuller account of each of these items, see Nussbaum,

"Aristotelian Social Democracy." For further methodological remarks, see Nussbaum,

"Aristotle on Human Nature," and "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings."

S55

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

shelter, sexual need and desire, the ability to move and delight in be-

ing mobile, the capacity for pleasure and the aversion to pain.16

3. Cognitive capability: perceiving, imagining, thinking. All human be-ings have these abilities in at least some form, and they are taken to be

of central importance.4. Early infant development. All human beings begin as hungry babies,

soon aware of their own helplessness, experiencing their alternatingcloseness to and distance from that and those on whom they depend.This common condition of early life, however differently shaped bydifferent social arrangements, gives rise to overlapping experience inthe area of emotions such as grief, love, and anger. This, in turn, is a

major source of our ability to recognize ourselves in the lives of otherswho differ from us in many ways.

5. Practical reason. All human beings participate (or try to) in the

planning and managing of their own lives by evaluating and then try-ing to enact their evaluations in their lives.

6. Affiliation with other human beings. All human beings recognizeand feel some sense of affiliation and concern for other human beings.Moreover, we value the form of life that is constituted by these recog-nitions and affiliations.

7. Relatedness to other species and to nature. Human beings recognizethat they are not the only living things in their world, that they are ani-mals living alongside other animals and also alongside plants in a uni-verse that, as a complex interlocking order, both supports and limitsthem. We are dependent upon that order in countless ways;and we alsosense that we owe that order some respect and concern, however muchwe may differ about exactly what we owe, to whom, and on what basis.17

8. Humor and play. Human life, wherever it is lived, makes room forrecreation and laughter. The forms play takes are

enormously varied,and yet we recognize other humans across cultural barriers as the ani-mals who laugh.

9. Separateness. However much we live to and for others, we are,each of us, "one in number," proceeding on a separate path throughthe world from birth to death. Each person feels only his or her ownpain and not anyone else's. Even the most intense forms of human in-teraction are experiences of responsiveness, not of fusion. These obvi-

16. Strictly speaking, I consider pleasure/pain to be a separate item, since one mightargue about the extent to which it is a bodily function. For the same reason, I also treatcognitive capabilities, practical reason, and emotion as separate items. See Nussbaum,"Aristotelian Social Democracy."

17. In "Aristotelian Social Democracy" and "Human Capabilities, Female Human Be-ings," I argue that we should recognize as essential two different forms of affiliation-close personal ties and broader civic or societal ties.

S56

8/12/2019 438424


Martha C. Nussbaum o SocialJustice and Universalism S57

ous facts need to be mentioned, especially when we hear of theabsence of "individualism" in other societies.

10. Strong separateness.Because of separateness, each human lifehas, so to speak, its own peculiar context and surroundings-objects,

places, a history, particular friendships, locations, sexual ties-thatare not exactly the same as anyone else's, and in terms of which the

person to some extent identifies herself. Though societies vary a greatdeal in the degree and type of strong separateness that they permitand foster, there is no life yet known that really manages (as Plato

wished) not to use the words "mine" and "not mine" in some personaland nonshared way.

As I have said, the list is composed of two different sorts of items:limits and capabilities. As far as capabilities go, to call them part of hu-

manness is to make a very basic sort of evaluation. It is to say that a life

without this item would be too lacking, too impoverished, to be human

at all. Obviously, then, it could not be a goodhuman life. So this list of

capabilities is a minimal conception of the good. With the limits,

things are more complicated. For we have said that human life, in its

general form, consists in a struggle against these limits. Humans do notwish to be

hungry,to feel

pain,to die. And

yet,we cannot assume that

the correct evaluative conclusion is to try as hard as possible to get ridof the limits altogether. It is characteristic of human life to prefer re-current hunger plus eating to a life with neither hunger nor eating, to

prefer sexual desire and its satisfaction to a life with neither desire norsatisfaction. Even where death is concerned, the desire for immor-

tality-which human beings certainly seem to have-is a peculiar de-

sire, for it is not clear that the complete loss of one's finitude can

coherently be desired for oneself or for someone whom one loves. This

seems to be a desire for a transition to a way of life so wholly different,with such different values and ends, that it is not clear that the individ-ual's identity could be preserved. So the evaluative conclusion needs tobe expressed with much caution, clearly, in terms of what would be a

humanly good way of countering the limitation.

