Sex and Social Justice

Sex and Social Justice

Martha C. Nussbaum

Language: English

Pages: 488

ISBN: 0195112105

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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.

The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (Ripe Series in Global Political Economy)

Multiplicity in Identity: Beyond the Metaphysics of Substance

The Shere Hite Reader: New and Selected Writings on Sex, Globalism, and Private Life

Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

common in the United States. (Of course in many parts of the world it never existed, and one dividend of thinking about feminism internationally is that one comes to see the many different ways in which children have been cared for with good results.) Some view its decline with alarm, and some with approval. Two social movements that have been implicated in the decline are feminism and the lesbian/gay rights movement. Feminism has led women to ask whose interests the traditional hierarchical

with assigning just punishments, becomes, in the end, oddly similar to the raging ungentle people against whom he reacts. Retributive anger hardens the spirit, turning it against the humanity it sees. And in turning against humanity, in evincing the rage and hardness of the angry, one then becomes perilously close to the callous wrongdoers who arouse rage in the first place. Thus in Seneca's examples we find acts of horrifying vindictivenes and cruelty committed by people whose anger is in the

an advocate of women's human rights should say. Addressing the Dilemma My starting point is a simple one: It is that human beings should not be violated, and that the protection of the basic human rights should have a very strong degree of priority, even when this interferes with some elements of traditional religious discourse and practice. To those who object that violating others is part of the free exercise of their religion, we should reply as we do when a murderer claims that God told him

find sex traded for grades or other favors. Others look more innocuous: Young assistant professors, for example, dating graduate students in their own department. These cases raise legitimate issues of personal freedom because adults are often brought together in a working environment by their common interests. But most standard policies would allow such dating, provided that the professor carefully avoided teaching the graduate student, supervising his or her work, and participating in any

the former rather than the latter when this can be done. A representative, and especially clear, formulation of the problem is that given by Nobel Prize-winning economist John Harsanyi, in an article entitled "Mo- 15O JUSTICE rality and the Theory of Rational Behaviour" published in the highly regarded collection on utilitarianism edited by philosopher Bernard Williams and economist/philosopher Amartya Sen.50 Harsanyi insists, so far in agreement with Sommers, that "in deciding what is good

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