Introduction

1Martha Nussbaum, who holds the Ernst Freund Chair in Law and Ethics at University of Chicago, believes that philosophical theorizing has practical political value, and that its place cannot be filled by other, more empirical forms of inquiry. “Part of theory’s practical value lies in its abstract and systematic character”, observes Nussbaum. “Without abstraction of some sort, there could be no thought or speech; and the type of abstraction characteristic of the tradition of political philosophy has great value, so long as it is tethered in the right way to a sense of what is relevant in reality”. (p 10, Women and Human Development) Her feminist work is woven into a larger set of concerns expressed in twelve books and over 250 articles concerning (among other things) the relationship between literary and philosophical modes of moral reasoning, the role of emotions in moral life, the relationship between emotions and ethical knowledge, the cognitive content of emotions, the role of shame and disgust in shaping social life and the law, the elaboration of a theory of justice based on the notion of human functioning and human capabilities. My list does not fully capture the breadth of Martha Nussbaum’s philosophical inquiry, but it should give some idea of the wide-ranging yet coherent philosophical project within which Nussbaum’s feminist work is situated.

2The work on capabilities and human functioning provides one vital context for Nussbaum’s work on feminism, liberalism and internationalism in the context of global economic development. Taking as her point of departure the notion that all human beings are of equal dignity and value, in virtue of their basic capacities for moral choice and reasoning, Nussbaum draws our attention to the problem of political, social and economic inequalities that make it impossible for millions of individual women (and men) to exercise their basic human capacities. Human capabilities, she tells us, “exert a moral claim that they should be developed. Human beings are creatures such that, provided with the right educational and material support, they can become fully capable of the major human functions” (p 43, Sex and Social Justice). Justice demands that all human beings, regardless of sex or sexuality, or of race, class or religion, be in a position to develop these central functional capacities, if they so choose. For a life that lacks any one of these capabilities will fall short of being a good life, no matter what else it does have.

3The capabilities list, which includes life, bodly health and integrity, emotions, and control over one’s environment (political and material), is clearly informed throughout by issues of gender inequality. For the sharp socio-economic inequalities that, throughout most of the contemporary world, place women in an unequal and dependent relationship with men not only mask the potential capacities of women (as John Stuart Mill pointed out), they actually deform and diminish women’s aspirations and desires for themselves. Via a process of lifelong habituation to an inferior status that, moreover, bears the stamp of inherited destiny, women “adapt” their preferences and desires so as to bring them into line with the little that they can hope to own or achieve. And this is a very poor basis indeed for the free exercise of practical reason in the shaping of one’s own life!

4Martha Nussbaum thus asks that feminism move beyond mere identity politics to embrace a “systematic and justifiable program that addresses hierarchy across the board in the name of human dignity” (p 71, Sex and Social Justice). Moreover, the need for such philosophical theorizing is urgent, for as Nussbaum reminds us, “in a time of rapid globalization, where non-moral interests are bringing us together across national boundaries, we have an especially urgent need to reflect about the moral norms that can also, and more appropriately, unite us, providing constraints on the utility-enhancing choices nations may make…We need to ask what politics should be pursuing for each and every citizen, before we can think well about economic change. We need to ask what constraints there ought to be on economic growth, what the economy is supposed to be doing for people, and what all citizens are entitled to by virtue of being human…Considerations of justice for women have been disproportionately silenced in many debates about international development; it is only fitting, then, that they should be a central focus of a project aimed at constructing political principles for all”. (p 32-3, Women and Human Development).

5Laura Lee Downs

Interview

6At the outset, I would like to move from the personal, that is, whatever you would like to say about your family, where you’re from, any formative experiences at school, in the arts, in politics or elsewhere, toward the political and public aspects of your life and work, bearing in mind that the two are always intertwined. I know that you spent at least part of your childhood in the college town of Bryn Mawr. Were your parents scholars and/or intellectuals?