Things now get complicated. For we want to describe two distinctthresholds: a threshold of capability to function, beneath which a life

will be so impoverished that it will not be human at all, and a somewhat

higher threshold, beneath which those characteristic functions are

available in such a reduced way that, though we may judge the form oflife a human one, we will not think it a good human life. The latterthreshold is the one that will eventually concern us most when we turnto public policy, for we do not want societies to make their citizens cap-able only of the bare minimum. These are clearly, in many areas, twodistinct thresholds requiring distinct levels of resource and capability.

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

And yet there is need for caution here. For in many cases the move fromhuman life to good human life is supplied by the citizen's own powers

of choice and self-definition, in such a waythat once society places themabove the first threshold, moving above the second is more or less up tothem. This is especially likely to be so, I think, in areas such as affiliationand practical reasoning, where what we want from society and fromother associations within it, such as the family, is a development of the

child so that it passes the first threshold. On the other hand, it is clearthat where bodily health and nutrition, for example, are concerned,there is a considerable difference between the two thresholds-a differ-

ence made by resources over which individuals do not have full control.

Clearly there is a continuum here; and it is always going to be difficultto saywhere the upper threshold, especially, should be located.

Here, as the next level of the conception of the human being, I shall

now specify certain basic functional capabilities at which societies

should aim for their citizens (in accordance with the political idea to

be more fully investigated in the next section). In other words, this will

be an account of the second threshold, although in some areas it seemsto me to coincide with the first. I shall actually introduce the list as a list

of the correlatedcapabilities

rather than of actualfunctionings,

since I

shall argue that capability to function, not actual functioning, should

be the goal of legislation and public planning.

Level 2 of the Thick, Vague Conception:

Basic Human Functional Capabilities

1. Being able to live out a complete human life, as far as is possible;

not dying prematurely or before one's life is so reduced as to be notworth living

2. Being able to have good health, adequate nourishment, adequateshelter, opportunities for sexual satisfaction; being able to move from

place to place3. Being able to avoid unnecessary and nonbeneficial pain and to

have pleasurable experiences4. Being able to use the five senses; being able to imagine, think, and

reason

5. Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside our-

selves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence;in general, to love, to grieve, to feel longing and gratitude

6. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in

critical reflection about the planning of one's own life7. Being able to live for and to others, to recognize and show con-

cern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of familial andsocial interaction

S58

8/12/2019 438424



8. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals,

plants, and the world of nature

9. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities10. Being able to live one's own life and nobody else's

10a. Being able to live one's own life in one's very own surround-

ings and contextThe Aristotelian essentialist claims that a life lacking in any one of

these, no matter what else it has, will be to that extent lacking in hu-

manness. So it would be reasonable to take these ten capabilities as a

focus for concern in asking how public policy can promote the good of

human beings. Among these, two play a special role as architectonic,

holding the whole enterprise together and making it human. Thesetwo are practical reason and affiliation. All animals nourish themselves,

use their senses, move about, and so forth. What is distinctive, and dis-

tinctively valuable to us, about the human way of doing all this is that

each and every one of these functions is, first of all, planned and orga-nized by practical reason and, second, done with and to others. Hu-

man nourishing is not like animal nourishing, nor human sex like

animal sex-first, because human beings can choose to regulate their

nutrition and their sexual activity by their very own practical reason,and also, because they do so not as solitary beings but as beings who are

bound to other humans by ties of mutual attention and concern.18

ANSWERING THE OBJECTIONS

Concerning (a) neglect of historical and cultural differences, the Aristote-

lian begins by insisting that the thick, vague conception is vague pre-

cisely in order to accommodate such differences. In its very design the

list allows for the possibility of multiple specifications of each of the

components. It does so in several different ways. First, the constitutive

circumstances of human life, while broadly shared, are themselves re-

alized in different forms in different societies. The fear of death, the

love of play, relationships of friendship and affiliation with others,

even the experience of the bodily appetites-these never turn up in

simply the vague and general form in which I have introduced them

here but always in some specific and historically rich cultural realiza-

tion, which can profoundly shape not only the conceptions used by

the citizens in these areas but also their experiences themselves.Nonetheless, we do have in these areas of our common humanity

sufficient overlap to sustain a general conversation focusing on our

18. For the relationship of these ideas to Marx's account of truly human functioning

in the Economicand PhilosophicManuscriptsof 1844, see Nussbaum, "Nature, Function,

and Capability" (n. 2 above).

