Nussbaum (2000) Aristotle and Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities: A Response to Antony, Arneson, Charlesworth, and Mulgan Author(s): Martha C.
Nussbaum Reviewed work(s): Source: Ethics, Vol. 111, No. 1 (October 2000), pp. 102-140 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/233421 . Accessed: 29/09/2012 22:59
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Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities: A Response to Antony, Arneson, Charlesworth, and Mulgan Martha C. Nussbaum
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-activitiesthe person in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need. (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ) The articles in this symposium raise more signicant philosophical questions than I can answer to anyones satisfaction here. They also make me realize how old I am: for they address many chronological strata of my thinking, frequently without acknowledging that my thinking has undergone numerous shifts between 1980 (the date of publication of the article Shame, Separateness, and Political Unity, the rst text discussed) and the present.1 Some of these shifts are announced as such by me: for example, I have drawn attention to my endorsement, beginning in 1994, of a Rawlsian type of political liberalism, which signicantly alters my understanding of the political role of the capabilities list and of the relationship between politics and metaphysics.2 Other shifts are conscious, but not announced with any fanfare: for example, the increasing emphasis on the notion of a threshold level of each of the central capabilities and the increasing specicity of the capabilities list itself. Still other changes in my position have become evident to me through reecting on these articles. In general, my strategy has been to publish versions of my capabili1. Martha C. Nussbaum, Shame, Separateness, and Political Unity: Aristotles Criticism of Plato, in Essays on Aristotles Ethics, ed. A. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 395 436. Actually, the article was written in 1978. 2. This shift was rst made explicit in Martha C. Nussbaum, The Good as Discipline, the Good as Freedom, in Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship, ed. David Crocker and Toby Linden (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littleeld, 1997), pp. 312 411, a paper I rst publicly read in 1994. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (hereafter PL), expanded paper ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Ethics 111 (October 2000): 102 140 2000 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2001/11101-0006 $02.00
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ties view as records of work in progress, in order to elicit what I have very often received, criticism that would help me make the view better. Only in Women and Human Development (WHD ), published in the spring of 2000, have I made any attempt to synthesize the approach and provide an overview of it, together with at least some discussion of its philosophical justication.3 And even that overview is far from complete. It will need to be supplemented by years of further work, culminating, I hope, in a much fuller and more complete presentation of the view. Thus I feel that I am at something of a disadvantage when people take the earlier articles for a product that is both static and coherent over time, since I feel that most of what I wrote before has been denitively superceded by the new work. Nor do I see any reference to the growing inuence of both Rawls and Kant on my thought, or to the fact that my interest in Aristotle has been for some time in part an interest in the young Marxs own reading of Aristotle. In this reply, I shall focus on what I think now, although at times I may have to try to give an account of why I thought something else at an earlier time. I. THE ROLE OF READING HISTORY Why do I begin my work in political philosophy from the text of Aristotle, rather than simply stating what I think? Both Richard Mulgan and Louise Antony raise this question, in different ways. One part of the answer is biographical: I entered philosophy through Classics, and I learned philosophy largely through grappling with the texts of Plato and Aristotle not such a bad way to learn, I still believe. Apart from that history, however, I think that we have strong reasons to approach difcult contemporary issues by engaging in an ongoing conversation with important texts in the history of philosophy. First of all, the texts are complex, subtle, and deep, whereas much of what is written in any given generation of philosophy is supercial and too simple. So they nourish and stimulate our thought, until we ourselves become somewhat more subtle and complex. Second, they present a wide range of distinctive positions: so if we study the major alternatives presented in the tradition, we are likely to be confronted, if not with all the serious possibilities for the solution of our problems, at least with a wide range of helpful ones. Third, they force our thinking out of its contemporary complacencies, whatever they are, forcing us to approach problems from a different, unfamiliar angle. Every philosophical culture has its unexamined presuppositions, its cherished categories, its fads. Good study of history makes us call these into question, again making us at least a little better as thinkers in the process.4
3. Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (hereafter, WHD ) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4. I am grateful to recent conversations with Allen Wood, which have helped shape these formulations.
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Notice that in order to play the role I have envisaged, the study of history has to be active and independent, rather than subservient. That is, we only get the best out of the texts we read if we are really trying hard ourselves to solve the problems they pose, rather than blindly submitting to the authority of the text. I dont believe that any distinguished philosopher can be well understood if read as an authority: for philosophers are in the business of producing arguments, and the only way for us to understand an argument is to engage with it and actively test it. But this means that we need to preserve a space between ourselves and the text, even while we hold open the possibility that the text will lead us to see the world in an entirely new way. This is a very delicate balancing act, and it would be no surprise if one didnt always get it right. It helps, of course, if one studies a plurality of texts, because then the tendency to submit to one of them will be diminished, and one will be forced to think things through from an independent perspective.5 On the other hand, it would be no good to pull in a little nugget of insight from one place, another nugget from another. If the study of history is really going to illuminate the world in a new way, it has to be done systematically, trying seriously to reconstruct the position as a whole and make the best sense one can of it.6 One thing more also seems required: a decent knowledge of history. If the aim is to appropriate some element in the thought of Aristotle for contemporary thought, it helps a lot to know to what extent his thought is shaped by a specic political and historical context. Only then can we sensibly ask how far his answers are detachable from the context that gave them birth. Many different philosophers in the history of philosophy have used Aristotle as a conversation partner. This is no surprise, since he is among the greatest of thinkers, and his thought has unsurpassed complexity, subtlety, and rigor. To conne myself only to the past 150 years, and to his ideas about human capability and functioning, Aristotle has been a central inspiration for rationalist-universalist liberal Catholic thought in the Social-Democratic tradition ( Jacques Maritain), for rationalistuniversalist conservative Catholic thought in the new-natural-law tradition ( John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Robert George), for historicistcommunitarian Catholic thought that denies the availability of universal
5. These ideas were all developed by the Stoics in many helpful ways. On the independence and activity of the student, see the texts and discussion in Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 9, and Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), chaps. 12. 6. This has been John Rawlss method in teaching the history of philosophy: see A. Reath, C. Korsgaard, and B. Herman, eds., Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and my review article, Martha C. Nussbaum, Conversing with the Tradition: John Rawls and the History of Ethics, Ethics 109 (1999): 424 30.
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rational principles (Alasdair MacIntyre), for humanist-universalist Marxist thought (the young Marx and humanist Marxists, such as Mihailo Marcovic), and for British liberal-perfectionist Social-Democratic thought (T. H. Green and Ernest Barker).7 Aristotles political ideas have thus inuenced practical politics through a plurality of distinct and sometimes antithetical routessome of which remain to be traced.8 All these borrowers from Aristotle have subtly different interpretations of and also different quarrels with Aristotle. So the views that result differ from one another in obvious ways. Although I had not read these authors (except for Barkers classical scholarship) when I wrote Aristotelian Social Democracy (ASD), my own views are closely related to those of Green and Barker in that we all stress the importance of criticizing Aristotle in the name of liberal ideas of liberty.9 I depart from those perfectionist writers by my stress on respect for pluralism, as I shall describe further in Section IV. My current political-liberal views lie closest to those of Maritain, who was both one of the most distinguished international humanrights thinkers after the war and, also, or so I would argue, the rst political liberal, in that he introduced into neo-Aristotelianism the idea of an overlapping consensus among believers in different comprehensive conceptions of human life.10 What all these neo-Aristotelians have in common, despite their large differences, is a dislike for the ideas that wealth (of a person, or of a nation) is an end in itself, and that the accumulation of as much wealth as possible is an appropriate end for politics to pursue. (We nd one version of these ideas in development economics, where until recently it was standardly assumed that gross national product [GNP] per capita is
7. In 2002, I shall deliver the Hourani Lectures at SUNY Buffalo on the topic, Varieties of Neo-Aristotelian Thought. 8. For example, in a graduate course I taught on this topic in 1998, I learned from a visiting Japanese graduate student that the Japanese Social Democratic party was ultimately Aristotelian in inspiration, in that its founder studied at Oxford with Ernest Barker and was strongly inuenced by the ideas of both Green and Barker about human functioning and its social prerequisites. I would suppose that the role of Aristotelian ideas of capability in the left-wing politics of India, in Amartya Sens youth, had a mixed origin: both in English thought and in humanist-Marxist thought. This lineage needs to be documented further. 9. Martha C. Nussbaum, Aristotelian Social Democracy (hereafter ASD) in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R. B. Douglass, G. Mara, and H. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 203 53. 10. Of course overlapping consensus is Rawlss term, not Maritains; he describes the fact, without using the term. See Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1943), and Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), esp. the section on pp. 76 80, entitled Men Mutually Opposed in Their Theoretical Conceptions Can Come to a Merely Practical Agreement Regarding a List of Human Rights. Maritain argues that his conception, though supported in his own mind by metaphysical Catholic ideas of the soul, does not require that metaphysical support and could be endorsed by anyone, theist or atheist, who is prepared to give a certain nonnegotiable place to the idea of human dignity.
