>> Jane Sánchez:
Good afternoon,
distinguished guests
and colleagues.
My name is Jane Sánchez.
I serve as Deputy Librarian for
Library Collections and Services
at the Library of Congress,
and I also have a dual role.
I also serve as the 25th
Law Librarian of Congress.
I'd like to extend
a warm, hearty,
virtual welcome to all of you.
Thank you for joining the
Law Library of Congress
and the Greater Library for
the 2019, 2020 Frederic R.
and Molly S. Kellogg Biennial
Lecture on Jurisprudence.
The Law Library of Congress
is a very busy institution,
even now more so during COVID.
As an organization, the
Law Library is unique
in that it stands as the
primary resource search
for the U.S. Congress
in foreign, comparative
and international law.
We spend our days
in the midst of law
in a very practical,
operational way.
We conduct legal
research for Congress,
and for congressional staff,
and for other branches
of the U.S. government.
We provide resources and
services for the public,
in addition, both
nationally and globally.
In addition to research, our
core mission is to sustain
and preserve a universal
collection of law
for future generations.
Over the past 188 years,
we've grown to be the largest
law library in the world,
maintaining the most
comprehensive collection
of law books and resources from
around the world; collecting,
organizing, maintaining, and
servicing our collections,
which are over 2.9
million volumes.
And about 3 million pieces of
micro formats is no small task,
and one that consumes a great
deal of our time and attention.
We also deal with the
application of jurisprudence
in its practical operational
way on a daily basis.
The Kellogg Biennial Lecture
program brings another dimension
to us here at the Law Library.
It takes us back to the
theoretical grounding
of our trade and emphasizes
the original significance
of jurisprudence, the
study and theory of law.
It allows us to indulge
in a scholarly program
about contemporary legal
thought, through presentations
of internationally prominent
contributors to the science
of jurisprudence, judge through
their writings, reputation,
broad and continuing influence
on contemporary legal
scholarship.
Today's event would
not have been possible
without Fred and Molly Kellogg.
It is their generous endowment
that brought this
important series
to the Library of Congress.
We are most grateful.
I would also like to acknowledge
Professor Don Wallace
and Mark Medish, who
have been very helpful
with the planning
of today's lecture.
At this time, please join me
in welcoming Mr.
Frederic R. Kellogg,
who will introduce our
speaker and our interviewer.
Fred, the floor is yours.
>> Frederic R. Kellogg:
Thank you.
Thank you, Jane.
I'm Frederick Kellogg
and I have the honor
to introduce our speakers.
First, I want to thank those
who have made this series
and lecture possible, especially
the Librarian of Congress,
Carla Hayden, the Law
Librarian, Jane Sánchez,
who we just heard, their
assistants, Donna Socol
and Robert Grammer,
and importantly,
the two independent jurors,
Don Wallace and Mark Medish,
who along with the Law
Librarians select the
Biennial Lecture.
Their work, and this
year's arrangement have
been challenging.
And we are delighted
to welcome all who are
in attendance by Zoom.
In two years, we hope
to return to a lecture
at the actual library itself.
And believe me, it will
have a celebratory reception
for attendees.
So please come back in 2022.
Eleven years ago, the Library
of Congress and the Librarian,
James Billington, accepted
a proposal by Molly and me
to support an endowed series
of lectures on jurisprudence
and the philosophy of law.
I felt the need for a national
and international forum on this,
our legal philosophy,
but another inspiration was
Molly Kellogg's 30 years
of service on Capitol Hill
as executive assistant
to Congressmen, J. J.
Pickle of Austin, Texas.
Those were days when opposing
members treated each other
with remarkable courtesy
and respect.
Those days will return, but not
without effort and reflection,
which brings me to our lectures.
The first lecture in 2009
was by Ronald Dworkin
on whether there is
truth in interpretation.
Two years later, Joseph Raz
delivered the second lecture
titled Sovereignty
and Legitimacy:
On the Changing Face of Law.
In 2013, Amartya Sen
delivered Justice,
Disagreement and Objectivity.
And in 2015, Michael Sandel
spoke on Justice, Neutrality
and Law, focusing on whether the
law should affirm certain moral
judgments or be neutral on
moral and spiritual questions.
Our last lecture was presented
in 2017 by Jeremy Waldron
on the Philosophical
Foundations of Immigration Law.
Professor Martha
Nussbaum, as you can see
from her extraordinary
background, has brought a humane
and learned voice to a diversity
of issues in philosophy,
public policy and law.
Our lecturer holds several
academic appointments
as Ernst Freund Distinguished
Service Professor of Law
and Ethics, appointed
in the Law School
and Philosophy Department,
as an Associate
in the Classics Department,
the Divinity School,
and the Political Science
Department, and as a Member
of the Committee on
Southern Asian Studies,
and a Board Member of
the Human Rights Program.
She holds honorary degrees from
63 colleges and universities,
and several important prizes.
The Prince of Asturias
prize in Social Sciences,
the American Philosophical
Association
and Phillip Quinn prize,
the Kyoto Prize in Arts
and Philosophy, the Don M.
Randel prize for achievement
in the Humanities in the
American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and the Berggruen
Prize for Philosophy & Culture.
A list of her books is very
long, so I will refer you
to Wikipedia and
mention just a few
to demonstrate her truly
extraordinary reach.
In 2013, she published Political
Emotions: Why Love Matters
for Justice, in 2016, Anger
and Forgiveness: Resentment,
Generosity, Justice, in
2018, The Monarchy of Fear:
A Philosopher Looks at
Our Political Crisis.
Her new book, Citadels of Pride:
Sexual Abuse, Accountability,
and Reconciliation, will
be published in 2021.
And she is currently
working on a book
on justice for nonhuman animals.
I should also mention her
teaching ability so important
to her and to any
academic career.
She holds the University
of Chicago faculty award
for Excellence in
Graduate Teaching.
My final introduction and
deep thanks go to Professor
of Philosophy, Brian Butler, of
University of North Carolina,
Asheville, who will interview
Professor Nussbaum on Philosophy
of Life: Fragility,
Emotions and Capabilities.
Brian studied with her
at Chicago Law School.
