Sex and Social Justice [Paperback]

Martha C. Nussbaum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 24, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0195112105 | ISBN-13: 978-0195112108

What does it mean to respect the dignity of a human being? What sort of support do human capacities demand from the world, and how should we think about this support when we encounter differences of gender or sexuality? How should we think about each other across divisions that a legacy of injustice has created? In Sex and Social Justice, Martha Nussbaum delves into these questions and emerges with a distinctive conception of feminism that links feminist inquiry closely to the important progress that has been made during the past few decades in articulating theories of both national and global justice.
Growing out of Nussbaum's years of work with an international development agency connected with the United Nations, this collection charts a feminism that is deeply concerned with the urgent needs of women who live in hunger and illiteracy, or under unequal legal systems. Offering an internationalism informed by development economics and empirical detail, many essays take their start from the experiences of women in developing countries. Nussbaum argues for a universal account of human capacity and need, while emphasizing the essential role of knowledge of local circumstance. Further chapters take on the pursuit of social justice in the sexual sphere, exploring the issue of equal rights for lesbians and gay men.
Nussbaum's arguments are shaped by her work on Aristotle and the Stoics and by the modern liberal thinkers Kant and Mill. She contends that the liberal tradition of political thought holds rich resources for addressing violations of human dignity on the grounds of sex or sexuality, provided the tradition transforms itself by responsiveness to arguments concerning the social shaping of preferences and desires. She challenges liberalism to extend its tradition of equal concern to women, always keeping both agency and choice as goals. With great perception, she combines her radical feminist critique of sex relations with an interest in the possibilities of trust, sympathy, and understanding.
Sex and Social Justice will interest a wide readership because of the public importance of the topics Nussbaum addresses and the generous insight she shows in dealing with these issues. Brought together for this timely collection, these essays, extensively revised where previously published, offer incisive political reflections by one of our most important living philosophers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Human beings have a dignity that deserves respect from laws and social institutions. This idea has many origins in many traditions; by now it is at the core of modern liberal democratic thought and practice all over the world. The idea of human dignity is usually taken to involve an idea of equal worth: rich and poor, rural and urban, female and male, all are equally deserving of respect, just in virtue of being human, and this respect should not be abridged on account of a characteristic that is distributed by the whims of fortune."

But in the world we live in, notes classicist and law professor Martha C. Nussbaum, gender and sexual orientation are used routinely as excuses to violate human dignity. In 15 deftly written essays that are as accessible as they are erudite, she makes a convincing argument for viewing feminism and gay-rights activism as two facets of the same movement, a movement that has legitimate roots in the writings of philosophers like Kant and Mill (as well as the ancient Greeks). Whether she's discussing issues as concrete as Colorado's attempts to pass legislation that discriminated against homosexuals and the contemporary debate over female genital mutilation, or as abstract as the social construction of desire, Nussbaum writes with a thoroughness and clarity that help the reader better to imagine a society in which true equality for all people could be achieved. --Ron Hogan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Among academic stars, Nussbaum (Love's Knowledge) is one of the brightest. She combines her formidable erudition with meaningful experience beyond the ivory tower and an ability to synthesize her reading, her thinking and her experience in prose that is remarkably clear given the density of the content and the rigor of her thinking. A professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, she presents an admirably objective and insightful work on gender inequality, drawing from her experience as a researcher with the World Institute for Development Economics Research (an agency connected with the U.N.). This book, parts of which have appeared in professional journals and magazines such as the New Republic, leaves no issue unexamined, from pornography, genital mutilation and prostitution to the effects of religion on women's rights and the conflicts caused by the biological differences between the sexes. There's also an extensive section on gay and lesbian rights, illuminating their connection to feminist platforms, and a chapter on the effect of ancient Greek norms on modern sexual controversies. Drawing on writings throughout history, Nussbaum presents conflicting theories and current thinking while bringing her own insights to each topic. With a balance of contemporary radical critiques, ancient philosophy and political liberalism, Nussbaum ultimately makes a persuasive argument that feminism can be reconciled with the traditions of classical liberalism. Nussbaum is not a popularizer; she's a deep thinker, and one of the best. With its remarkable scholarship and comprehensive research, this work is both the ultimate primer on, and a major advance in, feminist thought.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 488 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 24, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195112105
• ISBN-13: 978-0195112108
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #35 in Books > Law > Constitutional Law > Human Rights

More About the Author

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in Law, Philosophy, and Divinity.