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a reliable index of a nations quality of life.) All these thinkers nd in Aristotle the idea that the proper goal of politics is to support a rich plurality of human life-activities, to use the Marxian phrase, and that these activities are distinct from one another and each valuable in its own right. Wealth is a means to human activity, and human activity should never be assessed simply by looking at its tendency to produce wealth. To this basic agreement we can add another, equally basic: neoAristotelians hold the separateness of persons to be a basic fact for normative political thought. Each person should be treated as an end, and none as a mere means to the ends of others. Thus they reject the idea that the goal of politics lies in some glorious total or average; they insist on asking how each and every person is doing, and, with Aristotle, they deny that a society can be ourishing as a whole when some members are doing extremely badly. In that way, they all oppose not only the pursuit of wealth as ultimate end, but also aggregative forms of Utilitarianism. Because they thus hold that human dignity is an end in itself and not simply a means to other ends, this neo-Aristotelian tradition draws near to Kant, and I have argued in WHD that Marxs reading of Aristotle was in many ways shaped by the Kantian idea of humanity as an end. So it would be no surprise if there were to be a close relationship between such neo-Aristotelianisms and the Kantian thought of John Rawls, who begins from the intuitive idea that every person has an inviolability founded upon justice. This relationship will be at its closest when the neo-Aristotelian is also a liberal, as in the case of Green, Barker, Maritain, and myself. And it has seemed to me, as it seemed to all four of these thinkers, that Aristotle provides a good starting point for thought in an era dominated by the pursuit of wealth especially when that regrettable human tendency has been given sanctity by dominant theories of the time. Thus Maritain announces from the start his fundamental opposition to forms of capitalism that make the pursuit of wealth an end in itself, and to the related everyday idea, which he nds ubiquitously in America, that human activity is simply a means to economic growth. Green and Barker were of course inspired to go back to the Greeks by the ascendancy of both philosophical Utilitarianism and far cruder ways of thinking about accumulation in their own philosophical and political context; Green, especially, writes about this opposition with urgency and eloquence. All of the liberal neo-Aristoteliansand, indeed, the antiliberal group as wellagree further in stressing the central importance of practical reason and sociability, as architectonic functionings that both organize and suffuse all of the others, making their pursuit fully human. I myself was motivated to discuss the relevance of Aristotle to public debates when I saw that the community of international development policy making was dominatednot even by the subtle ideas of Utili-
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tarian philosophy, but by the crude and cheapened form those ideas have taken in modern development economics. Economists are good at many things, but arguing for a particular conception of the ultimate ends of human social life does not seem to me to be among them. And yet they put forward ideas on this issue all the time, particularly in international development, and these ideas are enormously inuential. So Mulgan mistakes the context of my thought. It is true that the Greeks are sometimes fought over in American debates about education, and it is true that I have written on this topic. But Aristotle plays almost no role in what I write on education, and this is for two reasons: Aristotle has little of interest to say about education in surviving texts, and my Straussian opponents are not very interested in Aristotle anyway.11 He is not easy grist for an esotericists mill. So I focused on Plato in countering claims made by Straussians about his text; in developing the positive side of my own thinking, I focused on the Stoics, who seem to me the greatest ancient Western thinkers about education. Whatever my quarrels with Allan Bloom and the other Straussians, those writers have relatively little inuence on global politics. The normative thought that inheres in the practice of development economics has a huge and decisive inuence. I wrote Aristotelian Social Democracy sitting in a United Nations institute for development economics that happened to be located in Finland.12 After eight summers of work at that institute, I came to believe that Finland is as close to being a just society as any we know. Traditional conceptions and practices of social democracy in that nation were in many respects in tune with the conception of human functioning that I had been working out, against leading models of development economics, with inspiration from Aristotle. (To take just one example, Finnish sociologist Erik Allardts important book Having, Loving, Being, as its title indicates, defends against economic ideas of human development the idea that the quality of life in a nation should be assessed by focusing on a rich plurality of human functionings.) 13 This independent convergence called for investigation; my article was the record of that investigation. Thus the article Mulgan analyzes contains a substantial section describing Scandinavian (especially Finn11. In my review of Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind (Martha C. Nussbaum, Undemocratic Vistas, New York Review of Books, November 5, 1987), I make passing reference to his gross misreadings of the central ideas of Aristotles Poetics, as evidence of his defective scholarship. In my Cultivating Humanity, Aristotle gures primarily as a distinguished thinker who believed that cross-cultural study was an important part of good political theorizing. 12. For discussion of this institute and its work, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Public Philosophy and International Feminism, Ethics 108 (1998): 762 96. 13. Erik Allardt, Att ha, alska, att vara: Om valfard i Norden (Having, loving, being: On welfare in the Nordic countries) (Borgholm: Argos, 1975). For a short account of Allardts position, see his Having, Loving, Being, in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 88 94.
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ish and Swedish) ideas about the measurement of social welfare, which I compare to my own neo-Aristotelian conception. II. ARISTOTLES POLITICS: DEMOCRACY, LEISURE, EXCLUSION My aim in ASD was to describe a form of contemporary social democracy based on ideas of human capability and functioning, to show that this idea has roots in Aristotle, and to suggest that reection on Aristotles arguments helps us understand some reasons we might have for endorsing this view. I portrayed the view as an attractive alternative to resourcebased forms of liberalism, with their thin account of the good, and also to communitarianism, with its fully determinate account of the good (ASD, p. 238). A. Aristotle and Modern Liberalism We need to depart from Aristotle in some signicant respects in order to create a view we can endorse, especially if we are building a conception of social democracy that is genuinely liberal, as I argued we should. On most of the points stressed by Mulgan, I signalled my disagreement with Aristotle. From the very beginning of my work on his political thought, I have stressed the stupidity and unacceptability of his arguments on slaves and women, which I consider, however, not to be lodged at the heart of his conception. In my 1988 article, Nature, Function, and Capability (NFC), I stressed the need to work politically with an assumption that all children of two human parents are capable of the major functions of human life, unless and until prolonged experience with an individual indicates to us that a different type of functioning is what is appropriate for that individual, as in the case of a very severely mentally handicapped child, who will need special education and may or may not become capable of political functioning.14 The institution of slavery, of course, I rejected at the outset. In NFC, I stressed that Aristotles ideas about the need for leisure led to unacceptable consequences and needed to be altered (on which more below). And in ASD itself I insisted (as did Green and Barker) that Aristotles unacceptable lack of a conception of political liberty calls for major departures: In this area, I said, the Aristotelian must depart from Aristotle (ASD, p. 239). I remarked that on this point Athenian traditions of free speech might prove some help in crafting that departure, since some Athenian norms required the protection, around each citizen, of a sphere of privacy and non-interference (ASD, p. 239). Thus the passage cited by Mulgan to illustrate my erroneous interpreting of Aristotle is actually a passage about Periclean Athens that is brought in precisely to help us see how to depart from Aristotle. I did, however, mention that in some respects Aristotle is not as illib14. Martha C. Nussbaum, Nature, Function, and Capability (hereafter NFC), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. vol. 1 (1988), pp. 145 84.
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eral as he has been credited with being. I noted that he has no prescriptions regarding the religious identity of the ideal citysomething that already, in the fourth century, would be a notable omission, given that cities contained not only a conicting plurality of Olympian deities, but also a host of foreign cults. The effect of the omission would appear to be to leave this matter unregulateda great departure from Platos Republic, where all speech about the gods is carefully regulated (ASD, pp. 23536). I also noted that in some respects the liberal conception of freedom as noninterference can be effectively challenged by the Aristotelian, arguing that certain types of apparent interference with liberty (as in land reform and other types of economic redistribution) may actually be required in order to render citizens fully capable of choice (ASD, p. 240). In WHD I develop this idea much further, arguing that in the absence of economic redistribution the various liberties of choice are only words on paper. In this way, at least some policies that might seem illiberal in Aristotle are not really illiberal, if we have a sufciently rich and material conception of liberty. On the whole, however, I stressed the need to revise Aristotelian ideas in the direction of liberalism. B. Democracy and Social Democracy Mulgan argues that I call Aristotle a social democrat, whereas in reality he was deeply hostile to democracy and was a partisan of a mixed regime. His argument contains a twofold equivocation. First of all, the remarks he brings in to illustrate Aristotles hostility to democracy are Aristotles remarks about demokratia, which is introduced by denition as a degen erate regime. My remarks, of course, focused on Aristotles conception of politeia, which, though it departs from Athenian democracy in many respects, is still closer to democracy than to any other ancient form, in that it involves an idea of free and equal citizens ruling and being ruled by turns. 15 It is certainly neither oligarchy nor monarchy. Nor do I conceal the fact that Aristotles own conception of politeia involves the rejection of some key features of Athenian democracy; this is stressed in my discussion of privacy and noninterference, and of the roles of the craftsmen, sailors, and farmers.
15. See ASD, p. 233, for references and discussion of that idea: They are not free if they are treated despotically by a ruler and have no share at all in rule. Nor are they treated as equals if they are relegated to subordinate functionings while some king lords it over them. This does not mean that there is no room in government for expertise; nor does it mean that citizens can never delegate functions of some sorts to experts. It does mean that citizens should be judged by citizen juries selected in some representative way; and it means that some sort of democratic legislative body, either direct or representative, should make the major decisions concerning the conception. Aristotle denes citizenship as the authorization (exousia ) to share in judicial and deliberative functioning (Politics 1275b18 20, and see 1274a15 ff., where Aristotle praises Solon for giving the people the power of electing their magistrates and calling them to accounta power without which, he says, they would be living the life of slaves).
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The second equivocation concerns modern forms of democracy. Mulgan says that Aristotle does not support democracy, as if modern democracy were the same thing Aristotle attacks. But of course modern democracies are very different both from the degenerate regime Aristotle attacks theoretically and from the historical Athenian democracy to which he is in some respects opposed. All modern democracies are mixed regimes. All of them, though they permit all citizens to participate in political planning as voters and jurors, assign ofces by a different principle: not by lot, as at Athens, but by some kind of judgment about merit and service to the community.16 This is exactly as Mulgans Aristotle would urge. All modern democracies, again, mediate popular passions by deliberative and representative institutions, as Mulgans Aristotle would urge. All have a large place for expertiseas in the role of the judiciary, which I have discussed in various analyses of Aristotelian rationality. Again, this agrees with Aristotle and departs from Athens, where there was no career judiciary, all jurors were selected by lot, and there were not even any rules of relevance for testimony, resulting in a pernicious role for slander and scandal in the courtroom process. All modern democracies, nally, place considerable emphasis on civic education and the production of civic virtue, one of Mulgans central points. To quote from a recent, and quite typical, account of the American Founding: The founders were extremely fearful of popular passions and prejudices, and they did not want government to translate popular desires directly into law. They sought to create institutions that would lter those desires so as to ensure policies that would promote the public good. At the same time, the founders placed a high premium on the idea of civic virtue, which required participants in politics to act as citizens dedicated to something other than their self-interest, narrowly conceived. . . . From these points it should be clear that the Constitution was not rooted in the assumption that direct democracy was the ideal, to be replaced by republican institutions only because direct democracy was not practical.17 That is democracy, as we know it in the United States, Europe, India, and (or so I believe) Mulgans nation, Australia.18 Thus to say that Aris16. In Athens, only the ofce of general was lled by a merit-based selection. 17. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.Com (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, in press). Sunstein is describing not only his own conclusions but also those of Gordon Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1992). 18. Indeed, the emphasis on civic virtue is particularly strong in the Nordic social democracies that were my focal point. It is used, e.g., to justify their stringent controls on immigration, a feature that I nd morally problematic. When I was last in Norway, they were about to pass a law declaring private schooling illegal on grounds of civic virtue, wanting to transmit to all citizens a homogeneous conception of the values underlying the welfarist-egalitarian state. I do not support this idea; but Aristotle probably would, mutatis mutandis.