7My father was a lawyer. He wanted to be an intellectual, probably a scientist, but he came from a poor family in Georgia and had to support his younger siblings, so he got a law degree by the time he was 21 and was practicing law to make money. He encouraged my intellectual aspirations in every way. He couldn’t quite see the use of philosophy, but he thought the main thing was to put all your will and energy into whatever you did, so we got along very well in that way. Just before he died of cancer, I learned that I’d been chosen as the first woman in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and I was allowed to tell him, although officially it was a secret still, so that he had that news before he died. We did not get along so well on political matters, however, because he was a confirmed Southern racial bigot, and he also had anti-Semitic feelings. When I got engaged to a Jew, he refused to come to the wedding. Later we were reconciled, but I always thought it quite bizarre that someone so intelligent would have these stupid views.

8My mother was not at all intellectual, and she wasn’t a great reader. She was a lovely gentle and kind woman with deep feeling, and she was not very happy in life. She had been an interior decorator, but she quit that job to get married, and was very bored and restless. For many years she had a bad drinking problem, which upset me greatly. Around the time I got married, she started going to AA, and she became a very influential national leader in AA. That organization changed her life, largely by giving her something useful and active to do, and a set of friends who were more real than the stuffy elite people in Bryn Mawr. She was from an aristocratic family that went back to the Mayflower, but she hated all that snobbery.

9Another important influence for me was my grandmother, who lived to be 104. She was full of joy and energy, and she was able to take delight in small things, such as taking care of her antique furniture I think maybe she didn’t really love anyone very much. But to me she was a great model of energy and joie de vivre.

10Bryn Mawr was stifling to me, but the teachers at my excellent women’s school were my one refuge from all the social snobbery. I loved that school, and I still like to visit it (The Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr). I think I first came to feminism through those teachers, although I was not aware of it at the time, because everyone there was a woman.

11What impact (if any) did the political upheavals of the 1960s have on your education, your choices and options in your early career?

12In high school I was a libertarian and I worked for Goldwater. I still respect him greatly; I think he was a person of integrity, who held his libertarianism perfectly consistently (approving, for example, of gay rights). I soon found, however, that most Republicans I met working for him were not genuine libertarians but racists and elitists of various sorts. Reflecting about the problems of race, and seeing my father’s entrenched attitudes, I came to the conclusion that libertarianism was insufficient; people would not change voluntarily, so government would have to take a strong role in producing justice. By the middle of my college years I was a democrat, working for Eugene McCarthy. But I never liked the collectivist left-wing movements of that time; I always remained a liberal individualist. So I didn’t join SDS or any other group, but just licked stamps for the Democrats.

13In particular, our readers would like to know something about how you first came to feminism, and how feminism first came to you.

14I was not aware of being a feminist until I encountered discrimination, which was in graduate school. Encountering problems of sexual harassment, and, later, the difficulty of child care, I started caring more and more about feminism. Because I had a child three years into grad school, I didn’t have time for meetings and consciousness-raising, I was too busy trying to take care of my daughter and get some work done. But I thought about these things more and more. Later on, I felt compelled to write about them, particularly after getting involved in international development policy issues, where I found a whole set of issues about women that weren’t being talked about enough – equal access to primary education, access to credit and equal property rights, and so forth.

15But they would also be interested to know more about the route by which you chose to become a philosopher… Through what means and in what ways did Aristotle and company first speak to you?

16I was thinking philosophically long, long before I ever heard of Aristotle. In high school I read Greek tragedies and wrote about the ideas they contained, and I also wrote about Dostoyevsky and Henry James. In my high school there were no courses in philosophy, but the literature teachers were very philosophical. This continued: in college I did a lot of French literature courses and wrote about Rousseau in that context, and eventually I majored in classics, focusing on the tragedians and their ideas. But in graduate school I found that the people teaching literature in the Classics department weren’t interested in the ideas of the poets, so I turned to the ancient philosophy program, and there I discovered Aristotle.

17It strikes me that across the trajectory of your work – there is a consistent interest on your part for approaching the psychological aspects of human existence with a range of tools that is far broader than that of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Can you say something about this aspect of your work?

