Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.

• Author: West, Robin

By Martha C. Nussbaum. Boston: Beacon Press. 1995. Pp. xix, 143. Cloth, $20; paper, $12.

Martha Nussbaum's(1) graceful book Poetic Justice is an elegant brief for the importance of our capacity for imaginative "fancy" to our moral and legal lives.(2) Imaginative fancy, Nussbaum argues, allows us to know the internal substance and quality of the lives of others. It allows us to come to appreciate, to understand, to share, and ultimately to resist others' suffering (pp. 72-77). It is, in short, the means by which we come to care about the fate and happiness of others. It is a part, but not the whole, of our capacity to transcend a narcissistic and infantile egoism. It is therefore central, not peripheral, to our capacity for moral judgment, and it is accordingly central, not peripheral, to our lives as public citizens (pp. 1-12). Fancy is a part, not the whole, of what prompts us toward a generous, humanistic, egalitarian, and democratic stance toward others. Fancy is a part, not the whole, of what enables us to give a due regard to the individuality, the dignity, and the irreducible worth of our fellows.

Given its importance to our moral, political, and legal lives, Nussbaum argues, we should not only study our capacity for imaginative fancy, but we should also value, nurture, and encourage it. Reading modern realistic fiction, particularly (but not only) in novel form, is central to that end (pp. 1-12, 49-52). The modern realistic novel, Nussbaum argues, is the fanciful genre, par excellence. Through reading realistic novels -- and only to a lesser extent watching films or reading history -- we come to understand the subjectivity and the perceptions of others, and we move some distance toward actually sharing in that subjectivity (pp. 4-7). More striking, though, we come to care about these fictional characters. If written well, the characters are so richly detailed that we actually concern ourselves with their projects, we share in their assessments of their lives and life situations, and we worry about their fate (pp. 7-9). This care for the fictitious lives of others is an important part -- maybe the most important part -- of the distinctive experience of reading realistic fiction. Because care for the real lives, fates, and projects of others is such an important part -- maybe the most important part -- of the moral point of view, it follows that the capacity to read and respond to narrative fiction is related, perhaps quite intimately, to our capacity for moral reflection and action. The experience of reading a novel and then engaging in the flight of fancy it engenders is not just a reminder of our moral capacities: it is training for them. Learning to read novels sympathetically is a part of our moral education (pp. 13-52).

More specifically, although they are never spelled out quite this explicitly, at least three arguments run through Poetic Justice regarding the relation between fancy and our moral lives. First, Nussbaum directs her elaboration of the capacity for fancy, and its relation to novelistic realism, to an internal, decidedly friendly critique of utilitarianism (p. 66). Both classical utilitarianism and its twentieth-century cousin, the normative law-and-economics movement, could attain much more sound footing if they would recognize the necessity of sympathy to moral judgment (pp. 3-33, 46-49). Utilitarianism at its best counsels a due and equal regard for the interests and well-being of every person affected by a moral or legal decision. It also requires a tentative assessment of the components of well-being -- of the nature of suffering and of the good life -- which are independent of, and even at times contrary to, the felt desires of individuals or communities (pp. 46-49, 66). Knowing an individual's external circumstances or chosen "preferences" among a range of market options does not aid an understanding of either that individual's subjective interests or the nature of the good life. Rather, one must know something deeply individualistic about the experiences, perceptions, and aspirations of the other, and at the same time know something deeply universal about the conditions of general well-being or of the ideal life. To know both the subjectivity of another human being and to know something of the objective content of the good life requires the capacity for fancy. Classical utilitarianism and modern normative economics both run aground when they try to eschew fancy and supplant it with more readily quantifiable sources of data. The gain in quantification, predictability, and precision is nowhere near the cost to moral depth. The behavioral criterion of well-being at the heart of normative economics or utilitarianism is superficial when stripped of its relation to the internal subjective experience of life. By eschewing concern for subjective experience, both classical utilitarianism and twentieth-century law and economics gain a facility for precise quantification, but they do so by running a very real risk of inhumanity -- of maximizing a sterile and behaviorally defined value without regard for the organic, lived consequences of legal or moral decisionmaking.