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totle is in some ways like modern forms of democracy is to say that he is in some ways like that. Social democracy comes in, of course, in the ways in which Aristotle insists on comprehensive material support for life-activities. Pace Mulgan, Aristotle is no complacent backer of wealthy propertied classes. In a passage to which Mulgan himself draws attention, he argues that the state should directly subsidize the participation of even the poorest citizens in necessary civic functions. And in material discussed by me in ASD, he mandates large-scale land reform: indeed, for him, the really tough question is whether there is to be any private property at all. Half the property is held in common, and the rest is common in use, in the sense that a needy citizen is entitled to take produce from a richer persons land. Aristotle is vividly aware that in existing states the rich and the poor are engaged in a constant struggle. His analysis of this conict led the great historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, who died this year, and whose memory I pause to honor, to call Aristotle the originator of the modern concept of class struggle. De Ste. Croix also demonstrated the extent of Aristotles inuence on Marxs development of that idea.19 Aristotles attacks on the idea that wealth should be the aim either of an individual life or the life of a polity are too well known for me to dwell on them here (see Politics I.8 and VII.1). They are the source of the long neoAristotelian tradition I have described. And, in evidence produced by Mulgan himself, Aristotle rejects the almost universal tendency in his time to assign ofces on the basis of wealth, or property, or honor, preferring the claims of virtue and service. He disapproves even more strongly of assigning citizenship itself in accordance with wealth or birth, as is done at Sparta. Does Aristotle adopt an inclusive account of citizenship only for reasons of ensuring stability? Some of his arguments, certainly, have stability in view. But I have argued that Aristotles whole conception of the job of political arrangement is one that focuses on providing the necessary conditions of the good human life to anyone whatsoever (Politics 1324a23 5); I explored all the interpretations of anyone whatsoever that seemed plausible, rejecting those that seemed incompatible with the text. I concluded that it must mean anyone who has (as women and natural slaves do not) the basic capacities to perform the judicial and legislative functions associated with citizenship. I granted that this conception is one that Aristotle does not consistently endorseindeed, one of the purposes of my 1988 article (NFC) was to stress these inconsistencies. But it is one major thread in his conception, and it is the one that governs not only crucial elements in his account of the ideal city but
19. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981).
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also his criticisms of his predecessors in Politics, book II. His criticisms of Plato, especially, insist that one cannot provide eudaimonia to a city as a whole without providing it to each and every one of its members (Politics 1261b16 27, 1261a17ff.); but the goal of making the city eudaimon is ab solutely fundamental, and it is certainly not pursued for the sake of stability only. Until Mulgan advances arguments against me on these points, which are the core of my argument, I conclude that it stands. C. Leisure and Education Mulgan correctly emphasizes that Aristotle excludes from citizenship people who dont have enough leisure to get the education he thinks citizenship requires. And of course that looks like a major difference between his conception and all other modern democratic conceptions. But is it? The liberal tradition has had great hesitation about the universality of the franchise on precisely these grounds. Even John Rawls insists that the principle of one person/one vote should be applied only once a nation reaches a certain level of economic development; presumably this is because, as traditional liberal arguments observe, uneducated laboring classes may not be able to be the informed citizens we want. In this sense, modern liberalism has been quite skeptical about the values of the ancient Athenian democracy, where any farmer or sailor, illiterate or literate, could vote in the assembly and have his name in the lottery from which all ofces, excepting that of general, were chosen. It was just this aspect of Aristotelianism that T. H. Green famously took up, becoming one of the great public champions of compulsory free public education for all citizens, regardless of class or wealth.20 As I point out in my 1988 article, that is the right direction for an Aristotelian position to go. If one rejects the idea that the correct basis for assigning citizenship is wealth or birth, as Aristotle clearly does, and if one bases the claim on some more nebulous human qualications (as I think he does, though this is not so clear), then the right solution is not to exclude from citizenship those who cannot pay for education and the leisure it requires. This is no more reasonable than the Spartan arrangement for common meals, where those who cannot pay in lose their citizenship because taking part in the common meals is regarded as a necessary condition of citizenship. Aristotle clearly rejects the Spartan approach in favor of one that subsidizes the participation of poor citizens, thus giving them what they need in order to be and remain citizens in good standing. If we reason analogously about the requirement of education, the right solution would be, similarly, to subsidize education for all citizens,
20. I note that this same principle was defended as early as 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which advocates free coeducational schools in which all social classes would meet as equals; apparently these schools were to be compulsory. Her work, of course, had no public inuence in her own time.
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so that all get what citizenship requires. So Green was correct and Aristotle was incorrect. I argue that this error involves Aristotle in a fundamental inconsistency with his own political principles: so Green was more Aristotelian than Aristotle. Why did Aristotle commit this error? In a poor agrarian economy, it is very difcult to provide compulsory education for all citizens, however poor. In India, for example, despite the fact that compulsory primary and secondary education is in the constitution as a fundamental right of all citizens, only 35 percent of its women and 65 percent of its men are literate. (And citizenship does suffer.) This sad situation has multiple causes: corruption that leaches off the money that should have been spent on schools, lack of public participation by those who are illiterate (which, of course, often results directly from illiteracy, a baneful cycle), and the inability to solve the problem of parents economic reliance on child labor. I am sure that in ancient Greece at least some of these problems also obtained. Child labor, for example, is evident in some of the comedies of Aristophanes. Aristotle is, in general, not good at envisaging profound economic transformations in society. His rejection of Platonicstyle utopian thinking often degenerates into a failure to take the bold imaginative leaps that Plato so creatively takes. The important thing is that Aristotle is correct: education is a fundamental prerequisite of republican citizenship, and education requires quite a long period of leisure (is incompatible, for example, with extensive child labor). He was wrong if he believed (as is unclear) that citizenship is incompatible with holding a job in adult life, after one is educated; but modern Aristotelians should still devote thought to creating spaces for public deliberation and adult learning, as fundamental elements of citizenship.21 D. Exclusions Mulgan suggests that Aristotle is not at all unhappy about excluding craftsmen and metics (resident aliens) from citizenship in the city. What I said is that their inclusion is entailed by some of his fundamental political principles (see above), and that, furthermore, he himself was a metic, leading, thus, a life that he calls that of an alien without honor (Politics 1278a37, quoting from Homer). It is thus quite extraordinary, I said, that in view of these strong reasons, both philosophical and experiential, for discussing the matter critically, he glides so glibly over the whole question of their exclusion, saying nothing about it. The signs of
21. We just dont see in the text examples of people who have an education and then do work for a fee. So strong is the Greek suspiciousness of the life of money making that people of good background typically would not take such salaried posts; even the work of running estates was frequently delegated to women, on the grounds that this base type of occupation is not suited to free men.
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discomfort I noted were in the remark just cited, which surely does not sound like the utterance of someone who is pleased with his own situation, and in the wistful observation (mentioned by Mulgan) that it would be nice if all the farm labor could be done by people brought in from outside the borderswhich might at least make it look as if the city is not excluding people to whom it has some obligation (Politics 1330a2531). But I stressed that there is basically silence on this topic, and a most puzzling silence at that. I would now add that we should not ignore the fact that Aristotle was twice forced into political exile on account of his Macedonian origins; the second time he apparently said that he was leaving to prevent the Athenians from sinning twice against philosophy comparing his likely fate to that of Socrates. So we should not ignore the possibility that as a metic with no civil rights, twice forced to run for his life, he might not feel able to speak out in criticism of the situation of metics. How deep is the exclusion of slaves and women from citizenship? On women, Aristotle in general offers arguments so ludicrous as to be unworthy of any serious person. He holds, for example, that women have fewer teeth than men and that when a menstruating woman looks into a mirror it turns the glass red. But in the context where he is talking about their exclusion from political membership, he doesnt even say something ludicrous; he says virtually nothing. Simply, women have the deliberative faculty, but it is lacking in authority (Politics 1260a12 13). He never tells us what he means by lacking in authority over their emotions? That is the most common interpretation, and probably the correct one. But sometimes people read the text as suggesting a merely contingent limitation: they dont in fact have authority. That latter position would not justify any restriction on their role in an ideal city, of course. One quite mysterious passage suggests such a reading, though we will never be able to assert anything with condence, so slight is the evidence.22 One thing is certain: that having rejected Platos demolition of the family, and having attached considerable importance to its maintenance, as a source of love and education for children, Aristotle is unable and unwilling to envisage any transformation of that institution that would make women equal as citizens. This is another big failure of imagi22. At 1259b6 ff. of Politics, Aristotle observes that in political government there is a basic equality, but ruler and ruled are distinguished by differences of outward forms and speeches and honors, as is the case with the footpan of Amasisreferring to a Herodotean story in which people were led to worship a golden footpan. He then says, The relationship between male and female is permanently of this sortmeaning, apparently, that there is a permanent, rather than shifting (as in political rule) difference of outward form and speech and honor. The Amasis story strongly suggests that this difference is without foundation in realityalthough just above, in a tortuous sentence, Aristotle appeared to endorse the proposition that males are by nature more rulerly than females (1259b2). What to make of all this is anyones guess.
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nation, but we can hardly pretend that this failure is his alone. No political thinker in the Western liberal tradition has yet solved the problem of designing a society that would retain the intimate love characteristic of the nuclear family while delivering women full equality as citizens and human beings.23 Again, howeveras with Green on educationAristotles basic ideas have proven fruitful by those grappling seriously with the problem. Stoic thinker Musonius Rufus, while not proposing full political equality for women, did propose their equal education, including higher educationusing premises that are, roughly speaking, Aristotelian. Women, he argued have basic capacities for all the virtues; those capacities can only be developed by education. Not to develop them is a mistake. So: lets give them an equal education.24 With slavery, I pointed out that Aristotles justication is extremely narrow: slavery is justied only when the individual in question is totally unable to foresee the future and totally lacks the deliberative faculty.25 Now Aristotle clearly believed that there are a lot of able-bodied people in barbarian countries who have those features; in that, as Mulgan says, he was making a ridiculous claim, though one most Greeks believed. What is rather interesting is that his claim renders unjust much of the institution as conventionally practiced: for the enslaved populations of other Greek cities were, according to that argument, unjustly enslaved. And his argument has been used subsequently in a progressive way. Las Casas famously used it to argue that the enslavement of the Native Americans was unjust, on the grounds that they possess a culture and thus clearly do not altogether lack the deliberative faculty. So there is complexity here. And, once again, at the bottom of Aristotles failure lies a failure of imagination: he cannot envisage a transformation of the economy such that slave labor is not required. It took many centuries before any thinker would be able to achieve this. A concluding remark on Henry James: Mulgan thinks that James shows a general indifference to the political context which sustains [his] society. 26 I do not believe that such a reading can survive contact with The Princess Casamassima. In my article on that novel, as Arneson
23. For my own views of this question, see WHD, chap. 4, and also Martha C. Nussbaum, The Future of Feminist Liberalism, presidential address of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, forthcoming in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 24. See Martha C. Nussbaum, The Incomplete Feminism of Musonius Rufus, forthcoming in The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, under advance contract to University of Chicago Press. I argue that Musonius does not, in fact, hold that women have a just claim to education; his argument is rather that it would be better for society if women had it. So his argument is not the same as the capability-based argument I endorse. 25. In Nussbaum, Shame, Separateness, and Political Unity. 26. Richard Mulgan, Was Aristotle an Aristotelian Democrat? in this issue, p. 101.