He is a preeminent legal
scholar and the author in 2017
of The Democratic Constitution:
Experimentalism and
Interpretation.
Now, I turn the virtual
podium over to our speakers.
Brian.
>> Brian E. Butler:
Thanks, Fred.
It's really great
to be here with Fred
and Molly's Lecture
series, and with Martha,
people I really do admire.
So I think we should just get
right on with the interview
if that's okay, Martha.
I would like to start with
your philosophical methodology,
I think, and to ask a
question about that.
Through Fragility of Goodness,
Poetic Justice and Monarchy
of Fear, you used a real
breadth of texts of information.
And when I was emailing back
and forth with you about this,
I described you as a public
intellectual and you said very,
certainly you wanted to be
described as a philosopher,
which I greatly appreciate.
So I just would like
to say exactly,
would you explain your
philosophical methodology
and what your conception
of philosophy is?
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Okay.
So thank you.
First of all, I want to thank
the Library, and thank Fred
and Molly Kellogg very much
for making this event possible.
And thank Brian,
especially, for being willing
to be my interlocutor
in this interview
and for the wonderful questions
that he's come up with.
Well, I mean, I do
very much want
to be considered
as a philosopher.
Actually, my PhD was in
Classics, so I guess I've had
to fight to get into
the philosophy world.
And I find it a very precious
world where rigor of argument,
respectful criticism and all
the virtues that are so lacking
in some of our public
life are still honored.
So what, though, what
Brian's really asking about is
that in my work, I've
used literary texts,
and to some extent
also musical texts,
I'll talk about that later,
in thinking about
philosophical questions.
Now, so why do I do that?
Well, you know, ever
since high school,
I've been fascinated
by Greek tragedy.
I was an actress for a while and
I acted in some Greek tragedies,
actually, even as a
professional actress.
And those plays always seemed to
be, to offer deep human insight.
But there was a debate about
them and this interested me,
because Plato understood that
the tragic poets were teachers
of people and that they offered
people insights, but he thought
that the insights were
false, and pernicious,
and lead people astray.
And pernicious, not just because
of certain claims that were made
within the plays, but because
the whole tragedy form,
the genre itself, told lies.
Now, what did he mean by that?
Well, tragedy show a person
who's not a bad person,
pretty good person, coming
to grief in spectacular ways
through events that that person
largely does not control.
So if you believe that
tragedy offers insight,
you have to believe that
good people can be harmed
by things beyond their control.
That we're vulnerable in very
deep ways, that, for example,
the loss of a citizenship,
the loss of a husband,
the loss of children, that
these are really big things
that can affect the
wellbeing of a person
in very significant ways.
Plato thought that
that was totally false.
That the only thing that was a
real importance was your moral
purpose or character,
and that was always
within your own control.
So the citizens in his ideal
city would not see such works
and they would never hear these
people say, "Oh, terrible,"
and rolling around in the dust
because they've lost somebody
that they cared about.
Now, he was very similar in
this respect to the Greek Stoics
who came later, and
later too in my career,
because I didn't know much
about them at that time,
and the Stoics actually
offered a definition of tragedy.
So this is how tragedy
comes about;
when chance events befall fools.
And once again, they thought it
was not just what was asserted
within the tragedy, but
it's the way the play shapes
your intention.
It makes you care about the
hero and then deeply grief feel.
And if you feel emotions
such as compassion and fear
for that hero -- Well, of course
not every philosopher agrees
with Plato that these
are close insights.
Aristotle largely
thinks that they're true.
And so there comes to be a
debate, which is the debate,
not just propositions
within the works,
but about the form itself,
whether it offers
human insights.
So in my first book, the
Fragility of Goodness,
I wrote about that and I said,
look, here we have a real debate
between literature and
philosophy and it's not just
like colleagues in different
departments peacefully talking
in their own way.
And then later I extended this
and I thought about other areas
in which this idea applies.
The form itself has
a, it were a content.
I thought about the
Aristotelian philosophical claim
that ethical attention
is very contextual,
very particularistic.
And well, of course,
Aristotle can say this,
but to really assess that claim,
to see what you make of it,
it's very helpful to consider
the form of the novel.
It shows in particular novels,
my particular interest was
Henry James and Preuss,
because those characters
attend in the way
that Aristotle describes and
the novel is able to show
that fine-tuned attention
taking shape.
So I wrote a good
deal about that.
And then later, as I came to
be teaching in the law school,
I saw that the same
issue happens within law.
Judges who just read the text of
Black Letter Law miss something
about human beings that
literature is able to show them.
So I've written a
good deal about that.
And we've had a whole
project of conferences on law
and literature where
we've published.
We're now at our sixth edited
collection is coming out soon.
And the sixth one
is a good example,
War in Law and Literature.
Well, how do you
learn about war?
If you don't get close to
the people and have a sense
of what their bodies
are suffering,
then you missed something
that lawyers
and judges really need
to know about war.
And here's where I find that
music too is very important.
And in my contribution
to this volume,
I use Benjamin Britten's,
War Requiem,
because music can go
beyond literary words
to actually make us feel
the cutting of the body by,
you know, cutting of steel
into flesh, and the bangings
and the climbings in that work,
show us the terrible horror
of war and then ask
us to deliberate,
what do we want to
do about that?
Of course, Britten was a
total pacifist, I'm not.
But anyway, we agree that
something very terrible happens
to the human body that we
better deliberate well about.
So that's the kind of
terrain I've been covering
and I'm moving, I guess, more
and more in the direction
of music, because it just is
such a passionate
part of my life.
But anyway, I think those
works need the commentary
that philosophy offers.
I don't think we should
throw out philosophy and turn
to literature and music instead.
Of course not, because we
need the rigorous analysis
of what these things
are bringing in.
But in any case, I've
turned to texts that a lot
of philosophers don't turn to.
Is that --
>> Brian E. Butler:
And that's great.
It's great to read that and to
see that even say, for instance,
non-propositional knowledge is
something really interesting,
the way you've been
working with that.
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: But I
do insist that philosophy needs
to be there too, because
you know, we can't,
we don't have a view on the
table that we can assess
until we have the
contribution of the philosopher.
So you know, some philosophers
like Plato could put the
literary inside their philosophy
because they were actually
gifted literary authors.
