| Title | : | Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0674024109 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780674024106 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 512 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2006 |
The idea of the social contract--especially as developed in the work of John Rawls--is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition. But as Nussbaum demonstrates, even Rawls's theory, suggesting a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals, cannot address questions of social justice posed by unequal parties. How, for instance, can we extend the equal rights of citizenship--education, health care, political rights and liberties--to those with physical and mental disabilities? How can we extend justice and dignified life conditions to all citizens of the world? And how, finally, can we bring our treatment of nonhuman animals into our notions of social justice? Exploring the limitations of the social contract in these three areas, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of capabilities. She helps us to think more clearly about the purposes of political cooperation and the nature of political principles--and to look to a future of greater justice for all.
Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership Reviews
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I read this for my Philosophy of Law class that I took in law school and loved it. It's a great, thought provoking read, and I don't agree with everything in it but I sure did enjoy reading it. I wrote my seminar paper about it and it turned out to be 25 pages long and I still have NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL I WROTE. :|
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An ambitious and important book. Taking Rawls as a point of departure, Nussbaum argues that all of humanity is obligated -- collectively -- to support the dignified flourishing of all living creatures, including people with disabilities, people in other countries, and nonhuman animals.
I appreciate her critiques of the social contract tradition: I agree that the "classic" theories of social justice rest on unduly cynical, rationalistic assumptions about people and social relationships. And I like her conception of "central capabilities" as a way to capture the various elements, tangible and intangible, that make a human life meaningfully dignified. She's convinced me that these are crucial elements, and that in a decent society everyone would enjoy some threshold level of them.
She hasn't convinced me, though, that securing everyone's wellbeing is a matter of justice - rather than one of benevolence, or even love. She speaks of the need for a public culture of benevolence/compassion that would support the costly policies necessary to secure universal enjoyment of capabilities. But she doesn't clarify the relationship between benevolence and justice. If taking care of the disabled is something justice requires, why do we need benevolence - is it then superfluous as a moral motive? Or is it that we need benevolence to open our eyes to what justice requires - so then is benevolence just a useful sentiment, as opposed to a fundamental virtue (as Nussbaum takes justice to be)?
That's just a substantive quibble of mine; it may not bother other readers.
Overall, her critical arguments and theory-building efforts are smart and nicely laid out. It's a bit repetitive; better editing might whittle this 400-pager down to 200. Still, it's a good read for fans/critics of Rawls, and folks who care about questions of justice in relation to disabilities, international law, and animals. -
Wow! Five stars! A stellar work, by a great moral philosopher, that profoundly advances our theory of justice and clarifies our obligations to the less fortunate.
"The social contract tradition has one big apparent advantage over the approach to basic justice that I have just defended. Namely, it does not require extensive benevolence. It derives political principles from the idea of mutual advantage, without assuming that human beings have deep and motivationally powerful ties to others" (408). Here Professor Nussbaum expresses the Pre-Modernist critique of "The Enlightenment Projects" great error. The ancients recognized the criticality of virtue in citizens and leaders. From Machiavelli, through Hobbes and Kant, to Smith thinkers moved to designing systems that would produce positive results without requiring virtuous citizens and leaders. We see the culmination--to date--of this tragic error in President Trump.
Professor Nussbaum's treatment of "Mutual Advantage and Global Inequality" provides a pellucid basis for understanding the inherent injustice of our response to Climate Change and why we are certain to fail.
"The Central Human Capabilities" (76-78).
"Very likely the arrangements we need to make to give justice to developing nations, and to people with severe impairments within our own nation, will be very expensive and will not be justifiable as mutually advantageous" (p. 89-90).
"I believe that Rawls cannot explain why the ones below the 'line' are owed justice rather than charity, without fundamentally modifying this aspect of his theory" (118).
"The good of others is not just a constraint on this person's pursuit of her own good, it is a part of her good" (158).