S59

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

common problems and prospects. And sometimes the common con-versation will permit us to criticize some conceptions of the ground-

ing experiences themselves as being at odds with other things humanbeings want to do and to be.19

When we are choosing a conception of good functioning with re-

spect to these circumstances, we can expect an even greater degree of

plurality to become evident. Here the Aristotelian essentialist wantsto retain plurality in two significantly different ways:what we may callthe way of plural specification and the way of local specification.20

Plural specification means what its name implies. The political plan,while using a determinate conception of the good at a high level of

generality, leaves a great deal of latitude for citizens to specify each ofthe components more concretely and with much variety, in accordance

with local traditions or individual tastes.

As for local specification, when Aristotelian practical reasoning is

well done, it is always done with a rich sensitivity to the concrete con-

text, to the characters of the agents and their social situation. This

means that in addition to the pluralism I have just described, the Aris-totelian needs to consider a different sort of plural specification of the

good. For sometimes what is a good wayof promoting education in one

part of the world will be completely ineffectual in another. Forms of

affiliation that flourish in one community may prove impossible to sus-

tain in another. In such cases, the Aristotelian must aim at some con-

crete specification of the general list that suits and develops out oflocal conditions. This will alwaysmost reasonably be done in a partici-

patory dialogue with those who are most deeply immersed in those

conditions. For though Aristotelianism does not hesitate to criticizetradition where tradition perpetrates injustice or oppression, it also

does not believe in saying anything at all without rich and full informa-tion gathered not so much from detached study as from the voices ofthose who live the ways of life in question.

The liberal charges the Aristotelian with (b) neglectof autonomy,argu-

ing that any such determinate conception removes from the citizens

the chance to make their own choices about the good life. Here two

points should be stressed. First, the list is a list of capabilities, not a list

of actual functions, precisely because the conception is designed to

leave room for choice. Government is not directed to push citizens into

acting in certain valued ways; instead, it is directed to make sure that allhuman beings have the necessary resources and conditions for actingin those ways. It leaves the choice up to them. A person with plenty of

19. See, e.g., Nussbaum, "Non-relative Virtues" (n. 1 above).20. For fuller development, see Nussbaum, "Aristotelian Social Democracy.'

S60

8/12/2019 438424



food can alwayschoose to fast.21Second, this respect for choice is built

deeply into the list itself, in the architectonic role it gives to practical

reasoning. One of the most central capabilities promoted by the con-ception will be that of choice itself, which is made among the most fun-

damental elements of the human essence. Third, we should note that

the major liberal view in this area, the view of John Rawls, does not

shrink from essentialism of our internal sort in just this area. For Rawls

insists that satisfactions that are not the outgrowth of one's very own

choices have no moral worth, and he conceives of the "two moral pow-ers" (analogous to my "practical reasoning") and of sociability (corre-

sponding to my "affiliation")as built into the definition of the parties in

the original position, and thus as necessary constraints on any outcome

they will select. In this regard, the liberal view and the Aristotelian view

are more in harmony than one might initially suppose.22 Finally, the

Aristotelian insists that choice is not pure spontaneity flourishing inde-

pendently of material and social conditions. If one cares about auton-

omy, then one must care about the rest of the form of life that supportsit and the material conditions that enable that form of life. Thus the

Aristotelian claims that her own comprehensive concern with flourish-

ingacross all areas of life is a better

wayof

promotingchoice than is the

liberal's narrower concern with spontaneity alone, which sometimes

tolerates situations in which individuals are in other ways cut off from

the fully human use of their faculties.

The Aristotelian conception can indeed be (c) prejudiciallyapplied.It

is possible to say all the things we have said here about humanness and

then to deny that women, or blacks, or other minorities fall under the

concept. How should the essentialist deal with this problem? First, it

should be stressed that the fact that a conception can be withheld for

reasons of prejudice or lack of love undermines not the conception it-self but the person who withholds it. One may, looking at a minority

whom one hates, speak of them as beetles or ants, and one may carry

this denial of humanity into the sphere of law and public action. Does

this undermine our idea that a conception of the human being is a

good basis for a moral and political conception? It seems to me that

it does not. For what such cases reveal is the great power of the

21. This is a central idea in the ethical theory of Amartya Sen; see his "Equalityof

What?"in his Choice,Welfare, nd MeasurementOxford, 1982), pp. 353-69, and Commodi-ties and Capabilities Amsterdam, 1985). For related arguments, see Nussbaum, "Aristote-

lian Social Democracy." Sen's views are excellently discussed by David Crocker in

"Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Nussbaum's and Sen's Development

Ethic," PoliticalTheory 0 (1992): 584-612.