Aristotle wasn't, so he just
turned to real literary authors.
I think Boost is someone
who's kind of a hybrid figure.
He can talk philosophically
in one part of the work,
but then he offers you
the literary material
in another part of the work.
But in any case, you really need
two different sorts of things,
the emotion inspiring work,
and then the philosophical
commentary.
>> Brian E. Butler: Thank you.
When we were emailing
back and forth,
you said something
quite interesting.
You said your methods
do not change,
but your substantive views do.
And so I thought that
that was interesting.
We could focus on a couple
places where they change and one
of the places you said they
changed was cosmopolitanism.
And you've analyzed it quite
effectively as something that's,
that has great virtues,
but also has blind spots.
Then you were intrigued by, or
worried by how it fits with,
say liberalism, as well
as with the nation state.
And I just, if you
would just play that out
for us a little bit, I think
we'd all appreciate it.
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Yeah.
Okay. First about the general
point, I guess I notice,
as I go through life, that
philosophers often dig in
and get identified
with a particular view,
and they get very upset,
and they want to do
down their opponents,
but I think, you know,
you should always be
wanting to be challenged.
That's why I have such wonderful
colleagues in the law school,
because they never tell me,
"Oh, that's a great paper."
But they always tell
me why I'm wrong.
And you know, I think you
learn a lot unless you're ready
to be told that you're wrong by
others, and then just feel it
in yourself, and
to move forward.
But in any case,
yeah, cosmopolitanism,
I started working on a very
long time ago, and this book,
The Cosmopolitan Tradition,
has been a very long time
in the making, during which I
really have changed my views.
Now, I define cosmopolitanism
as the view
that one should always give
one's first loyalty to the whole
of humanity, wherever it is,
and then only secondarily care
about your own nation, your
own family and so forth.
So that's something that I
wrote about back in around,
1994 in a piece in the
Boston Review, that was part
of a debate on patriotism
and cosmopolitanism.
And then every year I'm brought
up with the change in my views
in a somewhat painful way,
because people write to me
and they ask me if they
can reprint that piece
where I really agree with
the cosmopolitan position.
And you know, actually, I
say, you could reprint it only
if you describe the change in my
views and refer to later work.
But of course, often
people do not ask permission
if they want to reprint
something.
So I come to a campus and I
find somebody has a seminar
about Nussbaum the Cosmopolitan.
And then I have to say,
"You're wrong about that.
Why did you think?"
They want up and told
you what I think?
So actually the cosmopolitan
view,
I think has many great virtues.
It's the origin basically of our
modern human rights movement.
All human beings deserve respect
and they deserve a measure
of concern no matter
where they are.
So that's good in many ways.
It's brought us forward
from where we used to be.
But there are, I
guess, basically,
four things that I find
wrong with this tradition
that I investigate starting
with the Greek and Roman Stoics.
First of all, they were
very concerned with respect.
And so we have very
strict duties not
to let human beings be insulted
in their dignity and so on,
which translates into a
very strict set of laws
about the initiation
and resolution of war.
And I think those, that's
been a tremendous contribution
to the modern world,
but the whole law
of war is already in Cicero.
But they didn't talk about
material need very much.
They couldn't figure it out.
They thought it so amorphous,
who would you give your money to
and how would you do
that all over the world?
And you could see how you would
try to stop on conflict all
over the world, or have to go
ahead on just presuppositions.
But they couldn't think
well about material need.
And so it was only very
gradually and I traced this
in Hugo Grotius, Adam Smith, and
later people who thought, "Well,
look here, if we don't have war,
but we can't get
anything to eat."
That's not a very good
situation and it does look
like human dignity is undermined
just as much by hunger,
by lack of education, which is
of course another material need,
by lack of healthcare,
as it is by war.
And so why separate the two?
Now, in my own views, which
we'll talk about later,
I do not separate the two,
but our modern human rights
tradition very much does.
They're the first
generation rights,
which are the ones connected
with the duties of justice.
And then if material
duties come into it at all,
duties to promote health,
duties to promote adequate
living standard and so on,
it's very much in
the second place.
So one thing that the tradition
itself does is to address
that problem, and it gradually,
gradually works on it,
but it's still a very
difficult problem.
The second problem is that the
nation shouldn't be neglected.
This is something, this is just
where I think I did neglect it.
I was tired of me first
patriotism, you know,
the flag-waving kind, and I
didn't sufficiently reflect
on what is special
about the nation.
Namely, it's the place where we,
and I think it's
the largest place
where we people get a chance
to give ourselves laws
of our own choosing.
Therefore it's a source of the
very important good of autonomy,
which really does mean the right
to give yourself laws
of your own choosing.
And it's accountable to us
in a way that, let's face it,
if there were a world state,
it wouldn't possibly be.
Even you has had tremendous
problems with accountability,
but I can tell you,
having worked in many years
in a United Nations agency,
there's no accountability
in the UN.
So you know, the nation has
problems, there are issues
of accountability, as we know,
grappling with voting right now,
but in principle, if things are
done well, the nation is ours
and it is accountable to us.
And so I feel that the
nation is a special thing.
Cicero already saw that by the
way, he was a great patriot
for the Roman Republic.
So you know, I think he was
right to say that we're entitled
to give our own nation the
spectral measure of our concern.
And therefore the duties to
other nations ought to flow
from our duty to the nation.
And it should be the
nation in the first instance
that performs those
transmit national duties.
Now, some people, of course,
a lot of people disagree
with that, but that's
what I currently think.
Another problem that I came
upon later is the problem
that John Rawls makes the topic
of his second great book
called, Political Liberalism.
Rawls said that in a
pluralistic society,
we cannot prescribe one
comprehensive doctrine of how
to live for all the different
people who differ by religion
or sometimes secular
comprehensive doctrines
like utilitarianism, Marxism,
any modern society
contains all of those.
So therefore political
principles,
if they are to provide a,
as it were convergence place
for all these different
people, Protestants, Catholics,
utilitarians, et cetera,
must be rather narrow
and non-metaphysical.
Just sort of thin ethical
principles that we can all agree
to in what Rawls came to call
an overlapping consensus.