". . . I do not favor policies that would make unhealthy activities such as boxing, unsafe sex, football, and smoking illegal, although education about risk seems to be highly appropriate, . . ." (171).
"If enough of them are impossible (as in the case of a person in a persistent vegetative state), we may judge that the life is not a human life at all, any more" (181).
"The use of terms suggesting the inevitably and 'naturalness' of such impairments masks a refusal to spend enough money to change things on a large scale for people with impairments" (188).
"And my main contention will be that we cannot arrive at an adequate account of global justice by evisaging international cooperation as a contract for mutual advantage among parties similarly placed in a state of nature" (226).
"States, he holds, 'already have a lawful internal constitution, and have thus have outgrown the coercive right of others to subject them to a wider legal constution in accordance with their conception of right" (232).
"In the real world, however, we see this tactic for what it is: an arrogant mentality that is culpably unresponsive to grave problems" (236). This just is our response to Climate Change, which is consequentially unjust and certain to fail.
"Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind" is captured by the Rawls quote on p. 239-240.
"There is a striking parallel between the situation of poorer nations and the situation of people with disabilities" (250).
". . . . Kant in Perpetual Peace: a moral loathing of colonial domination and a related moral belief that one should respect the sovereignty of any nation that is organized in a sufficiently accountable way, whether or not its institutions are fully just" (256).
"Pogge and Beitz abhor such inequalities in basic life chances. To cope with them, providing a philosophical rationale for an ambitious commitment to global redistribution, is the whole point of their project" (269).
"Quite simply, our world is not a decent and minimally just world, unless we have secured ten capabilities, up to an appropriate threshold level, to all the world's people" (281).
"(Not it seems to me, is it possible to assert with confidence that a nation such as our own connot move in the opposite direction. Indeed, on many of the issues that concern Rawls, the United States has been moving further and further away from anything like concensus.)" (304). We were warned.
"It is far better to create a decent instructional and the to regard individuals as having delegated their personal ethical responsibility to the structure" (308).
"ix. Ten Principals for the Global Structure" (315)
"5. The main structures of the global economic order must be designed to be fair to poor and developing countries" (319). No attempt has been made to do this on climate change.
". . . . plus a tax on the industrial nations of the North to support the development of pollution controls in the South; . . ." (320).
"The meat industry brings countless animals into the world who would not have existed but for that" (345). If we give up beef and dairy, it is the bovine, not the human, population that will collapse. They domisticated us.
"The capabilities approach judges instead, with the biologist Aristotle, that there is something wonderful and wonder-inspiring in all the complex forms of life in nature" (347).
"(Cooperation itself will now assume multiple and complex forms)" (351). As in the cooperation between humans and domesticated animals.
"It is not a single conception at all, because the plurality of forms of life is very important to the whole idea" (356).
"What about the continuation of species? Here my answers are tentative, and I am sure they will not satisfy many thinkers about ecology" (357). 99 percent of all the species, that have existed on Earth, are extinct. Surely there is not a natural right to persist now. All of the cosmological, geological, and biological processes that shaped Earth are still active. The universe continues to evolve towards greater complexity. It would be pure hubris to think that any existing species represents some end state.
". . . . it holds that the frustration of certain tendencies is not only compatible with flourishing, but actually required by it" (366). That is something I need to work on.
"(Competitive sports probably play a related role in human life.)" (371). In my youth I was acutely aware of how much of my love of basketball was from banging under the hoop, the sheer joy of running with the pack (on the fast break), etc.
"We have a strict duty not to commit bad acts, but we have no corresponding strict duty to stop hunger or disease or to give money to promote their cessation" (372).
"Nature is not just, and species are not all nice. . . . Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions contain many elements of what I recommend, as did early Platonism. But Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and most people's secular comprehensive doctrines rank the human species metaphysically above other species and give the human secure rights to the use of animals for many purposes" (390). -
Citado en el artículo de Comim de
Capabilities and Happiness. -
I love Martha Nussbaum. in full agreement of everything. capabilities approach. subtle feminist plugs. brilliant arguments. queen of political philosophy!!
