Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

In her new and pathbreaking book, Martha Nussbaum shows that the social contract tradition, despite its great insights, cannot handle some of the most important political problems of our day, and she points the way to a conception of justice more attuned to our human frailty, our global society, and our place in the natural world. This work will change how we think about the nature of social justice.
--Charles Larmore, University of Chicago (20060501)

For over thirty years, thanks to John Rawls's great work, the idea of a social contract has provided the dominant framework for liberal theories of justice. Frontiers of Justice is the most important challenge to this framework from within liberalism since the ascendancy of Rawls's theory. Eschewing utilitarianism, Nussbaum draws on the capabilities approach she developed elsewhere to show deep problems with using the social contract idea for modeling the liberal ideals of inclusiveness and equal respect for human dignity. The book's impact on liberal political thought will be resounding. Its arguments and program are bound to be discussed for a long time.
--John Deigh, University of Texas at Austin (20060622)

Prevailing ethical theories neglect three important subjects: the treatment of persons with disabilities, the scope of justice beyond the nation state, and duties owed to non-human animals. Martha Nussbaum's landmark book offers a courageous and bold approach to these issues based on fellowship and respect. Honest about where it builds on past theories and where it departs from them, Frontiers of Justice boldly and elegantly charts the territory for much needed theoretical and policy debates.
--Martha Minow, Harvard Law School (20060519)

In this groundbreaking work, Nussbaum develops her capabilities approach--enlarging our conceptions of reciprocity, dignity, and flourishing--in an effort to make it adequate to the three problem areas. The results of this original, erudite investigation include major contributions to moral and political theory, disability studies, the international relations literature, and animal ethics.
--David DeGrazia, George Washington University (20070301)

Martha C. Nussbaum's impressive new book Frontiers of Justice can be easily summarized as Rawls meets Aristotle...Well-argued and beautifully written, Frontiers of Justice is an important, provocative and thoroughly admirable book, and will be essential reading for anyone interested in the concepts of justice and moral entitlement.
--Mark Rowlands (Times Literary Supplement )

[Nussbaum] aims to widen the reach of Rawlsian theory by addressing questions it has thus far largely neglected, such as the role of distributive justice in international relations, the claims of disabled people and the moral status of nonhuman animals. Nussbaum's resourceful and imaginative exploration of Rawls's work displays a command of the longer tradition of political philosophy that matches and even surpasses that of Rawls, along with a notably richer sensitivity to the history and variety of constitutional arrangements. The result is a notable contribution to philosophical inquiry that merits the most careful study by all who try to think seriously about public policy.
--John Gray (The Nation )

Professor Nussbaum calls her work a "picture of who we are" in a world "more complicated, and interdependent, than philosophical theory has often acknowledged." But it may also be a map for navigating that complicated world in the pursuit of justice. (Harvard Law Review )

Martha Nussbaum has written a substantial philosophical treatise on the difficulties that recent fashions in political theory have put in the way of understanding the nature of justice for the mentally and physically disabled, foreigners, and animals...She is philosophically deft...One real achievement of Frontiers of Justice is to stir up the reader's imagination. Some books beat the reader into submission; Martha Nussbaum has never done that, and here she invites the reader into an open-ended discussion in just the way one wishes that all other philosophers did.
--Alan Ryan (New York Review of Books )

The task of the public intellectual is to ensure that important areas of common life (public policy, cultural activities, moral understandings, and so on) live up to the standards thoughtful reflection reveals. The United States has not proved the most fertile ground for this sort of person, but now and then contenders arise, and Martha Nussbaum is surely one of the more formidable candidates of our time, discharging the responsibilities of that role with a dizzying industriousness...In Frontiers of Justice she brings her considerable talents and energy to a set of questions which, she persuasively argues, public discourse and philosophical reflection have too long ignored: namely, what are our obligations to the disabled in our midst, the poor around the globe, and nonhuman animals everywhere?
--David McCabe (Commonweal )

Nussbaum's explication of the human and animal capabilities essential for lives of dignity sets a demanding, detailed, moral and political standard to strive for.
--Ernest Dempsey (Philosophy Now )

Product Description

Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reaching beyond the particular and the immediate to the general and the timeless. Yet such theories, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation.

The idea of the social contract--especially as developed in the work of John Rawls--is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition. But as Nussbaum demonstrates, even Rawls's theory, suggesting a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals, cannot address questions of social justice posed by unequal parties. How, for instance, can we extend the equal rights of citizenship--education, health care, political rights and liberties--to those with physical and mental disabilities? How can we extend justice and dignified life conditions to all citizens of the world? And how, finally, can we bring our treatment of nonhuman animals into our notions of social justice? Exploring the limitations of the social contract in these three areas, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of "capabilities." She helps us to think more clearly about the purposes of political cooperation and the nature of political principles--and to look to a future of greater justice for all.