Now, I hadn't thought about
that when I started to work
on cosmopolitanism, and
of course, cosmopolitanism
as I define it is a
comprehensive doctorate.
So I think that we must not
prescribe that as the doctrine
that everyone should agree
to, because you know,
each person's religion will
have different relation to that.
A lot of religions think
you owe special duties
to your own co-religionists.
And so I think what we ought
to say is that duties to care
for people in other parts
of the world are a part
of what we could make the object
of an overlapping consensus,
but it can't be in that
strong, comprehensive form.
We have to think what is it that
we can recommend to everyone?
And then, finally, and
here's the real clincher,
I think it's the problem
that breaks the back
of the tradition, it
is a form of humanism.
It is like the human dignity
of all human beings
is what it's about.
And they had a lot to say
about why that should be true,
because human beings are
special, because we're moral,
and we're rational, and so on.
And in the process, they totally
pretty much neglected any duties
we might have about
the environment.
So not even duties about that,
but they certainly didn't have
duties that showed respect
for nonhuman animals, which
to me is a big, big failing.
These other sentient beings
with whom we share this world
into which we're thrown,
they are sentient too,
and they're very,
very intelligent.
And we abuse them every day
if we eat meat and so on.
So anyway, those,
as those issues came
to occupy my mind more and more,
I came to have doubts whether
cosmopolitanism could even be a
decent starting point
for global duties,
because whatever
global duties are,
I think the cosmopolitan can
agree that we better care
about global warming, because
that pertains to human beings.
But they cannot hope that
we should care about animals
as worthy of concern
in their own right.
And so to me, that was the
straw that broke the back
of the tradition and led me to
think we need a replacement.
>> Brian E. Butler:
And so the replacement,
or the way you critique
it is with your version
of the capabilities approach,
which I find incredibly
significant and so important
as a philosophical,
as a analysis
of international and
national justice.
So let's say creating
capabilities
and even human development,
would you kind
of fill that critique in.
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Yeah.
Okay. Now, first I want to
say, this is a group effort.
I did the initial work
on this in collaboration.
I was very lucky to
have as a collaborator,
the Nobel Prize winning
economist Amartya Sen.
And by now there's an
international association,
the Human Development and
Capability Association,
you can find it online.
There are over a thousand
official members, but many,
many more people in over a
hundred nations that are working
on these ideas, and
is very important,
I think they each
have their own view.
Not everyone has
my view; Amartya
and I have significant
differences,
both in what we're
doing with the view
and in specific disagreements
within it.
And there are other
people who write about it
who have still other views.
So basically, the common
ground is, and it began
with some problems in
development economics,
when nations were compared
in the old days and rated
as to how, what is
their living standard,
how well are they doing?
They used to be compared
by gross domestic
product per capita alone.
And if you think about that,
that simple measure, I mean,
it's attractive because you
can measure it and it's easy
to measure, but it conceals
many other problems.
First of all, it's an aggregate.
And therefore it conceals
distributional inequalities
within each nation.
So it could give very
high marks to a nation
that had very high average GDP,
but had staggering inequalities.
So to give you an example
of that, in the old days,
when that measure was used,
South Africa under apartheid,
used to shoot at the top of the
table in developing countries,
because with all its riches and
its resources, it was very rich
in terms of GDP per
capita, even though 90%
of its people had no share
in that wealth at all.
And of course there are many
different kinds of inequality,
racial, gender based
and so forth
that are completely included
by that aggregate measure.
Another problem it has,
because it's an aggregate,
is it doesn't separate the
different parts of human life,
which are all quite important
and not commensurable
with each other.
One part that is important is of
course having enough to live on,
that is important,
but health, education,
the ability to move
freely from place to place,
the ability to speak your
views without being tossed
into prison, the ability
to have some leisure time
when you can play and exercise
your imagination, all of these
and others are important
aspects of human life
that are not always well
correlated with GDP,
even when you adjust
for distribution.
Because there's things that
nations do when they're shooting
for growth alone, that doesn't
address the healthcare needs
of people.
I mean, our nation is a
brilliant example of --
not so brilliant
example of that.
That we do very well,
second in the world to looks
at aboard, GDP per capita.
But you know, look at
the healthcare problems
that we have, no guarantees
for anyone of healthcare
and staggering inequalities
in healthcare.
There're also problems
in education,
if you compare different Indian
states, some Indian states have,
because education is a
subject that's handled
by the state government,
not the national government,
the average in India
is about 65% literacy
for men, 50 for women.
There are some states that
have 100% literacy for both men
and women in adolescent years.
What have they done?
I mean, it's not
because they're richer,
because actually they
don't have the highest GDP,
it's because of specific state
initiated policies that target
that particular issue.
So these states in
India, particularly Kerala
and Tamil Nadu have very
wonderful and well known results
in both health and education
because of what the government
has done to create a health
and educational infrastructure.
So that's, in short, the reason
that we need to desegregate,
look at things separately.
Now, another thing you might
try, if you were not still,
you weren't happy with GDP,
but you wanted a single number,
would be the satisfaction
of preference considered
as a single number.
And that's what a lot
of utilitarian economists
did for a while.
But again, that has
the same two problems.
It's an aggregate and so
it doesn't take account
of distributional problems,
and it funnels all the different
satisfactions into one bucket.
And so you don't
get desegregation
of the different parts of life.
So what we said is, look, it may
be messier, but it's important
to be more true and
more close to what,
where people are living.
I like to say that my version
of the capabilities approach,
I feel like a lawyer who's
been retained by activists
who were seeking for a better
living standard for poor people.
And I've done a lot
of work in --
with women's development
projects in India.
And so I like to
think, well, you know,
I can walk into the
World Bank and say,
this is the right approach.
They can't do that,
so I'm their lawyer,
as it were arguing
on their behalf.
But it's what people
really are striving for.
They want, people
want to be able
to do things that
they care about.
And so the capabilities
that a person has are
substantive freedoms to choose
to do things to which you
ascribe value in your life.
Now that is very broad, and
then we have to get more refined
about which capabilities
we're paying attention to,
but that's what Sen
and I agreed on.
We think this is the
right space of comparison.