22. For detailed discussion and references, see Nussbaum, "Aristotelian Social

Democracy."

S61

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

conception of the human. Acknowledging this other being as a mem-

ber of the very same kind would have generated a sense of affiliation

and responsibility; this was why the self-deceptive strategy of split-ting the other off from one's own species seemed so urgent and so se-

ductive. Furthermore, by using a concrete and determinate list of

elements, we make it difficult for such self-deceptive stratagems to suc-

ceed. With a vague moral notion such as 'person', it is sometimes all

too easy to avoid the recognition that a being whom one is confrontingfalls under the concept. With 'human being', on the other hand, it is

always possible to say to such an evader, Look at these beings: you can-

not fail to grant that they use their senses, that they think about the

future, that they engage in ethical conversation, that they have needsand vulnerabilities similar to your own. Grant this, and you grant that

they are human. Grant that they are human, and you grant that theyhave needs for flourishing that exert a moral pull on anyone who

would deny them. As I have said, it is always possible to deny such an

appeal, even when looking into the face of a woman with whom one

lives and converses and bears children. On the other hand, it is impos-sible to do so with full and honest and consistent reflection. The con-cept of the human pushes us toward moral acknowledgment.

I have focused so far on the higher-level (developed) human capa-

bilities that make a life a good human life; I have not spoken at lengthabout the empirical basis for applying the concept 'human being' to acreature before us. The basis cannot, of course, be the presence of the

higher-level capabilities on my list, for one of the main points of thelist is to enable us to say, of some being before us, that this personmight possibly come to have these higher-level capabilities but doesnot now have them. It is that gap between humanness and its full re-

alization that exerts a claim on society and government (as I shall ar-gue below). What, then, is to be the basis for determining that this

being is a human being, one of those whose functioning concerns us?I claim that it is the presence of a lower-level (undeveloped) capabilityto perform the functions in question such that, with the provision ofsuitable support and education, the being would be capable of choos-ing those functions.23

There is, of course, enormous potential for abuse in determiningwho has these basic capabilities. The history of I.Q. testing is just one

chapter in an inglorious saga of prejudiced capability testing that goesback at least to the Noble Lie contrived to justify the class structure ofPlato's Republic 414c-415d). Therefore we should, I think, proceed asif every offspring of two human parents has the basic capabilities, un-

23. For fuller development of this idea, see Nussbaum, "Nature, Function, and Capa-

bility," and "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings."

S62

8/12/2019 438424



less and until long experience has convinced us that the damage to

that individual's condition is so great that it could never in any way, no

matter how great the expenditure of resources, arrive at the level ofhigher capability. (Certain patients with irreversible senile dementia or

a permanent vegetative condition would fall into this category, as

would certain very severely damaged infants. It would then fall to othermoral arguments to decide what treatment we owe to such individuals,who are unable ever to reach the higher capabilities to function hu-

manly. It certainly does not follow that we would be licensed to treat

such individuals harshly;we simply would not aim at making them fully

capable of the various functions on our list.)

Concerning individuals who can profit from education, care, and re-sources-and I emphasize that in practice this is to be taken to include

all individuals, with the very rare exceptions noted above-the Aristo-telian view holds that these basic human capabilities exert a claim on

society that they should be developed. Human beings are creatures

such that, if they are provided with the right educational and material

support, they can become capable of the major human functions.

When their basic capabilities are deprived of the nurture that wouldtransform them into the

higher-level capabilitiesthat

figureon

mylist,

humans are fruitless, cut off, in some way but a shadow of themselves.

They are like actors who never get to go on the stage, or a musical score

that is never performed. Their very being makes forward reference to

functioning; thus if functioning never arrives on the scene they are

hardly even what they are. This basic intuition underlies the recom-mendations that the Aristotelian view will make for public action.

Certain basic and central human endowments have a claim to be devel-

oped; they exert that claim on others and especially, as Aristotle saw,

on government.24

OUR NEED FOR ESSENTIALISM INPUBLIC POLICY25

I have said that we urgently need a version of essentialism in public life.

If we reject it, we reject guidance that is crucial in constructing an

adequate account of distributive justice to guide public policy in many

24. Ibid.

25. This section has been much condensed; my "Human Functioning and Social

Justice" (n. 2 above) gives a fuller account of the objections to utilitarianism and also

to a Rawlsian liberal approach to distribution. For the basic political conception and its

relation to the ethical conception of the basic functions and capabilities, see Nussbaum,

"Nature, Function, and Capability" and "Aristotelian Social Democracy." For a very

clear account, see Crocker.