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points out, I do impute to James a concern for securing to all citizens the intellectual and spiritual nourishment, through public education and public provision of the arts, that would be necessary in order to bring about a true class-leveling revolution. I contrast this liberal-perfectionist aspiration both with traditional elitism (which holds that such advantages should go only to those favored by birth or special natural endowment) and also with the revolutionary ideologies depicted in the novel, which are indifferent to the nourishment of the spirit, and are perfectly willing to let the arts get wiped out in the name of class leveling. I still believe what I wrote. The James whose gravestone reads Henry James, Citizen of Two Countries, Interpreter of His Generation on Both Sides of the Sea was not indifferent to social context. And though Arneson seems to me correct in his suggestion that at times James inclines toward the narrower perfectionism of a Rashdall, in The Princess he seems more on the track of Green, though with a richer interest in beauty and art. III. THE POLITICAL CONCEPT OF THE HUMAN BEING: INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL I have argued that a concept of the human being can help us to make progress on the difcult enterprise of nding a foundation for political theory. Antony gives us an eloquent and philosophically rich account of how such concepts can assist, as well as impede, feminist inquiry. She contends, however, that my approach here is awed, sliding inconsistently between an external and an internal account of the human beingalthough, as I read her article, she ultimately holds that both the external and the internal can help us to make progress on the problem, if distinguished from one another and combined in the right way. To begin responding to Antony, I need to describe, briey, my general approach to justication in political philosophy.27 In WHD, I adopt, for purposes of political justication, the procedure described and defended by John Rawls, when he describes argument proceeding toward reective equilibrium. We lay out the arguments for a given theoretical position, holding it up against the xed points in our moral intuitions; we see how those intuitions both test and are tested by the conceptions we examine.28 For example, among the
27. I advanced this view as one about justication in ethics in my introduction to Martha C. Nussbaum, Loves Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 28. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 20 22, 46 53; PL, pp. 28, 45, 381, n. 16. In Martha C. Nussbaum, Rawls and Feminism, forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. S. Freeman (New York: Cambridge University Press), I discuss Rawlss restrictions on the roles emotion might play in this justicatory process, and I suggest that we should admit emotions (and the judgments they contain) to the same extent and in the same way that we admit beliefs: we will leave aside those that are especially likely to be biased or unreliable, but we will not leave
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provisionally xed points might be the judgment that rape and domestic violence are damaging to human dignity. We look to see how the various conceptions we examine respond to that intuition. We may prefer the capabilities view to the utilitarian view, for example, when we notice that satisfactions are malleable and people can learn to acquiesce in an undignied situation. At other times, our concrete judgments may give way when we discover that the conception we favor on other grounds calls them into question. For example, if we had tended to think private property not very important for political justice, thinking about the role of personal property in the capabilities approach and about the way that approach connects property to other areas of human choice and liberty might make us reevaluate that initial judgment.29 We hope, over time, to achieve consistency and t in our judgments taken as a whole, modifying particular judgments when this seems required by a theoretical conception that seems in other respects powerful, but modifying or rejecting the theoretical conception when that has failed to t the most secure of our moral intuitions. We follow this procedure in many ways, but, with Rawls, I imagine that we are following it in a specically political domain, seeking a conception by which people of differing comprehensive views can agree to live together in a political community. This entails that we take into account not only our own judgments and the theoretical conceptions but also the judgments of our fellow citizens.30 In the rst chapter of WHD, I understand myself to be carrying out a rst step in the process of reaching toward such a reective equilibrium. Before that process would be complete (if it ever would be), we would also have to lay out other competing conceptions, compare them in detail with this one, and see on what grounds ours emerged as more choiceworthy. (Chapter 2 of WHD begins that part of the task, by comparing the capabilities view in some detail to various forms of subjective welfarism that might be used as the basis for fundamental political principles.) Things are actually somewhat more complicated, for in WHD, chapter 2, considering the claims of theories based on the idea of satisfying desire or preference, I, on balance, reject those theories in favor of a theory of the sort I defend, one based on a substantive (albeit partial) conception of the good. But I say that, nonetheless, it is quite important to political justication that there should be a good measure of convergence between a substantive-good approach and an intelligently de-
them out as a class. I suggest that, whatever Rawls says, his actual procedure in conversing with the reader does at times rely on strong emotions, such as indignation and (appropriate) fear. 29. I discuss this example in Nussbaum, Public Philosophy and International Feminism. 30. See Rawls, PL, 384 n. 16: This equilibrium is fully intersubjective: that is, each citizen has taken into account the reasoning and arguments of every other citizen.
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signed informed-desire approach, where the latter has been designed by building in certain substantive ethical norms (such as absence of hierarchy, freedom from intimidation) into the procedure used to winnow or scrutinize desire. The reasons I give for according desire an ancillary role in political justication have to do both with political stability and with respect for persons. Thus, as can be seen, the entirety of my method is both internal in the thin sense recognized by Antony, taking its start from human beliefs and practices, and also internal in the stronger sense, making evaluative and, indeed, ethical judgments absolutely central to the holistic task. Although it is obvious that (for me, as for Rawls) knowledge of general scientic and historical facts, which is internal only in the thin sense, enters the picture as a source of constraints on what politics may sensibly aim at, the provisional xed points in our judgments are all evaluative, indeed ethical, and the theories we test against them are evaluative, indeed ethical, also. Thus I never claim to be deriving ethical conclusions from nonethical premises. Indeed, it was Bernard Williamss apparent hope that we might be able to do some such thing that I called into question in Aristotle on Human Nature, 31 arguing that it was from the realm of ethical value alone that we would be able to get judgments that were really pertinent to settling troublesome evaluative disputes.32 And it was my controversial contention that Aristotle already saw this point: he was not doing what many, including Williams and MacIntyre, have thought him to be doingthat is, deriving ethical norms from metaphysical biologybut rather deriving ethical norms from some more basic and more generally shared ethical judgments. If he had been doing the other thing, I argued, we would be right to reject his conception, as Williams did; but what he is really doing, deriving ethical value from ethical value, makes sense and should hold our interest. I believe that I have been absolutely consistent in this contention throughout my writing on the topic. The passage that Antony introduces as evidence that I waver between a more evaluative sense of internal and a less evaluative sense actually does not show wavering, if one exam31. Martha C. Nussbaum, Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics (hereafter HN), in World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Philosophy of Bernard Williams, ed. J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 86 131. 32. Nothing I say here should be taken to suggest that I endorse any simple or conventional form of the fact-value distinction. I believe that the assumption that there is some such single and simple distinction has done serious philosophical damage, although there are several distinctions that one might usefully make in a variety of areas that sometimes get made using the language of fact and value. My argument in HN is actually couched in terms of the distinction between the ethical realm and other realms, whether of value or fact. I am not sure whether Antony and I have a difference on the larger question of the fact-value distinction, and I therefore refrain from commenting on this matter further.
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ines the passage in its original context. The argument of Human Functioning and Social Justice (HF) is directed at anti-essentialists of various types.33 Some believe that the demise of metaphysical realism (if, indeed, demise it is) entails the demise of all forms of essentialism. My rst dialectical move against this opponent was to point out the very obvious fact that this alleged demise entails no such thing, for its obvious that we can recognize all kinds of essentialist judgments as internal to the human point of view. Now of course at this point, as Antony rightly observes, the door is wide open. Not only evaluative judgments but judgments of many other types are on the table, as examples of the internal. But of course that is only my rst move, a dialectical tactic to convince a dogged opponent of essentialism that she might want to listen to what I am going to say. Once I get to developing my own position in the later sections of that article, I make it very clear, there as in other articles, that the fundamental judgments in question are evaluative and that the concept of the human being is in that sense a thoroughly evaluative concept. This could not be clearer, for the article ends with a discussion of how emotions of compassion and concern use a concept of the human being and cannot get off the ground without one. But of course it has been my contention in every word I have written about the emotions that the judgments, at their heart, are fundamentally and indissolubly evaluative and, indeed, are part of ethics in its broad sense of a search for the good life; here, they involve the idea of a signicant damage to a being like oneself. So all I was doing at the initial stage was introducing a genus of judgmentsthose that are internal in the weak sense of which my own preferred evaluative ethical judgments are one important species. Thus my use of an idea of the human being always was, as I insisted, closer to the Rawlsian idea of a concept of the person than to what Rawls identies as the Aristotelian reliance on a concept of human nature.34 My contention was that any concept of the human being (or person) that is useful in settling ethical questions must be evaluative and, in the broad sense, ethical: for among the many things we do and are, it will have to single out some as particularly central, as so important that without those we dont think that a human life exists any longer. I pointed out that it was in this (evaluative) way that we actually proceed when we make tough judgments about whether this senile-demented individual is really a human life any longer: we just have to ask ourselves: How important are the capacities for reasoning and sociability? And I argued that there is a rather broad consensus that they are very, very important: without those, whatever sort of life it is, it is not a human life.
33. Martha C. Nussbaum, Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism (hereafter HF), Political Theory 20 (1992): 202 46. 34. See Nussbaum, HN, n. 17 and p. 109 with n. 37.
