Liberalism, development, and gender: responses to the papers.

• Author: Nussbaum, Martha Craven
• Position: In this issue, p. 3, 21, 65, 89, 125, 133, 179, 201, 219 - The Works of Martha C. Nussbaum: Feminism and Liberalism; History, Identity and Sexuality; Gender and Development

I must begin by warmly thanking all the people here at Columbia who made this Symposium possible. I feel immensely honored and grateful for all of the time the participants spent with my work and for their acute criticisms. I shall introduce my specific responses to the papers by saying something about the ways that gender and sexuality figure in my work over the years. Then, I shall move through the papers, grouping them by thematic sections, but considering each separately to some extent, because I really learned so much from each of them.

1. OVERVIEW: MY WORK ON GENDER AND SEXUALITY

   My career as a philosopher has focused on two distinct types of issues. Often, they seem very different, so different that graduate students and other students who are attached to one or the other set of issues often do not link them, although I myself always do.

   First, there is philosophical reflection about the emotions, their structure, and their role in human life and the ethical life. And, second, there is normative political philosophy, where I have been working for some time on the development of the "capabilities approach" that so many people in this Symposium have talked about. The two projects do intersect, clearly, in a number of ways. One area of intersection comes from the fact that I hold that emotions have a complicated cognitive content and that they are, therefore, shaped by social norms. They contain appraisals of what is important, and those appraisals are, in turn, shaped not just by childhood development but by normative views that we learn in our social and political culture. That means that we have to think about how society does shape them. And it also means that, to some degree anyway, it is in our power to affect changes in that shaping. Certain forms of domination and humiliation that might be very common might possibly be different in the next generation, and the emotions that sustain them would be different. So we have to think about how to shape the emotions, not just how to control them. And I think that it is one thing we learn when we think about the emotions in a way informed by normative political philosophy: an insight into the ways in which political structure and political norms may actually influence the personality at a deep level.

   Currently, in fact, my main long-term project concerns the political emotions that support the institutions that would be required by my capabilities approach. My wonderful editor, Terry Moore, who died two years ago, said to me, "You know, you've written about capabilities, and you've written about compassion, but why not bring the two together? Ask how we can produce people who would actually build and sustain this society you have in mind." That, of course, is an important thing to do, and I am trying to figure out how to do it. The project, however, is not just to talk about compassion, which is basically supportive of good political institutions, although it may be narrow and uneven. There are, however, some emotions that are particularly threatening to the operations of a decent society, and we also need to talk about those: shame and disgust, in particular, but I also think that anger has a very bad and excessive side. So writing about political norms well requires thinking well about the emotions that both support and threaten these norms.

   On the other side, thinking well about emotions requires thinking about certain issues that are also central in political philosophy: in particular, narcissism and hierarchy. One of my great interests is thinking about how people's emotions begin, early in a young child's life, as narcissistic and self-focused, not animated by any sense of the other person as a real person with real needs, and so on, and how, as a child matures, if things go well, the child can become capable of sympathy and concern for another person seen as a separate being who is not simply that child's slave. But of course, things don't always go well, and narcissism remains I think a very pervasive danger in the emotional life. Naturally, that leads into politics. Such tendencies to narcissism may be influenced in various ways by the political culture, and their presence has major political consequences. As time goes on, I have gotten more and more persuaded that Gandhi was absolutely right: the real conflict of civilization is inside each person. It is certainly not the conflict between Islam and the West, but it is not even simply the conflict between respectful people and dominating people within a given society, although that is real and important. At a deeper level, as Gandhi said, we must consider the conflict within each person, between the tendency to dominate the other and to think of the other as a slave and the capacity for concern and respect. So my book, The Clash Within, (1) was really all about that. Therefore, thought about gender norms played an important role in that book, as I shall later describe.

   My work on gender spans these two big categories: theory of emotion and normative political philosophy. Let me briefly describe how those concerns play out in several books. Sex and Social Justice, (2) which quite a few people of the papers mention, is a collection of essays. It is quite heterogeneous, but it is held together by the aim of describing a certain kind of liberalism, which is, I believe, also radical and to some extent informed by queer theory. The capabilities approach is treated there, but so too are more specific political matters such as justice for gays and lesbians, the decriminalization of sex work and so on. Throughout, I try to respond to some criticisms feminists of various types have made of the liberal tradition in political philosophy, in the process articulating my radical form of liberalism, which I connect to Mill, to whom I actually also give a radical and queer reading. I recently authored a paper for Mill's bicentennial called Mill's Feminism: Liberal, Radical and Queer, (3) and I really do think that characterization makes sense, although Mill himself might be quite alarmed by the word "queer," Victorian gentleman that he was. I believe that Mill, like radical feminists, understood how hierarchy deforms not just practice but also emotion and desire; he was determined to call into question the norms of family life that produce deformed expectations and patterns of desire. He also was resolutely determined to call into question conventional categories of all sorts and to recommend spaces for experiments in living that would be quite diverse, and that would be protected from both legal and societal intervention by strong norms of liberty. That is the sense in which his feminism has a queer aspect. And although he didn't write about sexual orientation, as Bentham did--Bentham actually had very interesting things to say about sexual orientation (4)--Mill's general radicalism about tradition and convention pushed his thought in a direction that it is appropriate to call queer.

   Women and Human Development (5) was my first systematic book-length account of the capabilities approach, which I elaborated more fully and, I think, in some ways more adequately, in Frontiers of Justice. (6) But it was also a book about women and gender issues. Why and how did the two concerns come together? In Women and Human Development, I focused on women's situations both for their intrinsic interest and importance, and also in order to use those issues as a test of standard theories of development, showing that the inability of those theories to treat women's inequality adequately is a sign of a more general inadequacy in those theories. One of the ways in which you quickly see how the GNP per capita model of development fails is to see that it doesn't notice the inequalities women suffer both in the workplace and in the household. You also can test utilitarian models by noticing that models which are based on people's existing preferences are often biased in the direction of the status quo, and will often validate what are known as adaptive preferences; that is, preferences that are adjusted to a bad state of affairs. Women are a very standard example in the adaptive preferences literature. (7) And my collaborator, Amartya Sen, focused on this case in his own important writing on adaptive preferences. Women, he argues (and demonstrates empirically), often adopt images of the proper woman, and then report satisfaction with that situation, saying, for example, "We prefer not to have more education." But that might show a limitation of the preference-based model rather than a limitation of education for women. It was for that sort of reason that my focus on women had a two-fold role to play in my argument. (8)

   My opponent throughout that book was both economic and classical utilitarianism, which still dominates the world of development and policy-making. But I also criticized some aspects of mainstream liberal theory, in the chapter on the family. (9) In that chapter I said that John Rawls had adopted too much of the old public-private distinction, even though he says that that's not what he's doing. My conclusion was that Rawls had not been sufficiently critical of the internal distribution that is going on in the family. Although he grants that the family is a political institution, indeed part of society's "basic structure," he insulates it to a degree from the demands of justice. (10)

   The focus on India in that book was dictated, first, by my love of India. And I think that's extremely important, and it is important in all my work subsequently. But it is also because I thought that it was very important, in doing my type of feminist theoretical work, to get real and have a sense of one nation in all of its historical complexity, rural-urban differences, regional differences, religious differences, and so on. I was discontent with books that had one example from Iran and one example from China, without giving any...