Sex and Social Justice

489 Pages·1999·31.095 MB·English

by  Nussbaum, Martha C

SEX &
SOCIAL
JUSTICE
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SEX &
SOCIAL
JUSTICE
Martha C. Nussbaum
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
1999
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1999 by Martha C. Nussbaum
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataioging-in-Publication Data
Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1947-
Sex and social justice / Martha Craven Nussbaum.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-511032-3
1. Feminism. 2. Social justice. 3. Sex role. I. Title.
HQ1150.N87 1998
305.42—dc21 97-50576
3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
for
Kenneth Dover
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The essays in this volume were written between 1990 and 1997. I owe thanks for
research support to sabbatical funding from Brown University and to summer
research funding from the University of Chicago Law School. Many people have
given me valuable comments on one or more of the papers, including Ronald Allen,
Elizabeth Anderson, Julia Annas, Christopher Bobonich, Alan Boegehold, Diemut
Bubeck, Myles Burnyeat, Victor Caston, Claudia Card, Martha Chen, Nancy
Chodorow, Joshua Cohen, Scott Crider, Kenneth Dover, Jean Dreze, David Estlund,
Gertrud Fremling, Robert Goodin, David Halperin, Stephen Halliwell, Virginia
Held, John Hodges, Peter Hylton, Terence Irwin, Kenneth Karst, David Konstan,
Andrew Koppelman, John Lawless, Catharine MacKinnon, Charles Nussbaum,
Rachel Nussbaum, Sara Nussbaum, Nkiru Nzegwu, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan
Moller Okin, Onora O'Neill, David Pears, Anthony Price, Hilary Putnam, Ruth
Anna Putnam, John Rawls, Andrew Rehfeld, Henry Richardson, John Roemer,
Sara Ruddick, Alan Soble, Richard Sorabji, Roger Scruton, Amartya Sen, Nancy
Sherman, Margarita Valdes, Roop Rekha Verma, Paul Weithman, Leon Wieseltier,
and Susan Wolf. I am grateful, above all, to my colleagues at the University of
Chicago, some of whom have read all of these chapters at one time or another and
many of whom have read far more than collegiality would require. I therefore
extend extremely warm thanks to Al Alschuler, Douglas Baird, Mary Becker,
Daniel Brudney, Emily Buss, David Cohen, Richard Craswell, Stephen Holmes,
Elena Kagan, Dan M. Kahan, Robert Kaster, William Landes, Lawrence Lessig,
Viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
John Lott, Michael McConnell, Stephen J. Schulhofer, David Strauss, Cass
Sunstein, and Candace Vogler. This is a long unwieldy manuscript, and those who
have commented on the whole of it deserve especially warm thanks, so I extend
those thanks to Kenneth Dover, Gertrud Fremling, Richard Posner, and Mark
Ramseyer. Ross Davies provided invaluable research assistance and comments that
made my thoughts sharper at many points. 1 am also grateful to him for prepar-
ing the indexes, and to Michelle Mason for assistance with proofreading.
I have read each of these essays in a number of places and have profited greatly
from the ensuing discussions. My thanks, especially, to audiences at Oxford Uni-
versity; Cambridge University; Trinity College, Dublin; the Finnish Institute in
Rome; the Johann-Wolfgang University, Frankfurt, Germany; the Wittgenstein
Symposium, Kirchberg, Austria; the American Philosophical Association's Eastern
and Central Divisions; the University of Notre Dame; the University of Minnesota;
Princeton University; the University of Colorado at Boulder; Georgetown Univer-
sity; Bryn Mawr College; Harvard University; the University of Oklahoma; Scripps
College; Stanford University; the University of California at Riverside; Brown
University; Oberlin College; St. Lawrence University; St. Louis University; and the
University of Chicago. Finally, I have been challenged and provoked by several
groups of students, in courses on feminist philosophy and issues of social justice.
Between 1986 and 1993, I was a Research Advisor at the World Institute for
Development Economics Research in Helsinki, Finland, an agency connected with
the United Nations University. I spent a month every summer in Finland, work-
ing with a multinational and multidisciplinary group of researchers on a project
investigating the concept of "quality of life" as used to measure development in
nations. The aim of the project was to bring philosophical debates on this issue to
bear on the criticism of oversimple economic models of the family and of life qual-
ity that have had widespread influence on public policy. This engagement with ur-
gent practical issues of hunger, sex equality, and cultural and religious pluralism,