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Antony contends that if the concept of human being is internal in that sense, strongly evaluative, it will do no work in ethical and political judgment. Now in one sense I agree with her: the entire point of my critique of Williams was to say that no concept we nd here could possibly do the sort of work Williams (and David Wiggins, whom I also discuss) seems to want, namely, the work of settling troublesome ethical disputes without having to engage in difcult ethical judgment. Wiggins imagines that a substance-concept can somehow keep us from making decisions that are violative of human dignity, and I suggest that this hope is a chimera. If we want to protect human dignity, we had better do it with ethical arguments proceeding from ethical premises. Nonetheless, I do hold out some hope that a much more modest and realistic goal can be achieved by appeal to the concept of the human being: namely, that of setting forth a very basic level of ethical judgment about ourselves that is likely to lie deeper and to command a broader consensus than do many of the troublesome questions we are actually discussing. In other words, to put matters in Rawlsian language, we are trying to get clear about some of the provisional xed points in our judgments, before testing the theories we examine against them. Provisional xed points may, of course, be both highly specic and highly general. For Rawls, they include the specic idea that slavery is wrong, and they also include (or so I read him) the highly general idea that every person has an inviolability founded upon justice, which, of course, both supports and is supported by the judgment about slavery. (All these, of course, are ethical judgments.) My own concept of the human being plays this sort of role, at a very general level: we want to nd some at least provisionally nonnegotiable points in our judgments, so that we can see how various theories treat them. I suggest that we nd such provisional xed points in the idea that both practical reason and sociability are extremely important aspects of an existence that is truly human, permeating and organizing its many functions. I make it very clear that this starting point doesnt perform the task Williams had in mind: Such a logos may seem too elusive, too open-ended, to serve as a foundationif what one wants from a foundation is a once-forall hard-edged solution to matters that actual human communities nd perplexing. The Aristotelians claim, however, that no other sort of foundation is truly deep or truly pertinent. . . . It is only if it remains rooted in the human and the ethical that our search can be . . . about what is deepest and most essential about human living. (HF, p. 124) Nonetheless, I argue that some real work is donefor by directing our attention explicitly to something that (so I argue) we all actually nd very important, we notice to what extent actual ethical or political theo-
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ries protect that element, and how well. I suggest that we actually have a deep and broad consensus on the concept of the person as Aristotle articulates it. If we describe that conception explicitly, we will be forced to notice that some political theories do not give salience to what we actually think salient. In that way, we perform part of the task of working toward a political reective equilibrium: we notice a tension between a theory that may look attractive and our own deeply held convictions (provisional xed points). I compared my own procedure to one used by Rawls when he argues against Utilitarianism. Rawls believes that both Utilitarians and nonUtilitarians believe that the separateness of persons is an extremely salient fact for normative purposes. (We might understand in this way the Utilitarians insistence that each person shall count for one and none as more than one: each person counts, no matter what her class or status.) And yet the normative theory of Utilitarianism, however attractive in some respects, at times seems committed to neglecting that salience, and even to treating all persons as parts of a single social super-person; thus some peoples exceeding satisfaction can cancel out another persons exceeding misery. Rawls argues that the Utilitarian will experience a tension here, and it is his hope that at this point the Utilitarian will decide to investigate the Rawlsian conception further, to see whether it can offer political principles that are more attuned to her own deepest convictions. In that way, the argument does real workalthough it does this work only if the person really does share the concept of the person that Rawls puts forward. (That is why Rawls calls his procedure Socratic: it works with each interlocutor, as a sorting-out of each persons ethical beliefs.) 35 So too with my argument: it is only if the person really does think practical reason and sociability extremely central elements of human life that the argument will do work against political conceptions that wrongly slight or demote them (such as the forms of capitalism criticized by Marx). On the other hand, it is my contention that most of us actually do agree with Marxs Aristotle about these core elements of our humanity and their salience; so pointing out how other conceptions slight or demote them does real work. I think that when Antony says that no work can be done by this sort of argument, she is imagining an ethical situation that is too many steps down the road, so to speak. She is imagining an interlocutor who knows what all her convictions are and who has already decided how to adjudicate tensions among them. For such a person, she is right: theres no news here. But surely none of us is in this position, not even philoso35. For both the Rawls of PL and me, additional constraints enter the picture in the political realm: we both hold that a certain type of consensus plays an important role in justifying political principles. On the Socratic elenchus and what it can accomplish philosophically, see my review article on Gregory Vlastoss Socratic Studies, Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997): 27 45.
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phers. For we only know our convictions sufciently when we have studied both them and the major normative political theories, asking what we really want to stand for. This is a task that probably cant be completed in a lifetime. Surely most of the audience for Aristotles arguments, and our own, is much more likely to be in the position of Socrates interlocutors, who have never even begun to search into themselves. (Consider my example, in HN [pp. 98 102] of Protarchus in Platos Philebus, who announces his adherence to the trendy theory that pleasure is the good until Socrates points out to him all that this thesis omits, much of which Protarchus values.) So our arguments, while Socratic in their nature and limited by the limitations of that type of argumentation, can still do work of real political signicance. In HN, I made one further point. This was that, in certain specic argumentative contexts, we may point out that our interlocutors very behavior shows that she grants the centrality of the element on whose centrality we are insisting. There would thus be a pragmatic selfcontradiction were she to reply by denying its importance. Thus, it would be self-contradictory to engage in philosophical argument about the ends of human life and then deny that reason and argument have any importance. It would be similarly peculiar to attend the dramatic festivals of Athens looking for illumination about matters of human signicance and then to deny that community with others has any importance at all. I nd these patterns of argument interesting, and I think that they can sometimes do real work in convincing a certain type of opponent, but I do not rely on them. Where, then, does biology come in? In two places. In the normative concept of the person itself, I insist strongly on valuing the whole of our animality and not just our rationality, and on holding the two together: our dignity and rationality just are those of a certain sort of animal. I believe that in some respects Kantian starting points distort this point and give us, in the process, a distorted view of our ethical relation to the other animals.36 Second, a necessary and sufcient condition of being the object of normative ethical concern, in a politics based on the capabilities approach, is that one have some innate equipment that makes it possible for one to attain the capabilities that gure on my list, given sufcient attention, material support, and care. (A point of terminology obscured in Antonys usage: I call that equipment the basic capabilities; the achieved capabilities that it is the business of politics to produce are called the central capabilities, and they are also described as combined capabilities, since they combine, in most cases, internal training with external material and institutional supporting conditions.) For a basic capability to become a basis for moral concern, of course, it has to be a basis for one of the ones we have already evaluated in our normative concep36. See Nussbaum, The Future of Feminist Liberalism.
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tion and put on the list of the ones we like: thus many of the actual powers of human beings do not give rise to the concern that they be fostered in this way. But if the mature version is one of the capabilities we have evaluated as normatively central, then there is something terrible about the equipments being there undeveloped. This gives us a sense of waste and tragedy. If a turtle were given a life that did not develop powers of practical reason and sociability, we would have no sense of waste and tragedy; when Marxs worker is forced to live a life that reduces his senses to a less than fully human level of functioning, this does give rise to grief and anger. Thus the basic capabilities, those we pick out as corresponding to the central ones, already give rise to moral concern. As I have mentioned, I believe that the potential for error in assessing whether people have the necessary basis for a central capability is so great that we should proceed as if everyone has the necessary basis for all the major ones. This helps me answer Antonys point about men and women, as in fact I do in my article Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings (HC).37 If we have determined that the central capabilities are of great importance in any human life, then the very fact that a woman has the basic capabilities corresponding to these gives rise to a claim that those basic powers be developed. I pointed out that Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus develops an Aristotelian idea in just this way when he argues for womens equal educationshowing his male interlocutor that he has tacitly granted that women have the basic equipment necessary for developing these major human powers. Suppose, now (I argue), someone says, well, actually, we have two lists of the central capabilities, one for women and one for men. They have similar basic powers, but what is of normative centrality differs for the two. Here I examine Rousseaus version of that idea, arguing that, in Rousseaus own terms, it is a tragic failure. Emile cannot be a complete human being without Sophies sympathy and imagination, and Sophie cannot be a complete person without Emiles self-governance and rational capacity. I argue that Rousseaus own tragic denouement to their story, in his unpublished conclusion, shows that he saw this difculty clearly. We may add to this point another, connected with the idea of dignity and nonhumiliation: for, in WHD, I argue that it is always humiliating to be restricted from certain functionings on the basis of a morally irrelevant characteristic. On the other hand, if women fully in possession of the capabilities on the list want to choose a traditional gender-divided mode of life, I believe that any good political liberalism should create spaces for them to do so. This is why fully one-half of WHD is devoted to
37. Martha C. Nussbaum, Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings (hereafter HC), in Women, Culture, and Development, ed., Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 61104.
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tensions between sex equality and values connected with religion and family. One more point to Antony: my central capabilities are not virtues. In Non-Relative Virtues (NRV), I use Aristotles theory of the virtues to illustrate a way in which a cross-cultural debate about matters of central importance might be organized, despite cultural difference.38 But it would be misleading to think that I see my own theory as a theory of good human functioning closely analogous to a theory of moral virtue. Such a reading would ignore the fact that, in my view, the appropriate political goal is not functioning, but simply capability. And it would ignore the fact that, since 1994 at any rate, I hold a form of political liberalism that makes it inappropriate for any particular comprehensive conception of ethical value to be endorsed by politics. Aristotle sees the production of virtuous functioning as among the legitimate ends of politics; I do not. IV. THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH: PERFECTIONISM, FUNCTIONING, AND UNIVERSALS The aim of the capabilities approach in its current form is to provide the philosophical underpinning for an account of basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires.39 I argue that the best approach to this idea of a basic social minimum is provided by an approach that focuses on human capabilities, that is, what people are actually able to do and to bein a way informed by an intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being. I identify a list of central human capabilities, setting them in the context of a type of political liberalism that makes them specically political goals and presents them in a manner free of any specic metaphysical grounding. In this way, I argue, the capabilities can be the object of an overlapping consensus among people who otherwise have very different comprehensive conceptions of the good. And I argue that the capabilities in question should be pursued for each and every person, treating each as an end and none as mere tools of the ends of others: thus I adopt a principle of each persons capability, based on a principle of each person as end. Women have all too often been treated as the supporters of the ends of others rather than as ends in their own right; thus this principle has particular critical force with regard to womens lives. Finally, my approach uses the idea of a threshold level of each capability, beneath which it is held that truly human functioning is not available to citizens; the social goal should be understood in terms of getting citizens above this capability threshold.
38. Martha C. Nussbaum, Non-relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach (hereafter NRV), Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988): 32 53; and, in an expanded version (same name), in Nussbaum and Sen, eds., The Quality of Life, pp. 242 69. 39. I speak only of my own approach; in WHD, I summarize the differences between my version of the capabilities approach and Sens.