(20060203)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (April 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674024109
• ISBN-13: 978-0674024106
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #76,521 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What Constitutes A Life Worthy of Human Dignity?, March 24, 2006

By	Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values) (Hardcover)

Martha Nussbaum is a promoter of the capabilities approach, a school of thought that seeks to delineate the conditions for a just and decent world based on what people are actually able to be and to do (their "capabilities") in order to lead a life worthy of human dignity. Amartya Sen has pioneered this approach in the realm of economics where he has proposed to analyze development as consisting of freedom as much as of material progress. Nussbaum's approach differs from Sen in subtle ways: she is more interested in philosophical debates than economic reasoning, and (whereas Sen remains in the vague as to what constitutes basic human functionnings) she provides a list of ten capabilities that must be fulfilled beyond a certain threshold in a fully just society.

Nussbaum applies this approach to three unsolved problems of social justice: how to treat people with physical and mental impairments so that they can live up to their human potential; how to extend justice to all world citizen regardless of the place they live in; and what are the issues of justice involved in our treatment of nonhuman animals. In doing so, she engages in a detailed discussion of the social contract theory proposed by John Rawls which, all its merits notwithstanding, cannot provide a satisfying answer to these three pressing social problems.

Take people with disabilities. Social contract theorists imagine the contracting agents who design the basic structure of society as "free, equal and independent," and usually conceive the social contract as providing mutual advantages to its members. But how to include people who may have a limited ability to take part in the deliberations establishing the contract, or whose special needs often contradict the assumption that social justice should provide all members of society with roughly equal endowments? Nussbaum shows that a conception of the person more akin to Aristotle than to Kant helps frame the idea of a life in accordance with human dignity, while countries like Sweden or Germany show examples of practical arrangements that allow people with disabilities to participate actively in all the major spheres of life.

The contract model also typically constructs a single society, which is imagined as self-sufficient and not interdependent with any other society. In a second step, these societies establish relations to regulate their dealings with one another based on a set of core principles embodied in international law. This model leaves many issues unanswered, such as the unequal distribution of wealth and power across countries and the universal validity of human right principles. Based on Grotius and the natural law tradition, Nussbaum develops a theory of transnational justice that includes respect for human rights and the need for economic redistribution.

Likewise, moral philosophers typically hold either that we have no direct moral duties to animals or that, if we do, they are duties of charity and compassion rather than justice. But nonhuman animals are also capable of a dignified existence, and our theories of justice should recognize that right. Nussbaum mentions a court ruling in India that goes into this direction; she could also have referred to the European Union, which has enshrined the protection of farm animals' welfare in its constitutional treaties.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars disappointingly spread out, May 3, 2007

By	Gertude Whitman (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

There is substance to Nussbaum's account here -- the most interesting material is a consideration of how intuitive ethical duties towards the disabled, and towards members of other countries and species, conflict with a Rawlsian contractualism. Her notion of capability duties/outcomes, while nothing particularly innovative to my eye, is interesting, and the failures of contractualism are examined fairly and in detail.

The main problem with the book is that it is very diluted (it is also repetitious -- actually the stapling together of separate essays, and if I had had to read how GDP per capita does not take into account internal inequality one more time I would have gone mad.) A book of equivalent perceptivity could be a hundred pages or less.

The remainder of the book is taken up by Nussbaum's rather long winded examinations of different ways to be nice (indeed, very very nice) to other people and to animals (to give a sense, there is more than one paragraph devoted to whether we should put gazelles into protective custody to save them from lions.)

Quite a bit of the material -- especially the animal material, but also the nationality material -- is both philosophically uninteresting (the conceptual point has been made, and there is no more refined analysis presented) and practically naieve or vague (for example, if Nussbaum is aware of the ongoing debates in the NGO world over the nature of foreign aid, it doesn't show here.)

Worth a read in many ways, but also in many ways an indulgent performance.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Instructive insights on applied ethics, August 27, 2007

By	Barry J. Seltser (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Martha Nussbaum has delivered another thought-provoking book, this time applying her "capabilities" approach to questions on disability, national identity, and obligations to non-humans. As always, her writing is clear and forceful, and her insights are provocative, if not always completely convincing. As a follow-up to her earlier works, this book is likely to become a key resource for discussions of philosophical ethics, human rights, and the continued effort to interpret and modify the work of John Rawls.