If we're going to
compare, we have to compare
in a pertinent way, in a way
that it's pertinent
to people's lives.
And then in the human
development reports
of the UN development program.
Amartya did single out certain
specific capabilities education
and health related as
the important ones.
But then what I've
done is to go more
onto the philosophical
terrain and try to turn this
into a minimal theory
of justice.
Like a template for making
a constitution if you will.
It's to say, here are
-- And I have this list,
I guess I should have been
able to put it on the screen.
I'm so technologically inept.
But anyway, a list
of 10 capabilities,
things that people
ought to be able to do
up to a certain minimal
threshold level if a nation is
to lay claim to even
minimal justice.
And so then I argued that this
approach is pertinent not only
for comparative development
economics,
but it helps us have a theory
of justice that does well
by the claims of people
who are particularly likely
to be marginalized by
theories of justice
that don't pay attention
to persistent inequalities,
such as people with disabilities
I've talked about and so on.
So anyway, that's my approach.
And it's developed as a
political theory in keeping
with roles in political
liberalism.
It's a partial political
theory of principles
that I would say
could be the object
of an overlapping consensus,
first, at the nation level,
and then, let's hope, in
international society,
as we all try to figure out
how the different nations
of the world can
cooperate together.
Now, that really is
what I've been doing.
And first in women in human
development, and I focused
on women because
the issue of women
in developing countries
interests me,
but it's also a very good
litmus test for theories,
because theories like GDP theory
don't even get to the point
of stating the problems
that women have
in developing countries;
lack of access to literacy,
lack of access to
health and so on.
And so it shows you more
general things about the theory.
And then I wrote another
book, Frontiers of Justice,
where I tried to show that this
theory does a little bit better
than even Rawls' great theory
in areas such as justice
for people with disabilities.
So where there are
staggering inequalities
and the people are held
not to be equally rational,
which is another big problem.
And then in the last
chapter of that book,
I talked about nonhuman animals,
which was my first
foray into that terrain.
And then in 2012,
I wrote a book.
It's -- it was less
densely philosophical,
it was more available
to students,
to political practitioners,
to human rights practitioners,
creating capabilities.
And I, there, I tried to state
my view, but I also tried
to say, here are the
differences between my view
and a larger sense of view.
And I also did something else.
There's a movement in economics
called the human capital
approach, James Heckman,
who also,
he won the Nobel Prize a
little later than Amartya did,
has been a wonderful
cooperate collaborator with me
at the University of Chicago.
And his view is a little
bit different from mine,
but it's often confused with it
because he uses the
word capabilities.
So I also wanted to tell
people what Heckman is up to
and what are the points of
agreement and disagreement.
So you know, that's what
I've been up to basically.
And we have every year a
meeting of the Human Development
and Capability Association.
And we have, I want
to have more arguing.
I want to have more
people coming there
who challenge our approach,
who don't agree with it,
but within the association
itself.
And one way that I have stirred
things up is in this defense
of the entitlements
of nonhuman animals.
Because I get attacked, and
that's the biggest change
in my own view, I get
attacked from both sides.
We have this group
of philosophers
and development people who
are working on animals,
and my daughter, who died
last year, was a lawyer
for the rights of animals.
And so she gave papers
also at these meetings.
So some people think
that I'm right to think
that nonhuman animals deserve
certain capability based
entitlements, some people
think that's too much.
We should put all humans
first and the urgent needs
of human beings should
always take precedence.
And they actually get
annoyed with me sometimes
because they think I've kind
of given up on human poverty
by taking such an interest
in animal wellbeing.
But then from the other side,
there are people who think that,
no, it's ecosystems that
we ought to care about.
We should jettison the concern
with individual centric beings,
and we should just go over
to a more holistic approach
where what we're
promoting is ecosystems.
And that's a very
interesting challenge for me.
And I really love the challenge.
I do feel, still,
that I haven't given
up on individual sentient
beings because I do think
that suffering is an individual
matter and not getting
to do what you really, really
want to do, which is the core
of the capabilities approach,
that's kind of the core
of injustice is being
thwarted in your striving
after the most valuable
things in your life.
So I have not been convinced,
but I love the debate.
>> Brian E. Butler: It's always
been great to read your work
and to watch you analyze,
because the rigor combined
with the courage to advocate
for positions is something
that I think is pretty rare.
And so thank you for that.
And I think that your version of
the capabilities approach shows
that combination as much as
anybody else, if not a lot more.
And so I'd like to move to
one more place before we go
into the future, maybe.
And that's the, your
philosophy of emotion,
most specifically
your work on anger
which seems pretty
much ubiquitous today.
A lot of angry people
in the world.
And your work on anger I think
is quite challenging, right?
So for instance, in the
Anger and Forgiveness,
and The Monarchy
of Fear, I mean,
you really have some
strong courageous claims
to do with anger.
So I'd love for you to
play that out for us.
Plus it's an area where I think
you said you have changed.
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I didn't
-- It's not like the other one,
because I hadn't really
written very much about anger.
I had written about
somehow all these emotions
that I particularly liked,
like compassion, love.
And then I did write
about disgust
because I thought it was a
particularly challenging one
for democracy and particularly
dangerous one, and then I wrote
about fear in The
Monarchy of Fear.
But anger, I had just sort of
passed it by, but in passing,
I had said, well, I think
justified anger is an ally
in the pursuit of justice.
But you know, I never
had sat down
and actually analyzed the
emotion and tried to figure
out what its different
parts are.
So when I was invited to give
the Locke Lectures in Oxford,
I thought that was a good topic.
I never figured out what I
actually think about anger.
And I remember just sitting
there in my office, you know,
and here was the case where I
wasn't actually being pushed
by an opponent, but I
was just pushing myself.
And I noticed this, that all
the definitions of anger,
both in Western philosophy
and actually also
in Indian philosophy, which is
the only non-Western tradition
that I know much about, have --
there are two parts to anger.
First of all, there's the pain
that's connected with believing
that you've been wronged
in some significant way
by somebody else, and wronged
meaning the person didn't have a
right to do it.
It was a wrongful damage.
Okay. That's one part.