18I’d say, first, that one really needs to see two different trajectories, which intersect: the one focusing on emotion and ethics, and another focusing on international justice, feminism, and so forth, culminating in my latest book Frontiers of Justice. As for the emotions one: I started with the Greek and Roman philosophers, and I still think that their contribution is extremely important. But I also think that modern psychology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis have supplied essential ingredients for the understanding of the emotions. The cognitive dimension of the emotions was beautifully understood by Seneca and the other Stoic thinkers, and it’s not surprising that modern discussions refer a lot to them. But, as I say in Upheavals, they didn’t care about child development, so we have to do a lot to make their views complete.

19I see in your work a consistent move toward effecting a rapprochement between reason and emotion, toward promoting the Aristotelian notion that reason can and does inform and educate desire. More broadly, it seems that you are striving to demonstrate how, in human cognition, these two elements, traditionally held to be polar (and gendered) opposites, interpenetrate and inform one another.

20Well, “reason” means two things, and discussions are often slippery. On the one hand, saying that emotions contain reason means that they contain thoughts with a propositional content. This seems to me to be basically true, though I also say that we need to broaden the category of cognition to include the sorts of thoughts animals and young children have. On the other hand, saying emotions contain reason might mean that they contain good thought, thought that follows certain canons of evidence and argument. This is sometimes true and sometimes not. Emotions are no more reliable than any other type of belief, and often they are less reliable, on account of facts about child development that makes our adult emotions unusually inaccessible and opaque to us. As I say in Upheavals chapter 5, we can recognize this opacity without denying that emotions contain thought: indeed the sort of opacity they have is best explained by showing how early thoughts about objects get transferred, still in a primitive condition, to later objects.

21In sum, it seems to me that much of your work is underpinned by a feminist and humanist will to re-connect reason and emotion/desire in the all-important realm of moral reasoning, and that this has powerful implications for how we can think about human psychology. It also seems linked to a broader feminist philosophical project of bringing back together that which has been sundered in the modern west into two gendered realms: a private and feminized word of feeling and a public, masculine world of reason.

22Well, that is a very nice characterization, and I will just accept it!

23I’d like to turn more specifically to your work on feminism, internationalism, and what you term “the practical pursuit of gender justice”. In both Sex and Social Justice (1999) and Women and Human Development. The Capabilities Approach (2000), you argue that the liberal tradition of political thought, with its focus on the dignity of individual human beings and their right to make choices as to how they will live, contains rich resources for addressing violations of that dignity on the grounds of sex or sexuality. At the same time, you underscore that this can only happen if the liberal tradition is prepared to address seriously the ways that social and economic contexts shape what it is that individuals can do or be, in part by shaping their preferences and desires. At the heart of your solution lies the capabilities list (see Introduction), a universal list of central human functions that is set forth alongside the claim that a life that lacks any one of these capabilities will fall short of being a good life, no matter what else it does have. The difficulty, of course, is that the universalism underpinning this list, with its commitment to establishing (or reinforcing) cross-cultural norms of justice, equality and rights, might also be seen as a kind of western cultural imperialism, insensitive to cultural difference and inclined to ride roughshod over local cultural particularity. How do you respond to this difficulty?

24It would be difficult to regard the capabilities approach as Western, since it began in India! It was originated by Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Price in Economics in 1998, as a way of criticizing dominant (Western) approaches to development economics, that focused on economic growth as a measure of a nation’s development. Its practical impact was very largely set in motion by Mahbub Ul Haq, a Pakistani economist who started the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme; these reports were later edited by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, a Japanese woman. More or less every nation (except the United States!) now produces its own national Human Development Report. So the approach is very international, and the U. S. is lagging behind.

25The capability or capabilities approach, also known as the Human Development Approach, has by now given rise to a large movement, mostly aimed at criticizing the practices of the IMF and the World Bank. The Human Development and Capability Association, which is four years old this year, has 700 members from 69 countries. I am its current President, and I just returned from a meeting that was, I believe, our best yet, with so many excellent young people, many from developing countries, developing different aspects of the approach. Of course the whole point of having an association is to open oneself to criticism, and I really welcome the criticisms of any member, particularly those from developing countries. The way I see my own role, I am developing the philosophical aspects of the approach, while Sen concentrates on the economic aspects. I view myself as sort of like an advocate for excellent activists in the corridors of power. I mean, it would never occur to poor women in rural India to think that the fact that there is economic growth in their nation means that they themselves have a higher quality of life: for, after all, they know all too well that growth can enrich the rich while leaving the poor without essential resources. So my approach is an attempt to draw attention for the need, in any decent society, to bring each and every person up above some rather ample threshold on a series of central human opportunities. Moreover, the opportunities that matter in a human life are not all about money: the reason the approach got the name “Human Development Approach” was that we stress that money isn’t everything in a human life. We emphasize the importance of health, education, bodily integrity, freedom of speech, access to the political process, and much else. The whole point is to get Western development agencies to treat people in developing countries as full-fledged human beings.