The second argument, elaborated upon in the third chapter, is in my view the heart of the book (pp. 53-78). In this chapter, Nussbaum argues that fancy relates not just to utilitarianism or to sound normative economics, but to moral decisionmaking generally. Fancy, Nussbaum argues, sharpens the capacity for those rational emotions -- sympathy, fear, and revulsion -- that in turn inform the moral sentiments of the judicious spectator. Doing the right thing and knowing the right thing to do require an understanding of the value of the consequences of actions to those affected by them, and that value is in turn partly a function of the quality of the feelings of the persons affected. Our own sympathetic feelings, or responses to the dilemmas of others, are windows to a rich assessment of others (pp. 72-77). To borrow from Adam Smith's original elucidation of this idea, when I see someone getting hit in the shins with a stick, I wince in pain because I am sympathetically sharing in the pain of the victim.(3) I share in the subjective, psychic, sensatory experience of pain, I do not share in the bruising of the skin, muscle, and bone. That sympathetic echo of the victim's feeling -- his pain -- is a central component of my moral conviction that it is wrong to hit people in the shins. Our own sympathetic feelings -- our capacity to share in the actual experience, albeit not with the same intensity, of the feelings of others, particularly their unpleasant feelings -- are barometers of the emotional or simply the subjective well-being of others. Since feeling is in turn a central component of well-being -- the subjective misery that goes with the experience of hunger, for example, detracts from well-being, just as does the objective reality of malnourishment -- the capacity for sympathetic engagement in the emotional or subjective experiences of others is a necessary, not peripheral, component of moral judgment.

The third argument, alluded to throughout the book but most explicitly stated in the final chapter, Poets as Judges, is that fancy informs not just our moral sense, but, more specifically, our sense of justice. Accordingly, the judge who employs her capacity for fancy will simply be a better judge (pp. 79-122). Another way to put the point, I think, is that fancy and the knowledge it facilitates are components of justice. To judge common law cases, the judge must engage the subjectivity of the litigants if she is to do a good job. If deciding the constitutionality of a state law prohibiting homosexual sodomy, for example, she must ascertain the impact of such laws on homosexual citizens (pp. 111-19). When deciding a sexual harassment case, she must decide whether a pattern of behavior might reasonably be expected to prove unsettling to female workers (pp. 104-11). When determining whether a state is liable under civil rights acts for its failure to protect its youth against violent assaults by family members, she must assess the consequences, for a particular child, of that failure. Such a judge will have to enter the world, the sensibilities, the attachments, the projects, the sensitivities, the vulnerabilities, the anguish, and, yes, the suffering of the closeted gay or lesbian citizen, the sexually harassed female worker, or the violently abused four-year-old boy. That in turn requires, by necessity, not legal deduction and not even rational calculation, but rather a flight of fancy for almost any judge. She, of course, may have experienced being closeted, harassed, or violently abused. But very likely she has not. The judge deciding virtually any legal question will encounter at some point the need to understand, assess, weigh, and sometimes give voice to the subjective experiences of others. The fanciful ability to live momentarily the life of the other is an obvious prerequisite for our ability to do so, and to do so well rather than poorly. The ability to do so, then, is a part of our ability to do justice.

I will not comment here on the arguments of the first chapter of Nussbaum's book -- that utilitarianism or normative economics, or both, uninformed by narrative wisdom risk being sterile, and that a sensitive reading of both Dickens's Hard Times and Wright's Native Son underscores that truth. Nussbaum has written elsewhere at greater length on the pitfalls of both utilitarianism and normative economics when not informed by what she calls "love's knowledge."(4) I have written on related topics elsewhere,(5) and I do not want to use a book review format simply to repeat myself. I have also commented elsewhere on Nussbaum's use of canonical fiction toward egalitarian and progressive political ends, broadly speaking, and the quite stark differences between the ways that she and others within the...