S63

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

areas. It is time for me to substantiate these claims. I shall focus on thearea with which I began: the assessment of the "qualityof life" in devel-

oping countries, with a view to formulating policy both within eachseparate country and between one country and another. The generaldirection of my argument should by now be clear: we cannot tell how a

country is doing unless we know how the people in it are able to func-tion in the central human ways.And without an account of the good-however vague-that we take to be shared, we have no adequate basisfor saying what is missing from the lives of the poor or marginalized or

excluded, no adequate way of justifying the claim that any deeply em-

bedded tradition we encounter is unjust.Public policy analyses of the quality of life in developing countries

often use measures that are extremely crude.26 It is still common tofind countries ranked simply according to G.N.P. per capita-even

though this measure takes no account of the distribution of re-sources and thus can give good marks to a country with enormous in-

equalities. Such an approach, furthermore, does not look at all at

other human goods that are not reliably correlated with the presenceof resources: infant mortality, for example, or access to education, or

thequality

of racial andgender

relations, or thepresence

or absenceof political freedoms. Such an approach might fail to arouse the ire

of the anti-essentialist, since it appears to take no stand on questionsof value. And of course it is a deep part of neoclassical economics to

claim to be value-free in this way. But, first of all, this approach reallydoes take a stand, albeit a perverse one, for it assumes that the pres-ence of more money and resources is the one important determinant

of life quality. And, second, insofar as it fails to take a stand on other

independently varying components of the human good, such as free-

dom, or health, or education, it fails to offer useful guidance to thesocial scientist who seeks to understand how countries are doing, orto the policymaker who seeks to make things better.

One step up in degree of sophistication, we have an approach thatmeasures the quality of life in terms of utility. This would be done, for

example, by polling people on whether they are satisfied with their

current health status or their current level of education. This ap-proach at least has the merit of focusing on people and viewing re-

sources as valuable because of what they do in human lives. But its

narrow focus on subjective expressions of satisfaction brings with it se-rious problems. Desires and subjective preferences are not alwaysreli-

able indices of what a person really needs, of what would really be

required to make that life a flourishing one. For they are highly mal-

leable. The rich and pampered easily become accustomed to their

26. See Nussbaum, "Non-relative Virtues," in The Quality of Life (n. 1 above).

S64

8/12/2019 438424



luxury and view with pain and frustration a life in which they are

treated just like everyone else. The poor and deprived frequently ad-

just their expectations and aspirations to the low level of life they haveknown; thus their failure to express dissatisfaction can often be a signthat they are getting on as best they can, rather than as a sign that they

really do have enough. This is all the more true when deprivation of

education and other information about alternative ways of life is in

question. Circumstances confine the imagination.27Thus, if we rely on utility (in its simple economic form) as our mea-

sure of life quality, we most often will get results that support the status

quo and oppose radical change. A poll of widowers and widows in India

showed that the widowers were full of complaints about their healthstatus; the widows, by contrast, in most cases ranked their health status

as "good." However, a medical examination showed that the widows

were actually suffering far more than the males from diseases associ-

ated with nutritional deficiency. The point was that they had lived all

their lives expecting that women will eat less, and the weakened health

status produced in this way was second nature to them. Some yearslater, after a period of political "consciousness-raising," the study was

repeated.The

utilityof the women had

gonedown, in the sense that

they expressed far more dissatisfaction with their health. (Their objec-tive medical situation was pretty much unchanged.)28 On the other

hand, to the Aristotelian this is progress: for the women's desires and

expectations are now more in tune with information about what a

flourishing life could be. They know what functioning they are miss-

ing. Similar results obtain in the educational sphere where, once

again, polls of women in India asking whether they are satisfied withtheir educational status usually produce affirmative results, so deep are

the cultural forces militating against any change in this area, and solittle information is there about how education has transformed andcould transform female lives.

The local-tradition relativism endorsed in my Helsinki examples

claims to be different from prevailing economic-utilitarian views, on

account of its close attention to the fabric of daily life in traditionalsocieties. But such relativism actually shares many of the defects of

the utilitarian view, for it refuses to subject preferences, as formed in

traditional societies, to any sort of critical scrutiny. It seems to assume

that all criticism must be a form of imperialism, the imposition of an

27. For these objections, see Sen, "Equality of What?" For references to Sen' other

work bearing on this question, see Nussbaum, "Aristotelian Social Democracy"; and

Crocker. I do not wish to claim that the work of recent utilitarian philosophers is in

general vulnerable to this criticism, for they have introduced many subtle corrections to

preferences. For references and discussion, see my longer version of this article.