And I think, if your
beliefs are all correct
about who wronged you, how
significant it was, and so on,
that's the part that is okay
in the sense that it's good
for people to notice when
they're wrong, and it's good
for them to make a big
deal about that and say
that had better not happen
again, to protest it.
But all the definitions
adds something else, namely,
the desire for retributive
payback.
Every single definition says
that the angry person also
feels pleased at the thought
that they're going
to get the better
of the person who hurt them.
And you know, it's,
you can't ignore it.
It is ubiquitous.
It's not just a mistake.
And I actually think
it's very human.
I think most of the
time when we're wrong,
we really do want
to strike back.
It's probably evolutionary.
And even if we don't want to go
out and take revenge ourselves,
we think that the law
should do that for us.
If a child has been killed,
the parents, they want the law
to inflict capital punishment as
a kind of proportional payback.
And you know, even if you
don't do anything at all,
you kind of wish that the person
who wronged you would suffer.
So let's say you get divorced
and you feel betrayed,
you find yourself
wishing that that person
who betrayed you
would turn out badly.
That that second marriage
would be very, very bad.
You know, it's just a
very human thing to think.
But what I found myself
concluding as I sat there
in my office, is
that ubiquitous,
and human though it is,
it's empty and damaging,
because payback doesn't actually
make up for the thing you lost.
It never does.
I mean, capital punishment never
gives you your child back again.
And if you had some other kind
of damage to your reputation
or whatever, inflicting
humiliation on the person
who damaged your does not
give you back the thing
that you lost.
So your thought is
a kind of fantasy.
The idea that retribution
fixes things is a fantasy.
And it's a fantasy we all have,
but I think we had
better get rid of it.
And it usually makes things
a lot worse for everyone.
So let's think of divorce
again, the litigation
that people get themselves
into as they try
to inflict proportional payback,
it makes their lives go worse
in the future, usually,
because they become obsessive,
unpleasant, and then
the children suffer
with these terrible
disputes about custody.
So anyway, I found
myself thinking,
what is the point of all this?
Now, I have to say
that personally,
I've always had an aversion
to retributive anger
in my own personal life.
And I didn't really want to say
that this was the correct
philosophical position,
because I thought,
well, maybe that's just
because of some quirk about me.
And there were reasons
in my history to think
that I was strongly
inhibited with regard to anger
and maybe it's just a fault.
But I ended up thinking,
no, actually what I think
in my own life is
actually right.
And I found then, these other
people whom I strongly agreed
with, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and I've written extensively now
about his views on anger, and
Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela,
who's one of my great,
great heroes.
They were not all of them.
Some of them were
against all force.
Gandhi, of course,
was a total pacifist,
and he was for total
nonviolence.
But I think that's
not so much the issue,
because I do there are just
wars, the second World War,
I think was a just war.
And I do think there's
a justifiable use
of violence in self-defense.
This is what Mandela and
King, pretty much think.
But they think it's the anger
that's always poisonous and bad.
So you can have none anger
without having total
nonviolence.
Mandela says that of the 27
years he spent in prison,
a lot of that time was spent
meditating about the problems
that he had with anger.
Because he really did want
to destroy his enemies,
but he couldn't do that.
Now, what's the alternative?
The alternative is to keep the
sense of protest, but then turn
and face the future and say,
"That had better
not happen again."
This is what I call
transition anger.
Because you turn and you
transition to the future.
Now that means that
you don't want
to inflict pain retributively.
You might still use painful
punishments to deter.
And so there are plenty of
uses for punishment in my view.
But what Mandela rightly sees
is, you got to preserve a sense
of respect for your
opposition if you're ever going
to be able to fix the problem.
And then, you know, King too.
King, think about the "I Have
a Dream" speech where he says,
"Let freedom ring
from every hill
and every molehill
in Mississippi."
Now, he has this sly dig that
Mississippi in that phase,
but he really does
mean that you've got
to have freedom ringing even
in the land of the opponents.
And he wants people to
be able to join together
to make a new America.
And this you don't have if you
give way to retributive of anger
and just think destruction
for its own sake.
And of course, King was
opposing the views of Malcolm X,
which were retributive views.
Mandela could never have
created the modern South Africa
if he had been a
retributivist, he had to be able
to see common ground with
people whose actions he
deeply deplored.
And typically you do this by
thinking there's a distinction
between the deed and the doer.
People always deserve some
respect in an attempt to --
at a kind of, for King,
Christian love, for Mandela,
kind of Ubuntu, and then you
try to change their actions.
Okay. So that's what
I had come to realize.
And I guess it's like going back
to myself and not being so sort
of convinced by other people
that anger is useful
and productive.
>> Brian E. Butler: Great.
Well, I think we should move on
to what your future projects,
but we should also encourage
people to send in questions,
because we want to save some
time at the end, some good time
to answer other people's
questions.
So hope -- So could you fill
in, you know, for instance,
the sexual violence, the work
on sexual violence
and nonhuman animals.
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Yeah, I'm
glad The Tread mentioned that.
Yes. It's published, going to
be published in May by Norton.
I'm just going over the copy of
it now and I'm excited about it.
It's the book that really --
it's continuous with
what I said,
because I want an
accountability.
Well, the subtitle
is Sexual Abuse,
Accountability, and
Reconciliation.
So it's an attempt to
get into this terrain of,
let's have transition anger
and hold people to account.
And let's find ways that law can
do that, but without indulging
in a kind of punitive mindset,
which I do find is all
too common these days.
So you know, probably a
lot of people will think
that I've sold feminism
short if they think
that feminism has
to be retributive.
But I do not.
I think you could, you
have greater strength
when you're not retributive.
Retributivism is a kind of, I
think it's a kind of weakness
because it's selfish, it's
kind of empty of content.
But when you move
ahead and you ask,
how can we move forward in law?
And so I look at various areas.
So pride is in the title because
I investigate the vice of pride
as the vice in which some people
think that they just are over,
they're above other
people, they don't have
to take them seriously, they
can treat them like objects.
And so that's the core vice that
we have to come to grips with.
And I look at ways in which law
has not been able to get on top
of that phenomenon of pride.
I look at the federal
judiciary, I look at the arts,
and I look at the world
of college sports,
especially in professional
sports to some extent,
but especially go after
college sports, where I think
that sexual abuse is
encouraged by the very way
in which the whole structure;
teams' overweening pride
and the objectification
of women.