26How was it that you came to work so closely with women’s groups in India?

27I worked with Amartya Sen from 1986 to 1993 directing a project on Quality of Life at the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki, a U. N. agency that was created to foster broader interdisciplinary approaches to development economics. Our project focused on women, as had a lot of Sen’s other work, and on India, because that was his home culture. An excellent anthropologist named Martha Chen did a field study for our project about women’s right-to-work in India, and she worked with our project throughout. A lot of others in the project were also Indian or South Asian. I had been to India with great fascination. So when, in 1997, I decided to write the book Women and Human Development, I decided not to do what some writers had done, namely to pull in bitty examples from this place and that without knowing the place or its history. I decided to get to know one country really well, its history, its regional differences, its urban-rural differences, and so on. India was the obvious choice because I already had contacts there, because people speak freely there (unlike China), and because I love it.

28So how did you actually make the connections with individual development groups?

29I said to Marty, “I want to learn as much as possible about what women are struggling for in development groups of many different types. Please set me up with an itinerary and some contacts, and come along with me if you can.” Marty was born in India and has spent half her life there; she is very well-connected. So she helped me do what I wanted to do. The first year I spent 3 weeks going around with Marty: SEWA in Ahmedabad, where I was honored to meet the great Ela Bhatt; the Center for Development Studies in Trivandrum, Kerala; and many others. I also met numerous academics, some of whom are now among my closest friends, and they helped me further. I did this the next year as well, going to different regions. I also began working with a legal organization called The Lawyer’s Collective, and writing articles about Indian constitutional law. I also worked with the U. N. Development Programme in New Delhi, on their program in Gender and Governance..As time has gone on, I’ve been in India at least one period of time per year, and I get further and further drawn in. I think Americans know too little about India’s political life, so I’ve just finished a book about the Hindu right and its threat to democracy, called The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. I think of my role as that of a loudspeaker, making the concerns of Indians heard by Americans, or at least I hope so!

30In re-reading the capabilities list, I could not help but notice that American women come up short in a number of areas, notably that of bodily integrity (and here I am thinking of the high levels of sexual violence to which they are exposed), but also in terms of political participation/representation and economic equality. In the latter realm, the ongoing expectation that women perform most unpaid housework and childcare with little help either from male partners or from the state not only interrupts their careers but plays a key role in the broader undervaluation of their labour in paid employment. How have American feminists reacted to the capabilities approach, with its (implicit) plea to break through the insularity of American feminism and locate feminist demands in a larger, humanist and international context?

31There are lots of feminists in the Human Development and Capability Association, some of them American. I think any American who studies the approach is bound to agree with what you say: America lags behind in the area of sexual violence, and also in state support for family and care labor. As to how American feminists have responded: my dear colleague Iris Young, who tragically died a month ago, was very enthusiastic about the approach, supervised dissertations on it, and was a Fellow of our Association. She always criticized me, though, for talking too little about institutions in my articulation of the approach, and this same point was made by Henry Richardson at our latest meeting in a wonderful paper. Catharine MacKinnon is also quite enthusiastic about the approach: she once said that if women ever got all the things on my list she would retire and become a singer. Andrea Dworkin and I also enjoyed talking about these ideas. Seyla Benhabib once worked on Sen’s and my project at WIDER, and wrote a terrific paper on cultural heterogeneity that I still find inspiring. Susan Moller Okin was initially quite sympathetic to the approach, but came, later, to feel that for poor women in developing countries one ought to emphasize only subsistence capabilities and not things like freedom of the press and religious freedom. I have to say that I find this a rather condescending attitude to poor women, and it also contains the error sometimes imputed to Marxism, namely, that one can progress toward “higher” things only by beginning with the essentials of material necessity: “first feed the face, and then talk right and wrong,” as the libretto of the Threepenny Opera puts it. This is actually a bad strategy: Sen’s work shows that a free press is one of the most important factors in preventing famine. (How awful, that during the past year we have lost three of the most important feminist theorists in the U. S.: Andrea Dworkin, Okin, and Iris.) Another feminist with whom I greatly enjoy talking is Anne Phillips in London.

