My hat off to Professor Marcha Nussbaum.
In this utterly amazing philosophically reflective book on the “modern” denigration of women (modern since about six thousand years ago—in out-of-the-way places like Ladakh, all this happened with great rapidity in the past half-century), Nussbaum offers us is a clear statement of the capabilities approach as a theoretically sound but eminently practical way to value to a woman's life and in fact, a man's too. . [From my perspective, we can extrapolate this approach imaginatively and analogously, to nonhuman lives—no more single goldfish tanks filled with loneliness, and vague memories of other goldfish leading only to grief.) Her account is not a personalized version of the gross domestic product—to have a life of minimal value you need at least the minimum amount of money or at least food, shelter, clothing, medicines--but it is a “universal” approach that works in any situation, any nation.
The account is truly broad yet deeply grounded in the messy changing mud and spittle of life, where babies are born and cry, where adolescents fall out of trees and break bones, where women need to have the men in their lives change or one of them leaves, where in some countries baby girls are seen as a curse, where divorced or widowed women might lose all social standing, where violence against women has been an epidemic throughout written history, where songs (“My friend was a noble cow-puncher”) demonize women (she loved, she left, tough fella, whaddha expect), where women are often expected to work two jobs—their own “work” after they’ve cooked and cleaned house and parented the children--- where women not only don’t get equal pay, oftentimes they don’t even get equal jobs or any job--- and ad infinitum.
Thank the gods that Nussbaum spent time in India, which I love[but the heat is making the plains leading to the Himalayas prohibitive, e.g., (New Delhi]., Nussbaum argues that we need to change international political and economic thought, thoughts about “rights,” and reassess the value of a life--- including how we can improve that value. Her focus is women, as it should be, but the approach would work as well for men--- that would be an interesting exercise to work out and then let Nussbaum assess the product of running all this through another mind and with another gender.
This is not an account of women that focuses on the few wealthy women breaking though some imaginary glass ceiling. The focus is more on access for food (wealthy women often don’t eat well and eat old food), the liberty to go on a long walk, the availability of any job, the freedom to build a house—or burn it down. The value of a life is to be found in the liberty of the “holder” of that life, and has nothing to do with having food, or eating a lot. Think: whose life is better, the wealthy women whose servants cook for her three times a day but she is NOT ALLOWED to fast or to choose not to eat delicate meats and corn scraped off the cob, or pastry bread three times a day OR/VS/OR the woman who isn’t eating anything at all but instead fasting for twenty days before she returns to her own garden and fruit tree and eats food that is alive. (If you know the joke: “after you have steak for a long long time; beans, beans taste fine.”)
This is a book of inspiration and genius. Nussbaum’s a master of this new way of valuing one life and groups of lives. GDP? Total hogwash that only feeds the game players who are exploiting women (first) and minorities (also first) and poor whites (men and women, also first).
Since even a patient half-brain can look over these reviews and discover who I am, I ‘ll save everyone the time. If you are interested, I’m Dr. Bart Gruzalski, Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University, Boston Massachusetts and... AKA HAPPY POET. ,
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