28. See Sen, Commodities nd Capabilities.

S65

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

outsider's power on local ways. Nor does it simply claim (as do utili-

tarian economists) to avoid normative judgments altogether: it actu-

ally endorses the locally formed norms as good and even romanticizesthem in no small degree. One may sympathize with some of the goals

proposed-respect for diversity, desire to protect from exploitation

ways of life that seem to be rich in spiritual and artistic value-with-

out agreeing that extreme relativism is the best way to articulate and

pursue these goals.2There is a political and economic alternative to these various anti-

essentialist views, and it is in use in a variety of areas.30In developmenteconomics, a position strikingly similar to the Aristotelian position de-

scribed here has been developed by economist-philosopher AmartyaSen. Arguing that development analysis should focus on human capa-bilities rather than on opulence, utility, or resources, he has proposed

ways of assessing the quality of life in developing countries that beginfrom a list of interrelated capabilities. His arguments for this approachand against others are closely related to my arguments in this article.

Independently, a very similar scheme has been worked out by Finnish

and Swedish social scientists. Wishing to develop ways of gathering in-

formation about how their people are doing that would be more sensi-

tive and informationally complete than polls based on ideas of utility,

they worked out lists of the basic human capabilities and then exam-ined the performance of various groups in the population-above all,women and minorities-in these terms.31

I could multiply such examples. Instead, however, I want to return tothe anti-essentialist stories with which I began and show how the Aris-totelian view would handle them. The case of smallpox vaccination isrelatively clear-cut. While the Aristotelian would not wish to interfere

with the capability of citizens to use their imaginations and their sensesfor the purposes of religious expression, should they choose to do so,she would certainly make bodily health a top priority and would not bedeterred from a program of smallpox vaccination by the likelihoodthat it would eradicate the cult of Sittala Devi. The Aristotelian wouldintroduce the vaccination program and leave to the citizens whether

29. For an account of internal tensions within the Marglins' view, see Nussbaum,"Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings," and "Human Functioning and Social

Justice."30. Here I have omitted a lengthy section contrasting my Aristotelian proposal with

liberal proposals of Rawls and Dworkin; see Nussbaum, "Aristotelian Social Democ-

racy,"and "Human Functioning and Social Justice."

31. See R. Erikson, "The Measurement of Welfare in Scandinavia"; and E. Allardt,

"The Finnish Approach to Welfare Management," both in The Quality of Life (n. 1

above).

S66

8/12/2019 438424



they wished to continue their relationship with that goddess. Nothingwould prevent them from doing so; but if they ceased to see point in

the observances once the disease had been eradicated, the Aristotelianwould weep no nostalgic tears.

As for freedom and the Japanese husband, the Aristotelian will sim-

ply insist on what she means by freedom, which is the power to form a

conception of the good and to select action toward its realization. Shewill point out that in that sense of freedom, the Japanese husband in

the example has (and no doubt values) freedom; his freedom, indeed,is enhanced by having someone who will look after boring details oflife. But if the freedom of one person requires pushing someone else

below the threshold of capability to exercise practical reason, the Aris-totelian will call this injustice and exploitation. And she will not restcontent until a searching examination of gender relations in this case

has shown to what extent the capabilities of women are in fact beingundercut in the name of male leisure.

As for menstruation taboos, they look like a clear restriction on wom-

en's power to execute a plan of life that they have chosen. This is soeven if, as is sometimes claimed, such taboos end up giving womenmore rest and a little more pleasure than they would have had if theywere working. For trade-offs that diminish the power of choice, even

when they result in greater comfort, are not supported by the Aristote-

lian view.32

To conclude this part of my argument, however, I would now like to

examine a single case that is more complicated and problematic than

the ones I have just treated rather briefly. This case will dramatize the

difference between the Aristotelian approach and its rivals in the de-

velopment sphere and will also indicate how the Aristotelian proposes

to balance sensitivity to local tradition against her commitment to atheory of the human being. The case concerns a literacy campaign di-

rected at women in rural Bangladesh as described in MartyChen's ex-

cellent book, A Quiet Revolution.33

The women in the village where Chen worked had low status in

every area, in terms of our account of human functioning. They were

less well nourished than males, less educated, less free, less respected.Let us now consider their situation with respect to just one question-

32. For related discussion, see Amartya Sen, "Gender Inequalities and Theories ofJustice"; and Susan Moller Okin, "Justice, Gender, and Differences," both in Human

Capabilities n. 1 above).