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Hablando sobre zooética, Nussbaum ofrece una solución a la pregunta de cuáles derechos para cuáles animales. Además ofrece una buena explicación sobre las teorías contractualistas.
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We live in a world of a growing tide of democracy with open and public reasoning, a tide that brings great promise for human development. And yet various kinds of deep injustice prevail. Is this because our institutions set up to bring justice have failed to deliver, or is it something more deep-rooted, some flaw in foundational aspects of justice? This book goes deep and thorough into the theories of justice as applied to three frontier areas that remain the serious examples of failures of justice in the public sphere: justice for mentally and physically disabled people, global justice transcending national boundaries, and the justice for animals (and nature) crossing species boundaries. Martha Nussbaum, writing cogently and with clarity, has done a wonderful job in bringing a thoughtful and informed discussion on these issues to the fore.
The prevailing theory and approach to justice, one most frequently attributed to John Rawls, is the 'social contract' tradition. This derives principles of justice as emerging from a social contract for mutual advantage among normal people who are nominally equal, independent, and rational, and who evolve these principles in an idealised impartial manner. Nussbaum argues that this approach, although with some strengths of its own, fails or is insufficient in important ways in all three frontier areas of justice. The alternative she proposes, based on the 'capabilities approach' that she and Amartya Sen have applied to human development issues, shows greater promise. This book provides a much better written and argued account of the contrast between these two approaches to justice than Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (my review:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). The book is additionally illuminating by its careful explanation of the underlying philosophy and its attention to well-chosen examples from the real world.
(... to be continued...) -
Uma das abordagens mais interessantes de justiça que já li. Sua proposta de justiça baseada na abordagem das capacitações não tem como proposta uma simples nivelamento da sociedade com ideais utópicos. Ela parte do pressuposto de que todas as pessoas possuem propriedades intrínsecas que em diferentes etapas e situações da vida precisam ser suportadas. Quando as pessoas recebem o suporte de que necessitam para, digamos assim, tirar o máximo de si mesmas, elas conseguem atingir seus alvos pessoais, ou pelo menos alvos minimos comuns a todos os seres humanos, para que tenham uma vida digna que valha a pena ser vivida, nas palavras da autora. Apesar da teoria do bem ser alicerçada num certo otimismo antropológico, justamente se contrapondo ao pessimismo de Rawls, podemos aprender muito desta abordagem de justiça, especialmente sobre como construir uma sociedade plural, livre e democrática e ao mesmo tempo justa e a favor da vida.
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Nussbaum is a wonderfully clear writer (for a philosopher!). She explores questions that have bedeviled contemporary prescriptivist and Kantian moral philosophers, and does so from a perspective relying on both Aristotle and Marx. She calls her approach a "capabilities approach", and it greatly illumines questions about disability, nationality and species membership. While I think her account is very nuanced and careful, there are some moral issues where I would be curious about how her theory could be applied, e.g., abortion and end-of-life questions. But in any event this book is refreshing breeze amid the current analytically inspired theories.
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I've only read the bit on species membership, but that part laid out a solid introduction to how Nussbaum's neo-Aristotelianish capabilities approach can help us think about the lives and interests of nonhuman animals.
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Zeer sterk en goed pleidooi om mensen met fysieke en/of mentale stoornissen, mensen uit alle landen en streken, en dieren te beschouwen als wezens die respect en waardering verdienen, waardigheid bezitten en waar men rechtvaardig tegenover dient te zijn.
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Read through to the end of the disability section (which is what I picked this up for). More social contract studies than disability studies, which I hadn't been expecting but that's fine. Some interesting ideas marred by the author's all-or-nothing approach to being disabled.
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Have to read for POLS 654.
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Not overly accessible, but forgivable considering the abstract and difficult subject matter. Provocative and important. Nussbaum is an American treasure.
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Genius. This book sets forth the capabilites approach