32Since 1989, Muslim headscarves have occupied a central place in debates about immigration, religious difference and women’s social and political equality in France. In your book Women and human development, you argue that the French Republic should permit girls to wear the headscarf to school, if they so choose, even if there is a general sense that the wearing of the scarf is a symbol of sex hierarchy.. Would it be correct to say that your position implies that the Republic should strike a rather a different balance between freedom of religious expression and the upholding of gender equality than the one that underpins the current Stasi law

33Well, you’ll have to see my new religion book for a full discussion of this. The American approach has always been one that favors the idea of “accommodation”: that is, we seek to make exceptions for people of religious conviction, even exceptions to general laws (like the draft, or the laws about testifying on a Saturday when you have a subpoena), because we have seen that a nation isn’t truly fair if it burdens minorities. Law is always majoritarian: the usual days for work, the rules of dress, are going to reflect the religious preferences of the majority. So the only way to make them fair to minorities is to give them a break. Already in the mid-17^th century this was the norm in colonial America: Quakers didn’t have to take off their hats in court, and so on. I think this system is much better than the French system, because it is more genuinely expressive of equal respect for each person’s conscience.

34I agree with all you’ve said here, but I also think the fact that it is young girls who are targeted complicates the question of making individual conscience the target of protection. The French state, after all, has good reason to believe that at least some of these girls are being pressured by parents, older brothers, even neighbours, at an age where it is unclear that they possess a fully formed individual conscience. The State and the public schools are there to protect the girls from this pressure, to provide a space in which they might reflect on something other than what their families and religious communities demand of them. And this, in turn, is linked to the very different ways that France and the USA locate and conceptualise individual freedom. It is, perhaps, a very obvious point, but nonetheless worth re-stating that in French republican thought, the state is the guarantor of individual freedom against the pressure of local communities, whereas in the United States family and community – the very sites seen to be potentially oppressive to the individual in France – are seen to be the locus in which individuals are formed. Finally, there is the question (which I know you have treated) that freedom of religion is in fact a guarantee of collective, communitarian rights which can then be used against the weakest members of the community/religion, to keep them subordinate and in line. How can we ensure that individuals really can choose whether or not to be a part of particular minorities (or majorities, for that matter)?

35The whole question of parents’ rights over their children is a very difficult one, which is why Women and Human Development devotes one of its four chapters to it. I think that no decent society can stand by while children suffer bodily or sexual abuse within the family. On the other hand, we ought to respect the freedom of association, which, I believe, gives parents certain limited rights to transmit their culture to their children, up to a certain age. The best way to deal with deformed teachings on the part of parents is to have a robust system of public education that teaches girls about their fully equal political rights, and emphasizes that they are citizens in a pluralistic society in which women have many different choices. I think the U. S., with its easy access to home schooling, goes much too far in the direction of allowing parents to teach whatever they like. But I also think that the French system goes not far enough in the direction of honouring a diversity of religious lifestyles. Amy Gutmann had a fine suggestion about the controversy: let the girls wear the headscarfs, and then teach them thoroughly about women’s equality. I gave my Presidential Address to the Human Development and Capability Association on this topic, so eventually you can read my full view, and I have a new book coming out on religion, constitutional law, and equality.

36I don’t think that religious freedom need be conceived in terms of group rights, and in fact it is not so conceived in most modern constitutional traditions. The right to free exercise of religious is an individual right, in South Africa, the U. S., India, and most other constitutional democracies. On the other hand, groups sometimes play an analytical role in determining what liberties are legitimately to be claimed. Thus, if a Mennonite says that he wants to be exempt from the military draft because of religious norms pertaining to his religion, courts are going to ask what that religion actually holds before they grant his request. But he makes his demand as an individual. (I say “he” for the obvious reason that the U. S. has never drafted women.) I agree with you that proposals for group rights usually have a tendency to marginalize or subordinate the group’s weakest members, which is why I don’t like such proposals.