33. Marty Chen, A Quiet Revolution: Women n Transition in Rural Bangladesh (Cam-

bridge, Mass., 1983). See also Chen, "A Matter of Survival:Women's Right to Work in

India and Bangladesh," in Human Capabilities. discuss Chen's work in "Aristotelian So-

cial Democracy," and "Non-relative Virtues" (n. 1 above).

S67

8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

literacy. As I have said, polls based on the idea of utility typically show,in this and related cases, that women have no desire for a higher rate

of literacy. The poll is taken; women express satisfaction; no actionfollows. This, of course, is not surprising given the weight of the cul-tural forces pressing these women not to demand more education(and also not to feel that they want more) and given, as well, the ab-sence in their daily lives of paradigms of what education could do andbe in lives similar to theirs.

The development agency with which Chen was working went intothe village holding firmly to the conviction that literacy was an impor-tant basic good. At first they tried a somewhat paternalistic approach:

in cooperation with the local government, they handed out to thewomen of the village ample adult literacy materials, assuming it was

good for them to use them. The distribution had little impact on wom-

en's functioning. This was so because the development people madeno attempt to perceive the women's lives in a broad or deep way or toask what role literacy might play in those lives and what strategies ofeducation were most suited for their particular case. Perhaps evenmore important, they did not ask the women to tell their own story.

The initial project failed. And yet, the development workers did not

simply drop their general conception of the good, concluding that lo-cal traditions should in each case be the arbiter of value and that beliefin their own way was bound to be paternalistic. Instead, they made atransition to a more Aristotelian approach. Over a period of several

years, they set up women's cooperatives in which members of the de-

velopment agency joined with the local women in a searching partici-

patory dialogue concerning the whole form of life in the village. Theydiscussed with the women the role that literacy was currently playing

in the lives of women elsewhere, showing concrete examples of trans-formations in empowerment and self-respect. The women, in turn,told them their own story, the special impediments to education thattheir traditions had given them. The result was a gradual but deeptransformation in the entire shape of the women's lives. Once theyperceived literacy not as a distant abstraction but as a skill that mightbe deployed in particular ways in their particular context, they became

enormously interested in it, and many changes ensued in their lives.For example, women were able to take over the tailoring industry in

the village and other similar functions. In this way they began to earnwages outside the home-a circumstance that has been shown to givewomen a stronger claim to food and medical care when resources arescarce. Nevertheless, none of these concrete transformations couldhave happened had the development workers not held fast to their

general conception, showing the local women its many other concrete

S68

8/12/2019 438424


8/12/2019 438424


MODERN PHILOLOGY

not recognize himself or herself as sharing a common humanity with

the sufferer will react to the suffering with an arrogant hardness

rather than compassion. This structure is built into many literary andhistorical situations where people appeal to others for compassion; in

such situations we see that the response that acknowledges shared

possibilities is a humane response, closely connected with beneficent

action-as when, in book 24 of the Iliad, Achilles is moved by Priam's

reminder of their common humanity and returns Hector's corpse.

The denial of commonness is connected with overweening and ne-

glect-as when, in book 17 of the Odyssey, the suitor Antinoos, refus-

ing the beggar's request to think about their common possibilities,

casts him out as a useless "pain."This link between compassion and the recognition of the humanly

common becomes the central starting point of Rousseau's account of

social morality in Emile. He draws on this classical tradition to argue

that Emile will be a good and just citizen only if, from an early age, he

learns to understand the possibility of suffering and that he shares this

possibility with all other human beings. Compassion requires recogni-

tion of a shared humanity; without compassion (pitie) we have no rea-

son not to be harsh and tyrannical to those who are weaker.

Why are kings without compassion for their subjects? It is because

they count on never being human beings. Why are the rich so harsh to

the poor? It is because they do not have fear of becoming poor. Why

does a noble have such contempt for a peasant? It is because he never

will bea peasant. It is the weakness of the human being that makes

it sociable, it is our common sufferings that carry our hearts to

humanity; we would owe it nothing if we were not humans.36

Accordingly, the young Emile, who does not yet identify with the pain

of others, is to be given lessons in common humanity. "Make him un-

derstand clearly," the teacher is told, "that the fate of the unhappy can

be his own, that all their ills are beneath his feet, that a thousand un-

foreseen and unavoidable events can plunge him into those ills at every

moment."