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The capabilities approach has another related, and weaker, use. It species a space within which comparisons of life quality (how well people are doing) are most revealingly made among nations. Used in this way, it is a rival to other standard measures, such as GNP per capita and utility. This role for the conception is signicant, since we are not likely to make progress toward a good conception of the social minimum if we do not rst get the space of comparison right. And we may use the approach in this weaker way, to compare one nation with another, even when we are unwilling to go further and use the approach as the philosophical basis for fundamental constitutional principles establishing a social minimum or threshhold. On the other hand, the comparative use of capabilities is ultimately of not much use without a determinate normative conception that will tell us what to make of what we nd in our comparative study. Most conceptions of quality-of-life measurement in development economics are implicitly harnessed to a normative theory of the proper social goal (wealth maximization, utility maximization, etc.), and this one is explicitly so harnessed. The primary task of my argument will be to move beyond the merely comparative use of capabilities to the construction of a normative political proposal that is a partial theory of justice. The capabilities approach is fully universal: the capabilities in question are important for each and every citizen, in each and every nation, and each is to be treated as an end. Women in developing nations are important to the project in two ways: as people who suffer pervasively from acute capability failure and, also, as people whose situation provides an interesting test of this and other approaches, showing us the problems they solve or fail to solve. Defects in standard GNP- and utilitybased approaches can be well understood by keeping the problems of such women in view; but of course womens problems are urgent in their own right, and it may be hoped that a focus on them will help compensate for earlier neglect of sex equality in development economics and in the international human rights movement. A. Satiscing and the Threshold Arneson calls my view a satiscing view. This would be a good name if I really held what he asserts, namely, that once citizens are over the threshold, inequalities among persons above this level are a dont care from the standpoint of justice. 40 I dont believe I ever said this; in WHD I explicitly deny that I believe this claim: A list of the central capabilities is not a complete theory of justice. Such a list gives us the basis for determining a decent social minimum in a variety of areas. I argue that the structure of social and political institutions should be chosen, at least in part, with a view to promoting at least a threshold level of these human capabilities.
40. Richard Arneson, Perfectionism and Politics, in this issue, p. 55.
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But the provision of a threshold level of capability, exigent though that goal is, may not sufce for justice, as I shall elaborate further below, discussing the relationship between the social minimum and our interest in equality. The determination of such further requirements of justice awaits a further inquiry. (p. 75) In discussing equality later (WHD, p. 86), I argue that systematic discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and so forth is already a form of capability failure in the area of dignity and nonhumiliation, even when people are above the threshold in other respects. But apart from that concern, I simply do not yet say what should be done when citizens are above the threshold. Many different distributive principles should be entertained at this point. That is why I view the enterprise as so far very incomplete. Arneson quite rightly asks how we set the threshold in a nonarbitrary way. In WHD, I suggest that this is best done by the internal processes of each liberal democracy, as it interprets its own constitution. History shows that this is not only possible but is also quite a reasonable way to balance concerns for history and culture against the demands of a universal norm. Our own free speech principle has been interpreted and reinterpreted since it was rst embodied in the Constitution. When Eugene Debs went to jail for advocating resistance to military service during World War I, dissident political speech during wartime was explicitly held to be unprotected; only University of Chicago professor Ernst Freund (a German Jew and probably the rst Jewish law professor in the United States) wrote that it was protected by the First Amendment.41 Now such speech is considered paradigmatic of what the First Amendment protects. Here I am inclined to say that our understanding of a central value has deepened; in other cases, we might say that it has simply shifted. Similar points obtain across cultures. Germany currently bans antiSemitic speech and literature; our free principle has been interpreted to protect such speech. Both of these interpretations seem reasonable in the light of each nations history and special problems. It will always be difcult to say what is a legitimate local interpretation of a capability and what is not; that is why it is a good idea for this specifying to take place in connection with a cross-cultural dialogue and attention to international human rights documents, as Hilary Charlesworth helpfully suggests. But the history of constitutional interpretation in many nations shows, I suggest, that the incremental specication of a threshold level of a capability is possible and gives real political guidance. When we set the threshold level of a capability, we must attend to current possibilities: but not too much. Thus, it would be pretty unreasonable for India to constitutionalize a fundamental right to a college education, given that right now only 35 percent of its women and 65 per41. In The New Republic, then a left-wing magazine.
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cent of its men are even literate. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable for India to do what it has done, extending a basic constitutional right of primary and secondary education to all children, even though at the present time this goal is very distant, as least in some regions. Levels should be set high enough to goad people to take intelligent action, but they should not be set so high as to bring the whole document into discredit. In setting the threshold, attention must also be given to potential clashes between one capability and another, a topic of concern to both Arneson and Charlesworth.42 But again: we must not pay too much attention to such potential clashes. Consider religion and education. If we interpreted the right to free exercise of ones religion to entail permitting parents to withdraw their children entirely from all schooling, that would give rise to many conicts between that central capability and others on our list. Wisely, the U.S. Supreme Court has not so dened that right. It has held that free exercise entails the right of Amish parents to withdraw their children from the last two years of required public education. We may dispute the case, but we can see that it is in the ballpark of the reasonable, not creating quite so many terrible conicts with other items on the list.43 Suppose, however, we went to the opposite extreme, deciding to specify the threshold levels so low as to minimize conict. Thus, India might say that there is no right to education, given that the life and health of parents, as things currently are, makes them dependent on the labor of their children. This would be accepting current reality for the way things must be. We can see that they need not be this way, for some statesnotably Keralahave achieved a near-universal level of literacy while not killing off the parents. So in this case a fairly high threshold seems better than one set low because of fear of conict. In general, my approach to the clash between one capability and another is to say that any situation in which we must push some citizens below the threshold on even one of the capabilities is a tragic situation. We are asking them to forgo something to which they have an entitlement based upon justice. Even if the reason we do this is to get them above the threshold on another capability, what we are doing is morally unacceptable. By seeing the situation in this way, as a tragic clash of right with right, we prepare ourselves to design a better future, one in which such clashes will not occur. Hegel thought that the moral importance of tragedy lay in the impetus it provides for creative thinking about a syn42. The whole issue of clashes between capabilities is dealt with at length in Martha C. Nussbaum, The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Limits of Cost-Benet Analysis, Journal of Legal Studies 29, pt. 2 ( June 2000): 100536. 43. Richard Arneson has disputed this case in an excellent article coauthored with Ian Shapiro, Democratic Autonomy and Religious Freedom: A Critique of Wisconsin v. Yoder, in Democracys Place, ed. Ian Shapiro (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 13774.
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thesis that would resolve the contradiction. I believe that he is correct. If we notice that right now in India families must choose between adequate nutrition and the education of their children, we should not ask merely, What should they choose? We should say, rst, that this is a tragic choice in which, whatever families do, they are forgoing something to which they have an entitlement based upon justice. So we had better get to work and design a future in which such conicts do not confront families.44 B. Functioning and Capability Arnesons perfectionist position defends functioning as the appropriate political goal, at least in some instances. He is dissatised with my own insistence that we are entitled only to promote capabilities. I am sure that if my theory were a perfectionist theory, of any type whatsoever, I would feel the force of these arguments more strongly; but I actually think that Arneson is wrong to think that my theory is in any interesting sense perfectionist. It uses a theory of the good that is a little more ample than Rawlss list of the primary goods, and it couches that list in terms of capability, whereas Rawlss own list contains both thing-like items and capability-like items. But these are differences within political liberalism, and political liberalism of the sort both Rawls and I endorse is opposed to any view that advocates a comprehensive theory of the human good as giving a set of appropriate goals for politics. Individuals have and pursue many different reasonable comprehensive conceptions of what has value. Respect for persons therefore entails that we respect those reasons and create, and protect, spaces within which those different conceptions will be chosen. So the capabilities are now envisaged as a core that we promote for political purposes, knowing that citizens will attach them in many different ways to their comprehensive conceptions. Such a view is perfectionist only in the sense in which Rawls always maintained that there was an element of perfectionism in his own theory; namely, that not all satisfactions count for political purposes, and central importance is attached to choice. I am inclined to think that the various forms of perfectionismincluding Aristotles own version, including Arnesons, and including comprehensive perfectionist liberalisms focused on an ideal of autonomy, such as Millsare among the reasonable comprehensive conceptions of value citizens may hold. Thus we ought to support, for political purposes, capabilities that make it possible for them to pursue their conceptions. We will therefore have reason to support the arts for political purposes not only because, as I have repeatedly argued, the arts play a major role in the formation of intelligent citizenship, but also because they are ma44. See on this Nussbaum, The Costs of Tragedy.
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jor ingredients of many peoples comprehensive conceptions.45 But notice that the second reason leads to a much narrower type of support than the rst. With art as with religion, we will want the state to protect the freedoms of persons to engage in those functionings, and this may mean some concessions at the margin, when (as with the Amish and public schools) the state feels that a valuable option is at risk of going under. But subsidies that support some peoples ideas of art against other peoples will be problematic on my view, as perhaps Arneson thinks they should not be. I think we can justify a limited amount of state support for classical music and ballet, for example, on the grounds that it is a part of a set of arts that contribute to citizenship; and perhaps, also because it is a valued ingredient of many life-plans that might otherwise go under. But, like Rawls, I am nervous about this idea, lest it become elitist; so Id prefer public support for the arts to be as nondiscriminatory as possible. Indeed, one problem I have with all the perfectionisms Arneson discusses is that I really do not understand very well the language of higher and lower functionings that the perfectionist tradition glibly endorses. I understand the idea that certain types of scientic ability are worthy of public support because society needs them; but that they are higher and more intrinsically valuable than the activity of a farmer, or a mother, or a sweeper of the streets, smacks to me of casteism and elitism, and I dont buy it. I think that there is a way of doing all these functions that includes the capabilities for sociability and practical reason (capabilities concerning which I am in a sense perfectionist, holding that without them only a subhuman type of functioning is available). We are often misled by the current structure of societys rewards and privileges into seeing skill and humanity in occupations that get high salaries or much honor and into devaluing those that dont. So we should be on our guard, I think, against all sorts of false incentives to devalue citizens on grounds of their employment, or their chosen form of life. We can make such rankings a part of our comprehensive ethical conception if we want to. But let us not build any of this into the political conception of the person or the political account of citizenship. This leads us directly to one of the points where Arneson raises the most troubling challenges to my view: the distinction between capability and functioning. I believe that Arneson is correct: some of the reasons we might give for preferring capability to functioning as goal are not very good reasons. Respect for choice is the best such reason. I would understand this idea in a subtly different way from Arneson: not in terms of a comprehensive liberal ideal of autonomy, but in terms of an idea of respect for the diversity of persons and their comprehensive conceptions.
45. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice (Boston: Beacon, 1996), and Cultivating Humanity.