So anyway, that's what
that book is about.
And all the while, I've
been writing a bigger book,
a long book, on the entitlements
of nonhuman animals tentatively
called Justice for Animals,
but it's due at the end of 2021,
and then we'll see what
we want to call it then.
And you know, I love
doing this because there's
so much wonderful research
about so many different
kinds of animals.
Like in the last 20 years, we're
learning more than we learned
in the previous 500 years,
partly because we can now go
under the water and we can
find what whales are doing.
And we can look at Occupy
and find what they're doing.
And so I spend a lot of time
just enjoying myself learning.
But, anyway, I'm
trying to use a version
of the capabilities approach
to defend a new approach
to the entitlements
of nonhuman animals.
And then, you know, after that,
I actually, I got so interested
in the Britten, War Requiem
when I wrote this article
that I now just signed
a contract yesterday
to do a monograph
version of that.
And because I think it's an
important work for our thinking
about the body, about sexuality,
and obviously about war,
but about the future of nations
and how reconciliation needs
to be based on a kind of
shared love of the body.
So anyway, that's a short book,
but it will be the
next one after that.
>> Brian E. Butler: Great.
Thanks. Looks like we have some
questions, so let's go over here
and take a look at them.
So --
Okay. So I'm kind of scrolling
down [brief laughter].
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Okay.
You just pick and read it out.
>> Brian E. Butler: Okay.
I'll just go at the top.
Says, -- excuse me.
Says, many philosophers have
classified Martha's approach
to emotion as judgementalist,
I do not really agree
with that view and I
suspect Martha does not agree
with it either.
Am I right?
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: No, I
don't agree with it at all.
I think that's the result of
reading Chapter 1 of my book
and not reading the
other chapters.
And I say that that
Chapter 1 is a crude sketch
that will be modified later on.
So they -- I noticed that they
ought to read other chapters.
It's Robert Solomon had
a judgmentalist view,
and he was a very
important philosopher.
And I think one should take
his views extremely seriously.
But my view is that you
start with this Stoic idea
that emotions are
forms of judgment,
but that can't be
the stopping place,
because it doesn't give us a way
of thinking about the emotions
of young human beings
and of nonhuman animals.
And very importantly, it doesn't
give us a diachronic view
of the human emotions.
We begin as infants not having
the capacity to articulate
or accept propositions, but then
our emotions are very inchoate
and they have very
general objects.
So I always have an
evaluatively created perception,
like an animal perceives
this food as good
and is motivated
to move toward it.
But you know, that's a far cry
from saying it's
always a propositionally
formulable judgment.
And so I explicitly reject that.
Actually, there's an
interview on the journal,
the online journal,
Emotion Researcher,
which is a wonderful interview
by a young emotion philosopher
is called Love, Justice
and something, and
Disgust, I guess.
Anyway, you can look this up,
Emotion Researcher,
Martha Nussbaum.
And I goes through
all the different ways
that I reject judgmentalism.
>> Brian E. Butler: Okay.
Here's one I'm glad
we're getting.
Afternoon, Professor Nussbaum.
You seem to be saying that
music can make assertions
about such subjects as war.
I find this puzzling, what
sort of assertions does a work
like the 1812 Overture
make about war?
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Well, you
know, when I deal with music,
and you know, it's
just, I don't think
that all literary works
contain philosophical insights.
I never would say such a thing.
I think, often they
contain no insight.
I select the works and then
I make a case for the work.
Now, in case of music, I don't
think you can ascribe very
definite emotions to a work
unless either it's a theatrical
work like an Opera.
And I'm a passionate Opera fan.
I write the program notes
for Lyric Opera of Chicago,
teach a course on Opera.
Or a work that's in
that neighborhood.
Like I've written about
Mahler's song cycles
and even the Mahler
second symphony,
where of course it's
a programmatic work,
but as a text.
So I think otherwise, you know,
sometimes you could describe
a general kind of emotion.
Like Jerry Levinson
has a wonderful article
about the Hebrides overture of
Mendelssohn expressing hope.
But you know, for me,
those descriptions are
always very difficult
and they're likely to be
quite global and vague.
We could only get to
something very concrete,
like [inaudible] expressing a
certain view about the death
of children if we have a text
that has the death
of children in it.
So the war radically
we, of course,
have a very complicated
work that was created
with a certain purpose in
mind, which purpose was
to rededicate Coventry Cathedral
after its destruction
during World War II.
And it was intended
to promote, I mean,
this is what Britten was asked
to do, whether he did it or not,
we can see, promote
reconciliation.
Not just in Britain, but you
know, all through the world.
So he made sure that the singers
were -- there was his partner,
Peter Pears, was
the tenor, a German,
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, was
the baritone, and a Russian,
Galina Vishnevskaya,
was the soprano.
Now she wasn't allowed
to get a visa,
so she had to be replaced
at the last minute.
But that was his idea was that
the work itself in the way
that the singers participated in
it would express reconciliation,
and he chose poetry
of Wilfred Owen
to compliment the
traditional Requiem mass.
And the way that
he set the poems
against the mass express
definite ideas that he had.
They weren't always the same
ideas that Wilfred Owen had.
Actually, I think that Owen
was not a total pacifist
and Britten was, but
that doesn't really come
up because his work is 1962
and Britten had long gotten
over fighting with the draft
board about World War II.
And it's really a terrain where
he could agree with the people
who think we need reconciliation
and avoid future wars,
but we don't have to
be a total pacifist.
The big difference is that
Wilfred Owen, in the poems
that Britten shows,
expresses some views
that are quite dangerous
for the future of Europe,
such as contempt for women.
He keeps contrasting
the bodies of soldiers
with the boring bodies of women
and definite class elitism.
He expresses contempt in
poem code, insensibility,
for example, for
the common soldier
who is brutish and not a poet.
And we are the poets.
And so you know, Britten didn't
select the works that were
like that, or he edited them,
and I show this in a paper,
picked out the lines
that he didn't like.
And so he had a view
that he was developing
about a universal kind
of forward movement toward
reconciliation in Britain
that would be built upon a sense
that the human body is
divine, if you will.