I claim that the ancient Greek tradition and Rousseau are right:

compassion does require the belief in a common humanity. We do not

grasp the significance of suffering, lack, or impediment unless and un-

til we setit in the context of a view of what it is for a human being to

flourish. And we do not respond compassionately to that gap between

norm and fulfillment unless we think that this is a possibility in which

36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile(Paris, 1860), pp. 242-43 (my translation).

37. Ibid., p. 243.

S70

8/12/2019 438424



we too partake. Compassion requires us to say, However far these

people are from us in fortune or class or race or gender, those differ-

ences are morally arbitrary and might have befallen me as well. And ifwe are not in a position to say that, it is not at all clear on what groundswe can be persuaded to give to these people.

There is a deep moral tradition that says that compassion is not

required, for we can be sufficiently motivated to other-regardingaction by respect for humanity. This tradition-exemplified in the

thought of the ancient Stoics, Spinoza, Kant, and, in a different way,Nietzsche-still, however, makes central use of a notion of common

humanity. For respect is not groundless or arbitrary. It has a founda-

tion: the recognition that another being has certain powers or capabil-ities. Usually these are taken to be specifically human powers althoughone might motivate respect from a broader notion of the animal or, on

the other hand, from notions of the rational being or the person that

might be narrower in their application. For Kant, respect is due to hu-

manity; a basic moral principle is to treat humanity, wherever it is

found, as an end in itself. For the ancient Stoics, similarly, respect is

owed to any human being having certain powers and capabilities. One

needs to have an account of what thosepowers

andcapabilities

are,

and it had better be an account that links many times and places to-

gether. Otherwise we will have no moral motive for other-regarding ac-

tion toward people at a distance, or people of other races and genders.

I have suggested that without a notion of common human function-

ing, we will have to do without compassion and without a full-blooded

notion of respect. What, by contrast, are the moral sentiments of ex-

treme subjectivism? Here, I believe, most adherents of subjectivism are

not fully consistent. Insofar as they do show a concern for human life

everywhere that they do not show for rocks or stones or even, at least inthe same way, for all animals, they trade tacitly on beliefs and related

sentiments that their official view does not allow them. They commend

their view to us on the grounds of compassion, saying that it will help

the situation of the excluded, of minorities, and of women. And yet the

theoretical apparatus they then introduce is insufficient to make sense

of that very compassion. It permits only narrow, self-regarding senti-

ments and a relatively detached and curious attitude toward the situa-

tion of others.

Even where subjectivism has modulated into local-tradition relativ-ism, as in the examples given in my Helsinki conversations, its range of

moral sentiments seems narrow indeed. How quaint, these theorists

seem to be saying, how curious They do not appear to be able to delve

very deeply into the lives in question, imagining for themselves what it

really is like to be told that you cannot work when you have your

S71

8/12/2019 438424


8/12/2019 438424



Do the people of Textualite feel pain when they see a stranger whois hungry or ill or abused? They do dislike the sight of such ugly

things. But they do not feel the pain of fellow-feeling, for that hasbeen declared a remnant of outmoded Earthly thinking. How shouldwe know, they say, that this being is suffering from lack of food? Thatform of life is different from ours, and we have been brought up to ap-preciate the play of difference. Saying this, they go on with their playand turn away their eyes. Do the people of Textualite construct gov-ernment programs to improve literacy or health care or agriculture in

the distant, poorer regions of their planet? Why, indeed, should they?For this is unlikely to maximize their own expected utility; and they

cannot bring themselves to make any judgment about a form of life ina strange part of the globe, about people with whom they could never

be in conversation. Perhaps those inhabitants are enjoying their em-bedded way of life, they remark at conferences. Do the people of Tex-

tualite feel love for one another? Or isn't love of one's fellow humans

one of those shopworn essentialist ideas that they left on Earth behindthem?

We do not now inhabit the planet of Textualite. Right now, the new

subjectivism-whether in economics or in literary theory-is false toour experiences and responses. But we can choose to follow theoryinto our lives, focusing on our differences from one another and refus-

ing to acknowledge what is common to all. And then perhaps one day

the texture of the human world will be differently perceived, perceived

through the play of difference and strangeness. Then we will, I think,not behuman beings any longer.

S73

Date post:	03-Jun-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	mauricio-spinola
View:	218 times
Download:	0 times

438424

Documents