37French feminists have long been aware that republican universalism, with its insistence on public neutrality as a guarantee of citizen equality, has conspicuously failed to deliver parity to women in the realm of political representation. What do you think about the recent parité legislation in France that seeks to redress the gender imbalance in political representation by making this signal departure from republican universalism?

38I think that all quota programs have a danger: namely, that the quota gets rigidified and outlives its usefulness, and that it will just beget other quotas. India’s system of quotas for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes led, later, to request from other castes to have their own quotas, and now women too are seeking quotas, with the danger that all too few positions are not under some quota. On the other hand, quotas can be essential to break up very entrenched discrimination. On the whole, I prefer a system where political parties have to have a certain number of women on their lists, rather than a system that guarantees women particular seats. But the guaranteed seats may work well in local government: India’s recent constitutional amendments to give women 1/3 representation on the local village councils has been working very well, leading families to seek more education for their daughters and so on.

39Can you tell us about how you work on gender equality and on sexuality has informed your stance on gay rights and the politics of sexual diversity?

40I’ve cared about gay rights since the days when I was acting in professional theatres, and I saw the way gay friends of mine lived. The theatre was a kind of free counter-culture in the repressive larger culture, and I thought that the repression was utterly ridiculous and very cruel. Studying Greek homosexuality was also important, because it showed me how differently a reasonable other culture could think about these things. Some of the founding scholars of the “gay studies” movement were friends of mine from Classics, such as David Halperin and the late John J. Winkler. As I try to show in Hiding from Humanity, people are all too prone to turn their own shame and anxiety into repression of others, and I’m hoping to supply (both in that book and in my India book) a deeper psychology to back up liberal principles of equal respect.

41Your 1997 book Cultivating Humanity is a fundamentally optimistic one, leaving this reader, at least, with the sense that, while there is much that remains to be done in the realm of educating young United States citizens for a multicultural and increasingly globalized world, the report that you and your colleagues brought back from the field that year suggested that all kinds of creative and engaged approaches to this civic education for the 21^st-century was in fact being undertaken by a broad range of teachers and programs across a wide array of institutions. Do you think that September 11 and its aftermath have fundamentally altered this work, and if so, how?

42I think that college and university education in the US is in a very good state, and I don’t see that 9/11 has changed anything. If anything, it has done good, creating a demand for courses about Islam and other world religions. Outside the US, the values I care about are not present in colleges and universities, because students enter to read a single subject, and there’s no room in the curriculum for courses that are a general preparation for citizenship and life. For this reason, the study of race, and women’s studies, tend to be small and marginalized: a recent conference I went to in Germany, sponsored by an excellent Women’s Studies program, had not a single man in attendance, except the Swedish ambassador to Germany who was a friend of mine. In the U. S. gender has been mainstreamed through the liberal arts requirements that all universities have. Many educators I know in Europe want to change this, but it’s hard, because it would probably mean adding a 4^th year to university education. It would also mean small classes with lots of discussion and lots of feedback on writing, and this is simply not “done” in Europe.. For example, a friend of mine who is the Vice-Chancellor of a new university in Sweden that has a large immigrant population wants to introduce a required course on democracy, but the government can’t understand that she needs a lot of new faculty positions in order to have small classes. Furthermore, European faculty don’t expect to do this sort of teaching, and have never been trained to do it.

43I am very worried about the way in which the global market is affecting primary and secondary education, in all countries. There is increasing pressure to focus on subjects that are connected to national profit, such as science, technology, and economics, and the humanities and arts are getting marginalized. I think this is terribly dangerous, because good democratic citizenship requires learning to imagine, learning to criticize an argument, and many other things that the humanities and arts do. But virtually nobody is talking about this: it is all, “How can we make more profit in the global market?” This is particularly so in India, where Nehru long ago fostered a science-first attitude to education, but it is slipping in that direction here too, even with our rich heritage of Deweyan ideas.