Author photo by Robin Holland

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

93 of 93 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Just To Be Fair December 29, 2000

By Nathan Foell

Format:Hardcover

I decided to write this review just to be fair to anyone who is thinking about reading this book. I say this because the reviews I read of the book that were posted were severely misleading and unnecessarily harsh. So I will first of all respond to some of the misguided criticisms of the book that you will find in the other reviews, and then present my view on the book. First of all, no the author does not discuss discrimination against children or the elderly. Why would this make her book bad? She is dealing with SPECIFIC issues, like issues of justice relating to gender and sexual orientation. These issues are certainly large enough in scope and importance to justify their own treatment in a book, there is no reason why a discussion of every conceivable type of discrimination should also be included. The issues of discrimination against the young, the elderly, and the religious are important, but there are numerous books out there on those issues if someone wants to read them. It is unfair to say that this particular book should have to address them, it already runs 550 or so pages, that should be enough.

Also, someone complained that the author takes a purely male - centered perspective on the issues, and thus could not possibly be a feminist. I must confess I don't think you honestly read the book if you think that. She gives REASONS as to why her perspective is right and is feminist as well. There is no reason why rationality is a peculiarly male preoccupation, and I think that to intonate that is sexist in and of itself, because the conclusion seems to be that women are not reasoned creatures like men are, and that is a view women have been struggling against for centuries. Basically, the important thing is that there can be disagreement about the issue of how important rationality is to ethics, and that is certainly legitimate, but it is unfair and nothing more than ad hominem argumentation to say that someone cannot dispute the supposition that rationality is not important to ethics and still remain an important philosopher or feminist.

Finally, someone complained that this book is not "philosophy," because it pertains to political and social issues and is not well argued. The book is obviously well reasoned, and Nussbaum is an eminently respected philosopher. More importantly though, if philosophers don't deal with political and social issues, who should? Should we leave that up to politicians, because they obviously care and know about the issues? It seems to me that someone should do some serious thinking about political issues, and I see no reason why it should not be philosophers, who generally have a reputation for clarity and calm rationality. This is nothing more than someone's bias about what is most important for philosophers to discuss, and you can have your bias, that is fine, but you shouldn't tell people not to read this book because you don't like the subject matter. If anything, that should cause you to NOT review the book, because you should be uninterested in the subject matter.

In sum, this book was very well and calmly argued, unlike the reviews of it posted here. Nussbaum does not bow down to current fads like cultural and ethical relativism, or a care - centered feminist ethics. I thought when reading it that this might cause some controversy and anger, but I anticipated nothing like what I have seen in these reviews. She sheds light on important issues of global and national policy, and does so without abandoning reasoned argumentation, which if nothing else seems to be what philosophy should be about. Beyond making an excellent contribution to metaethics and international development policy, she has wonderful essays about the role of retribution in the law and what we can glean philosophically from important works of literature, for example there is an essay on the work of Virginia Wolf. I would recommend this book to you if you would like a well - rounded introduction to the thought of one of the most important philosophers of our time, and if you are interested in any of the issues I just mentioned.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars where social justice may be impossible March 26, 2007

By A. G. Plumb

Format:Paperback

I will start this review by noting two things. I greatly appreciated Nussbaum's 'Upheavals of Thought', and I am uncomfortable with the way sex sits in the society I live in. (But, then, I recognise things in myself that - for good or bad - change my perspective from that of the society I am embedded in.) But Wedekind's play 'Springtime Awakening' should raise alarm bells for most of us.