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Obviously it is difcult to know how to balance such respect with the respect for choice itself as a basic capability, for some comprehensive conceptions do not highly value choice. That is another reason for my decision to devote half of WHD to problems connected with family and religion. It seems to me that respect for persons as equal citizens demands providing all with all the capabilities, even though we know ahead of time that some will not be used. Thus, even if we know that the Old Order Amish will refuse to participate in politics, we should make sure that they have the same opportunities and capabilities to do so that all other citizens have, even if, as is the case, this means spending money. To behave otherwise would be to treat them as second-class citizens. Even if we know that a certain group of people will not use much nutrition and will in some ways deliberately damage their healthfor example, because their conception says that thinness is a major ingredient of beautywe would be treating them with disrespect if we, on that account, withheld from them the conditions of adequate nutrition and health care. Arneson is right that some of my examples are hard to assess because it is very hard to see how a society, particularly by coarse-grained measures such as law and social policy, could do anything to promote functioning beyond providing capability. 46 But that is certainly not true of all such examples. Many countries make voting compulsory; I would oppose this, though I do think that all subtle obstacles to voting must be identied and removed. Often looking at who actually votes and who does not helps us to identify such subtle obstacles. Again, many countries require some type of religious functioning of citizens, for example by making public state functions religious in nature; again, I oppose this. Of course I support mandatory functioning for children; that may be the only way to develop an adult capability. Even where adults are concerned, we may feel that some of the capabilities are so crucial to the development or maintenance of all the others that we are sometimes justied in promoting functioning rather than simply capability, within limits set by an appropriate concern for liberty.47 Thus most modern states treat health and safety as things not to be left entirely to peoples choices: regulations of food, medicine, and the environment remove some unhealthy choices from the menu. Such regulations are justied because of the difculty of making informed choices in these areas and because of the burden of inquiry such choices would impose on citizens. In other cases, for example smoking, while outright prohibitions are justied only to the extent that nonconsenting third parties are affected, it is not unreasonable for the state to promote awareness of the danger to health in smoking and to campaign rhetorically against it. In
46. See Arneson, p. 62. 47. See WHD, pp. 9195 for a longer discussion of this question.
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other areas of risk-prevention, such as helmet and seatbelt laws, I think that citizens can reasonably differ, although I would be inclined to think that the best justication for these forms of paternalism lies in the cost that injuries incurred by the risk-takers impose on society through the health care system. In still other areas of risk, for example boxing and mountain climbing, we do not make the activity itself illegal, although in various ways we regulate it. As this discussion of risky behavior indicates, we should be especially concerned with choices citizens may make to surrender permanently the necessary condition of a function. Thus suicide prevention programs, though not the criminalization of suicide, seem acceptable. This question arises with particular force in the area of reproduction. Men and women in developing countries are often led into sterilization by public incentives, and they often make the choice heedlessly; this is not acceptable, and it seems likely that mandatory waiting periods prior to sterilization would be wise. Many more such cases are discussed in WHD. Dignity is another area that is hard to ponder. While I believe that we should not close off voluntary choices citizens may make to choose relationships involving humiliation in their personal lives, it seems crucial for government to select policies that actually treat people with dignity and actually express respect for them, rather than policies (whatever those would be) that would extend to them merely the option to be treated with dignity. Suppose, for example, citizens could purchase dignied treatment at a low cost, but could also refuse to pay, and consequently be publicly humiliated. This would surely be an unacceptable public policy. We are also justied in requiring certain policies that manifest actual functioning that shows concern for others (e.g., paying ones taxes and obeying the criminal law). What about practical reason and sociability, the two architectonic functions? It seems reasonable here to say that it is the actual function, not simply the capability, that makes a life fully human. I can understand well why a comprehensive perfectionist doctrine, such as that of the young Marx, might say this. And yet, for political purposes, once again, I would judge otherwise. We want to make sure that all citizens have the ability to make their own plans of life and to use their own reason in making choices (and similarly with sociability). But to impose political disabilities on someone because they defer to astrologers, or a new age guru, or some more traditional source of authority in making important decisions seems to me quite inappropriate, and it is signicant that modern democracies do not seriously entertain such ideas, even though at one time making fortune-telling and astrology illegal was taken very seriously as a part of public policy. In the public realm itself, while we do extend to citizens certain civic options that involve a rather drastic surrender of the power of choosing a plan of life for oneself (e.g., military service), we reasonably seek
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to expand the amount of practical reasoning even such options contain (e.g., by introducing ethics courses in the military academies). Elsewhere, outside the sphere of specically political functions, it is reasonable enough to seek through public policy to enhance the amount of actual control and choice that is available to people in the various occupations they may performas a way of expanding capability, not mandating actual functioning of a specic type. There is no shortage of opportunities for mindlessness in any society. Thus my position on capability and functioning is subtle, and I do not altogether disagree with Arneson about the importance of functioning in certain cases. I admire his discussion of perfectionism, and I have much to learn from it as I work further on my approach. C. Globalizing the Capabilities Approach Charlesworth makes a number of attractive suggestions for the globalization of the capabilities approach, with many of which I am in sympathy. She is very persuasive when she responds to challenges to feminist internationalism that invoke culture and religion. As she points out, we need to ask whose culture is being invoked, what the status of the interpreter is, in whose name the argument is advanced, and who the primary beneciaries of the invocation of culture are. 48 In chapter 1 of WHD, I argue that legitimate concerns for diversity and pluralism are met by the capabilities approach, which at the same time gives us the resources to criticize unjust cultural practices. In general, I believe that our legitimate respect for pluralism in comprehensive conceptions of the good should make us build this respect into the approach in ve ways: (1) We specify the list at a rather high level of generality, leaving a lot of room for nations to specify the items in accordance with their history and their current problems (see section IV.A above). (2) We make capability and not functioning the appropriate political goal. (3) We put the various liberties, and choice itself, in a place of prominence on the list. (4) We interpret the whole list as a list of capabilities to be promoted for political purposes, a core that can be the object of an overlapping consensus of many distinct conceptions, not as a fully comprehensive conception of the good. (5) On the whole, we leave implementation to the internal political processes of each republican state. Thus we are advising, not requiring. Thus, in globalizing the capabilities approach, we must be especially careful to beware of benevolent colonizing.49 Kants warnings against
48. Hilary Charlesworth, Martha Nussbaums Feminist Internationalism, in this issue, p. 68. 49. I have discussed the issue of globalizing the approach in my Castle Lectures delivered at Yale University in February 2000, and forthcoming, eventually, from Yale University Press under the title The Cosmopolitan Tradition; here I allude to arguments I develop in the third lecture on Kant, and the fourth lecture on contemporary issues.
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such well-intentioned impositions of ones own conception of the good seem applicable, as well, to the well-intentioned imposition of what we think right and just: there is a grave danger that any such procedure will treat the people of the nation in question with insufcient respect. In general, then, I would support persuasive means, above all, as nations try to convince one another to work toward the goals on the capabilities list. The international womens movement is very active on this front. For example, women in the informal-sector economy, that is, agricultural laborers, hawkers and vendors, and craft laborers, are now organizing transnationally to ask for an improvement in their living conditions. We can all support these efforts in a variety of ways. Nongovernmental organizations that promote womens education and empowerment get most of their funds from both governments and private citizens abroad; we can all do more to support such efforts. Then, too, given the huge power of multinational corporations in the developing world, it seems imperative that they use their wealth and power to underwrite capabilitypromoting efforts that have broad support, for example (focusing on India) by supporting public efforts to promote female education and to contain pollution. But of course there are cases in which the protection of the human entitlements of individuals will call for interventions into national sovereignty. Military intervention to stop genocide, ethnic violence, rapes of women, and other crimes against humanity seems not only permissible but in many cases required, as does intervention to save lives in an area hit by famine or natural disaster, when local institutions prove unable to handle the problem. Perpetrators of crimes against humanity should be accountable before a world court. In other cases, economic sanctions may be appropriate responses to domestic rights violations, as in the case of South African apartheid. And yet, once again, there is a limit beyond which we should not go in compromising sovereignty. In many instances, we are justied in using persuasion only. In all these cases, the goal should always be the restoration of just and entitlement-protective domestic institutions in each nation. Let me give just one recent example to illustrate the delicate balance between sovereignty and international pressure that I have in mind. Women in India have long complained that they have no protection from sexual harassment in the workplace. In 1987, a group of activists from Rajasthan, after much harassment of activists in the eld, led a petition with the Supreme Court of Indiaas any group or individual is entitled to doasking that the Court address the fact that there are no laws addressing sexual harassment, despite the fact that India has ratied the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which requires signatories to come up with laws and policies in this area. The Court said, Quite right. India did sign CEDAW, and the Constitution requires us to abide by treaties we have
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signed. So henceforth any state actor who does not come up with policies protecting women from sexual harassment, following the CEDAW guidelines, is in contempt of court.50 As for private actors, we instruct the legislature to devise suitable legislation. We see here, I believe, an excellent paradigm for combining multinational pressure with genuine national sovereignty. The multinational document did a lot of work: it was the origin of the pressure on the Indian government to pursue change in this area. On the other hand, the domestic democratic institutions of the nation are ultimately the agents of change. This is as it should be, if change is to be genuine and stable, not simply the temporary imposition of a multinational feminist orthodoxy. I believe that here I am somewhat more Kantian than Charlesworth, but she is much more deeply immersed in the practicalities of these issues than am I. I have learned a great deal from her article, and I look forward to a dialogue with her as I try to rene my thoughts about these difcult issues. D. Controversy in International Feminism Charlesworth raises a difcult question when she asks how the capabilities approach responds to differences among women, and to the charge that the international human rights approach is too acontextual. I have already begun to respond to this worry in my observations about pluralism above: I positively urge that the conception be applied locally, in accordance with local circumstances and at least some local traditions. We can also see that when we focus on capability rather than functioning as the appropriate political goal, we include women who may have many different comprehensive conceptions of what the complete good life for a human being would be. But we may now make some more concrete observations about how this approach can help us to resolve one particularly divisive dispute in the international community of women: what I shall call the sexuality-vs.-employment debate. This is just one debate that can be illuminated by thinking about capabilities, but it shows how I would approach others. (As is usual in WHD, I shall use examples from India, but the debate is more general.) The debate, which sometimes becomes heated, involves a difference between two groups of feminists about the basic goals of feminism. For one group, lets call it group S, the essence of feminism is a critique of sexual domination, and the essence of change is changing socially con50. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997) 6 S.C.C. 241; see, further, Martha C. Nussbaum, The Modesty of Mrs. Bajaj: Indias Problematic Route to Sexual Harassment Law, forthcoming in a volume on sexual harassment, ed. Reva Siegel and Catharine MacKinnon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press). (The problematic route in question is not the route taken by Vishaka, which I endorse, but a route more recently taken through the criminal laws prohibition on conduct outraging the modesty of a woman.)