and with researchers from India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Iran, and
numerous other nations, has fundamentally changed my work as a philosopher. It
has led me to tackle issues I did not write on before (including both sex equality
and religion's relation to liberalism) and it has informed the abstract work that I
was already doing on human functioning and the quality of life with a new sense
of empirical reality and of the historical and political complexity of these issues of
justice. It also led me to think that much of the work on justice and on sex equality
that is produced in the American philosophical academy is too little informed by
international concerns and by confrontation with complex practical situations. This,
in turn, renewed my dedication to devote a good part of my career to these ques-
tions. For making these formative experiences possible I am immensely grateful to
all those who welcomed me to the World Institute for Development Economics
Research (WIDER): to Lal Jayawardena, its director, to Siddiq Osmani and Val
Moghadam, permanent researchers, who taught me a great deal about their areas
of specialization, to Martha Chen, who connected me to fieldwork in India and
Bangladesh and through whose eyes and words I came to know women such as
Metha Bai and Rohima, and above all to Amartya Sen, both for introducing me to
WIDER and for his enormously inspiring work on our collaborative project.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
During my work on ancient Greek sexuality, I began a correspondence on
these topics with Sir Kenneth Dover, a scholar whom I had greatly admired for
some time but had only met once. Because Dover took a keen interest in the legal
issues involved in the Colorado case and their connection with both moral and
historical arguments, the correspondence led to a collaboration, and we wrote
jointly an appendix to the paper that appears here as chapter 12. At this same
time, Dover published an extraordinary autobiography in which he describes
the connection between his historical scholarship on sexuality and the opposi-
tion to prudery and narrow moralism that have characterized his life as a scholar
and in the public world of academic administration. My discussion of Dover's
life appears here as chapter 13. Because of my enormous respect for the dedica-
tion to truth and justice embodied in both his work and his life, and because I
have so much enjoyed exchanging thoughts with him about the Greeks and about
modern politics, I dedicate this volume to Sir Kenneth Dover.
Chapter 1 incorporates material from "Human Capabilities, Female Human
Beings," which appeared in Women, Culture, and Development, ed. Martha
Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); it is, however,
basically a new essay. Chapter 2 is scheduled to appear in Women's Voices,
Women's Lives: The Amnesty Lectures 1995 (currently under contract to West-
view) and appears in pamphlet form as the Lindley Lecture for 1997, University
of Kansas Press. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in Religion and Con-
temporary Liberalism, ed. Paul Weithman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1997), 93-137. Portions of chapter 4 appeared in The Boston
Review 21(5) (October/November 1996). Chapter 5 has not been previously pub-
lished. A version of chapter 6 appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs 22
(1993), 83-125. A version of chapter 7 appeared in The Liberation Debate: Rights
at Issue, ed. Michael Leahy and Dan Cohn-Sherbok (London and New York:
Routledge, 1996); it was paired with a response by Roger Scruton, to which I
then replied; I have incorporated into the article material from that exchange.
Chapter 8 appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1995), 249-91. Chap-
ter 9 appeared in The New Republic, 217 (August 11/18, 1997), 36-42. Chapter
10 appeared in Sex, Preference, and Family: Essays on Law and Nature, ed. David
Estlund and Martha Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17-
43. Chapter 11 appears in the Journal of Legal Studies XXVII (2) (Part 2): (Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1998), 693-724. Chapter 12 appeared in a longer ver-
sion in the Virginia Law Review 80 (1994), 1515-1651; in its original form it
was followed by a coauthored appendix written with Kenneth Dover; with
Dover's permission I have incorporated parts of that document into the present
form of the article. Chapter 13 appeared under the title "A Stoic's Confessions"
in Arion, 3rd series no. 4 (1997), 149-60. Chapter 14 appeared in The New Re-
public 206 (April 20, 1992). Chapter 15 appeared in New Literary History 26
(1995), 731-53. All articles have been rewritten for this volume.
Chicago, Illinois M. C. N.
March 1998