We are sexual beings (most of us anyway) and we have to deal with that - learn to accept it within ourselves, learn to share it with others (it is, of course, the quintessential sharing experience), learn to grow with it, learn to let it go .... The easy path to take is to grasp a social 'norm' and follow it regardless of the morality of that path. Societies do present many 'norms' to a young person developing sexual awareness but not all of these are equally desirable. If Nussbaum's book does nothing else but diminish the acceptability of some of the undesirable 'norms', and enhance the more socially responsible ones it will have achieved a great service.

There are curious things in this book for me. Nussbaum refers to many sources but many of them are male - Aristotle, Seneca, JS Mill, DH Lawrence .... To be fair, the last chapter is about 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf, and other writers such as Andrea Dworkin are prominent. However I was surprised that some powerful women writers are totally ignored - where is Mary Wolstonecraft, where is Emma Goldman, where is Mary Shelley? Why is 'Maurice' (Forster) referred to but not 'The Well of Loneliness' (Hall)?

The chapter on female genital mutilation (FGM) is an appalling indictment on the behaviour of some societies. Nussbaum has a glancing reference to circumcision; not surpringly it is glancing for someone who was converted (so I read) to Judaism. While I would never compare what happens to baby boys with what happens to young women in severity or risk, nevertheless I think the motivations for both practices come from the same source. If, for cultural (religious) reasons it is appropriate for Jewish boys to be circumcised, I think it is a very dangerous position to take to expect other societies to abandon the practices they see as legitimate, if not mandatory.

The chapter on Equity and Mercy impressed me immensely - it is so balanced I expect many feminists will hate it. But for me, her rare use of a Christian quote ('Forgive them, for they know not what they do.') was a revelation. Never before had I seen how compromised that plea is. (Compare with Tolstoy: 'It is a wonderful thing to be loved because of oneself, but it is a far more wonderful thing to be loved in spite of oneself.')

The fact that often I have other feelings than Nussbaum expresses does not concern me, because she often has perspectives that broaden or hone my own thoughts. In the chapter on prostitution and its illegality I had to agree with most of what she writes simply from a libertarian point of view rather than one of morality. The morality issues are complex - perhaps irresolvably complex. Just as there are men with 'dangerous' sexuality, so there are women. Perhaps it's only an issue for men because they demand or expect control. For me, all of Nussbaum's discussions seem to centre on the effects on women that prostitution entails - this is not inappopriate even though it may not be balanced. The problem I see with prostitution is that it panders to the man's 'need' to have sex. They can get it on demand. This reduces their sensitivities to the needs of the women in their lives, including the need (wise or not) for a woman to have a faithful partner. In Australia we had an advisor on women's affairs to the Federal Government write a piece in a newspaper where she expressed the view - based on her own practice - that a woman should always make sure her husband knew where the red light district was in a city they were visiting, so he could satisfy his 'need' when she herself felt incapable. For me this is an appalling suggestion - as if men cannot have self-control and should not be expected to. But, for all of that, like Nussbaum I would not see prostitution as worthy of being made illegal.

For me this was a thought-provoking read. It had some incredibly ugly things to describe, to consider. But it helped me to structure my thoughts in this difficult area - perhaps it will help me guide my boys as they reach maturity.

Other recommendations:

'Springtime Awakening' - Wedekind

'The Well of Loneliness' - Radclyffe Hall (I hated the outcome of this)

'Matilda' - Mary Shelley (her biographical details are worth exploring too)

'Godwin on Wollstonecraft' - William Godwin (Mary Shelley's father; Mary Wollstonecraft was her mother)

'Upheavals to Thought' - Nussbaum

'Living my Life' - Emma Goldman

'Let Me Alone' - Anna Kavan

'Conditions of Love' - John Armstrong

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Hope For Global Justice February 26, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is what all philosophy should be--tightly argued, clearly written, and deeply moving. Nussbaum (and Amartya Sen's) capabilities approach offers promise in taking on problems of distributive justice and human rights. Nussbaum deserves praise for unflinchingly shining the moral spotlight upon all institutions--from the family to the nation-state--a project unsatisfactorily handled by some brands of liberalism. I eagerly await Nussbaum's next book.