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structed gender roles. For the other group, lets call it group T, the essence of feminism is a critique of womens economic dependency, and the most desirable change is to give women more economic options. Members of S are likely to focus on domestic violence, sexual abuse of all sorts, sexual harassment, and prostitution as the major ills, and they are likely to criticize a project as insufciently feminist if its focus is purely economic and doesnt involve a major component of consciousness-raising. For example, the directors of the Mahila Samakhya Project told me that their proposals had been criticized by other feminists as lacking a feminist content, on the grounds that the focus of the program is on empowerment through economic options. Members of T, by contrast, are likely to judge that it is counterproductive to talk about domestic violence and sex roles on coming into a village, and far more productive to talk about credit, land rights, and employment. They are likely to criticize members of S for making feminism look threatening and for saying things that have little resonance in the minds of rural women. Up to a point, one might think that there is just a strategic issue here: one group thinks that the economic approach is less threatening and therefore more effective, while the other group thinks that not to confront basic issues of gender hierarchy head on is ultimately counterproductive. The two groups may not even disagree all the time about strategy: members of S might agree that it is strategically wise to open up a dialogue by focusing on nonthreatening economic issues, even while they hold that the real source of womens inequality lies elsewhere and must ultimately be addressed. But in fact the split lies deep: the two groups have different intuitions about the root cause of womens subordination. Members of S think that subordination is all about wanting a submissive sexual outlet, and that the economic aspects of subordination are posterior.51 Members of T think that womens subordination is all about men wanting to control income and property and to have willing domestic servantsto them, the sexual aspects of womens subordination are posterior. There are some genuine differences between the two groups. For example, all members of group S would consider lesbianism an appropriate choice for women wishing to resist domination in a maledominated sexual world, while many members of T are religious or conservative women who believe lesbianism to be immoral, although they are committed to campaigning for womens economic self-sufciency. (Thus leaders of some organizations aimed at economic empowerment have conservative attitudes about sexual orientation.) More conservative
51. Members of S frequently invoke the writings of Catharine MacKinnon, although it seems to me that MacKinnon does not endorse any such view about there being a single basic cause for womens subordination.
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members of T also shrink from saying that there is anything wrong with male sexuality as it is, and they prefer to avoid talking about sexuality as such. Probably these are the deepest sources of the intense animosity that exists between the two groups in Indiain a nation that is still among the most repressive in the world toward homosexual people of both sexes, where some of the feminist members of S are lesbian and have been badly treated as persons by members of T. (A leader of the Mahila Samakhya Project in Andhra Pradesh, an intense and ery feminist who routinely put her bodily safety on the line to struggle against corrupt local ofcials to keep the womens program going, asked me why sexual perversion had become so common in the United States evincing an attitude not uncommon among feminists of the T variety.) The issue of homosexuality cannot easily be isolated from larger issues about the root cause of womens subordination. Feminists of the S variety believe that binary gender divisions and compulsory heterosexuality lie at the root of womens economic oppression and that any approach that doesnt stick up for lesbian choices is, therefore, ultimately self-subverting. They would say that the homophobia of India is not just accidentally related to its patriarchal treatment of women: the fear that women can be sexually self-sufcient, and not available as sexual outlets for men, is what inspires homophobia, so homophobia is patriarchys reaction to a deep threat. Some feminists of the T variety vigorously deny this, holding that the issue of womens equality within the heterosexual family is utterly unrelated to the morality of homosexual conduct: one may be intensely homophobic and yet be vigorously feminist. It seems reasonable to think that on the issue of causality the S feminists are correct: there is a long tradition in India (as in most of the world) of regarding women as mens sexual property, and the fear that this system would be upset is very likely to lie at the root of many peoples fear and hatred of lesbianism. It may well be that in the long run the treatment of women as property cannot be combatted without combatting the system of heterosexuality that has dened women as sexual property. If even such a morally reective and exemplary person as Gandhi regarded his wife as there, sexually, for his use, and not as a sexual agent in her own right, we should conclude that these attitudes are enormously deep, and it is easy to see how any lesbian choice threatens them. So it would seem that the T feminists are refusing to discuss an issue that may ultimately be absolutely central in understanding womens inequality. Fortunately, the dispute that began in December 1998 in India over the screening of the Deepa Mehta lm Fire, which deals with a lesbian relationship between two women who have both been oppressed in traditional marriages, has helped to open up this whole issue. Reacting strongly against the attempts of Hindu fundamentalist thugs to close the
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lm down, artists, academics, and feminists of all types got involved in demonstrating for the free speech rights of the lmmaker. Although differences still exist within these groupssome insisting that lesbianism is a traditional feature of Hindu culture, some preferring to focus on the lms feminist aspect, it can no longer be denied that there is a strong link between womens subordination in traditional sexual relationships and their interest in a same-sex relationship. The public attention of feminists of all sorts has been newly focused on the discrimination suffered by lesbians in all strata of Indias society. Open conversation about the topic seems to promise a closing of the gap between the two groups of feminists. Nonetheless, in many respects the entire dispute seems peculiar. Why should we have to say that there is just one thing that the subordination of women is about? Clearly, it has aspects that are sexual and aspects that are economic. Both of these are socially shaped, and each reinforces the other. Men have seen women as their sexual property, and they have also seen them as their economic servants. In some cases, the sexual relation of dominance is the primary relation; in others, it is probably the economic relationship that is the more prominent source of male interest and control. (Some of these husbands have other sexual outlets and are thus relatively indifferent to the wifes sexual function.) In short, both types of hierarchy are fundamental, and neither can or should be avoided. Understanding either one, indeed, would appear to require understanding the other. T feminists certainly should not refuse to rethink habitual distinctions of gender and sexual roles; but S feminists should not deny that economic issues sometimes have their own momentum and may offer independent explanations for some aspects of womens inequality. As we think this way, the capabilities approach helps us to make sense of what we nd. We begin with the idea that both employmentrelated capabilities and sex-related capabilities (such as bodily integrity, emotional health, and the capacity for sexual expression) are fundamental human capabilities that should not be abridged. Thinking about womens position vis-a-vis these capabilities then helps us to think about ` the many ways in which the two complement one another. Women who wish to avoid sexual brutality or exploitation in marriage, and to pursue sexual autonomy, can do so far more easily if they are in a strong bargaining position in the family; and access to employment, credit, and land rights are important sources of strength for their bargaining position. At the same time, the perception that women are whorish and childish, so pervasive in Indian traditions at least since the Laws of Manu, does undercut womens search for employment and weakens their bargaining position in the workplace. So attempts to alter those perceptions of female sexuality are important accompaniments to womens search for
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economic equality. The approach tells us that neither capability should be subordinated to the other, and that public action on both fronts is a legitimate way of promoting both sexual and economic freedom. Concerning practical strategies, T feminists have strong points to make, which S feminists can readily accept. It is certainly less threatening to enter a village saying that you are going to promote better services and extend new opportunities for credit and employment than to say, I have come to change your sex roles. (Does anyone really say things like this?) In order to avoid backlash against feminist programs, it may be good to focus on economic issues, leaving it to women themselves to draw their own conclusions about sexual life in their own way in due course. On the other hand, that doesnt mean being altogether silent about gender roles, particularly where domestic violence is concerned. Frequently women who are otherwise quite ambivalent about employment outside the home will nd it attractive if they come to think that it improves their bargaining position against domestic violence: so these links should be discussed, in order to present a more adequate picture of womens options. Domestic violence is one of the rst issues women typically wish to discuss. When the women in the Mahila Samakya program in Andhra Pradesh (all illiterate) made drawings of their problems, wife-beating and child sexual abuse were both absolutely central. So it would seem that even in strategic terms this question should not be marginalized, even early on, although its links with economic issues should also be pointed out. In short, the capabilities are an interlocking set; they support one another, and an impediment to one impedes the other. The capabilities approach helps us far more here than more schematic approaches in terms of human rights: it directs us to examine certain specic aspects of womens material, mental, and emotional lives, and to gure out their complex interrelationships. It is opposed to any kind of reductionism, to any claim that some one thing is the thing for feminism. It sees a plurality of distinct goals, none of which should be subordinated to others. And yet it achieves structure and unity by bringing the diverse goals together in their complex conceptual and causal relations with one another. In that way, I believe that it makes decisive progress in such debates, where, often enough, a false simplication is the mother of hostility. It is for this same reason that I would hold that the capabilities approach, rather than being a top-down approach, alien to the concerns of women who are struggling to survive, is actually a good ally of such women, as they struggle to express themselves in ways that do not always nd a comfortable home in the abstract discourse of development economics, with its frequent subordination of a plurality of human concerns to both opulence and utility. The approach is intended as, and, I believe,
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is, the systematization and theorization of thoughts that women are pursuing all over the world, when they ask how their lives might be improved, and what governments should be doing about that. Toward the conclusion of a visit to a rural village participating in the Mahila Samukhya womens program in Andhra Pradesh, in an extremely poor region, the group of women began to sing for me songs they had learned in the womens collective. One, my interpreter explained, was an old womens song that expressed the idea that a womans life was a life of sorrow. It used to begin: Woman, why are you crying? and then the woman would reply, listing all the bad things in her life. The women of the collective, however, had rewritten the song. Now it goes: Women, why are you crying? Your tears should become your thoughts. And then the woman tells all her plans for improvement in her life. Here is how the annual report of the collective records the womens plans: We want to plant fruit trees in front of our houses. We want to start an herbal medicine shop. We will build our house ourselves. We want to cultivate banjar lands. We want to register our Sangham.52 We want to travel. We want to see our ofce in Hyderabad. We want our school to run better. Our sangham should become big. We want more women to join us. We want to hold meetings at the Mandal [i.e., regional] level. Our children need a better life than us. They should learn new things.53 Next to this list of plans is a drawing of a child in wedding dress, under a canopywith a large red X drawn across it. The accompanying story: Twelve year old Swarupa of Potulbogada village joined the hostel after attending the summer camp. During the vacation her parents tried to get her married. She sought the help of the sangham and together they managed to convince the parents to allow her to pursue her studies. 54 The capabilities approach is the systematization and theorization of just such thoughts and plans. It is plural because what women strive for contains a plurality of irreducibly distinct components. It is focused on capability or empowerment, even as the womens own thinking is focused on creating opportunities and choices, rather than on imposing on any individual a required mode of functioning. To the thinking that is already there, it adds a set of arguments linking the capabilities list explic52. A sangham is a womens collective. 53. See Annual Report Mahila Samakhya (Andrea Pradesh, 1997). 54. Ibid.
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itly to underlying ideas of human dignity that help us test candidates for inclusion; it adds a framing political approach showing how these ideas of capability and functioning will deal with legitimate concerns about diversity and pluralism; and it adds arguments linking capabilities to specic political principles that can be embodied in constitutional guarantees. Finally, it adds arguments showing very clearly the incompatibility of this approach with other prevalent alternatives. In that way, it seems to me, the approach can fairly claim to make a distinctive contribution to the practical pursuit of gender justice.

Nussbaum (2000) Aristotle and Capabilities

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Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities: A Response to Antony, Arneson, Charlesworth, and Mulgan Author(s): Martha C.

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities

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