I mean, Britten was a Christian.
He was a, not a very orthodox
Christian in the sense
that in those days, in
1962, he was looking ahead
to the future of
same sex marriage.
He had a lifelong
partnership with over 30,
which is about 38
years with Peter Pears
that was later treated like a
marriage when he died in 1976.
Queen Elizabeth, and I must
say, I give her great credit
for this, she sent to Peter
Pears, a letter of constellation
as though he were
a grieving spouse.
But anyway, he wanted
to talk about many kinds
of reconciliation, the obvious
kind between nations in war,
but also the reconciliation
between the British
who persecuted gay men or
same sex relationships more
generally, which
was very recent.
I mean, after all Turing's
suicide was only a little while
before that.
And same sex acts
were made legal only
after this work was premiered.
So we had a nation
that was undergoing
about same sex relationships.
And there's a pivotal
part of the work,
which is the Agnes Day Movement,
which is in a way the center
of the nest where the poem
of Owen, one ever hangs
where shelled roads part,
is sang in a very naked
and pure tenor line
where the beautiful voice
of Peter Pears rings out.
And I mean, the love
letters of Britten and Pears,
they are public property
of the nation now.
And Britten is always
saying, you know, I love you,
good to know it's your voice
[brief laughter] that I view
as the heart of you, this
wonderful musical voice.
And they're very funny because
Pears is a little bit more
earthy in his utterances
than Britten.
But anyway, the beautiful voice
of Pears, which is earthy,
I mean, the tambour of his
tenor voice was very earthy,
expresses these views of how
the Christ is being sacrificed
by the makers of war.
So in a way he's portrayed as
the murdered Christ, and Christ,
therefore, is seen as
a thoroughly human body
and not only human, but
of a gay man, if you will.
And so all of these different
things are going on in the work,
which includes of course,
the casting of the work
and the voices that
sing the work.
And so you know, I don't think
you can always make claims,
but I defend my claims
about this work.
And it's a long issue
with Britten, because even
when he was a school boy, he got
tossed out of school for writing
about the rights of animals.
And he wrote an essay attacking
hunting, and they threw --
they refused to allow
him to graduate
with that graduation essay.
And later he wrote a work
called Our Hunting Fathers,
where he compares the
hunting that Britons love,
hunting of foxes, with
the hunting of people.
It was Auden who wrote the
Libretti, and the hunting,
the persecution of the Jews
was at the heart of this work.
So all different kinds of
hunting and persecution
of the body were of
enormous interest to him.
So anyway, that's
some of the stuff
that I think I can
justifiably ascribe to the work,
but I would never -- 1812
Overture, I don't know.
You know, Tchaikovsky is such
a very complicated composer
because he was so convoluted
and so at war with himself.
I've never seriously
worked on Tchaikovsky,
and therefore I don't --
wouldn't say whether
the overt patriotism
of that overture
should be thought
of as sincere or a facade.
And of course he gave a lot
of reasons to think that a lot
of what he wrote expressed
his own inner conflict
over sexuality, but I
don't -- I won't go there,
I don't know enough
about Tchaikovsky.
>> Brian E. Butler: Okay,
let's go to this one.
How do you differentiate
between a search for justice
through punishments by the legal
and judiciary system
and retribution?
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Well,
of course there are famously
different views of punishment.
One of them is the
retributive view.
Namely, punishment is justified
because it exacts
retrospective payback.
The other most prominent
one is the deterrent view,
punishment is justified
because it deters.
And then within that,
there are two varieties.
There's specific deterrence,
it deters that offender
from committing another
bad act in the future,
but there's also general
deterrence; it puts other people
on notice that this
is a bad thing to do.
And then there's one that I
particularly like in combination
with the deterrence view, which
is the moral education view
of punishment, saying
that punishment is --
you know, what you punish
educates the society.
When young people grow up, they
attend to legal punishments.
And I think we think
about sexual harassment,
which was not punished when
I was in graduate school,
and now it is punished.
You know, exactly, that
punishment, I think most
of the people who used to commit
sexual harassment were not
double eyed Johns.
They were just clueless,
they had no idea what
this did to women.
And now they're educated
and they see.
So it has a forward
looking purpose.
So I think that you
can have plenty
of punishment with
no retribution.
>> Brian E. Butler: Great.
How about this, would
you comment
on multi-dimensional
welfare as related
to the capabilities approach?
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Well,
of course the whole point,
as I said, one point
of attacking GDP is the
distributional point,
but the other point was
the multidimensional point.
We want to say welfare
is plural,
and this is why I always prefer
the term capabilities approach
to some people use the
word capability approach,
because I think the plural is
always worth keeping in mind.
When people say, how do
tradeoffs, costs and benefits?
And so I want to say, no, all
these things are essential.
It's like our bill of rights;
you don't make tradeoffs
between freedom of speech,
freedom of religion?
You try to have both.
And of course, as you try to
have both, you have to think,
what reasonable threshold
can we set?
We can't maybe educate everyone
up through postgraduate school
at government expense,
if we're also going
to have an adequate
healthcare system.
So the more -- the
different dimensions have
to be held together as we
think of a reasonable set
of capabilities that
we can hope to fulfill.
But they're all different
and we don't trade them
off one against another.
Now, of course, that means it's
much more difficult to measure.
And this is the Achilles'
heel, people always
like simple things, and
they want to think first,
what can I measure here and
now, and then they work back
from that to what's important.
I would rather work in
the other direction.
I think, you see it
all over the place.
You see it in many
different parts of philosophy,
what I call the fallacy
of measurement.
You're looking back,
what you can measure
to what you think is important.
But anyway, you know,
think what's important,
find some way of measuring that.
Education is very hard because
what the human development
reports use is many
years of schooling
as reported by the nations.
Now, I mean, this is not totally
worthless, but it comes close,
because you can't rely
on the nations really
to tell the truth.
So in our association,
we have a lot of studies
that are a lot better than that,
but even years of schooling,
you need to know much
more about what's going
on in the classroom, you
measure the real education
of a human being.
And of course, these are all
questions that we discuss,
but then we need to do it.
We need to get in
there and do it.
And then of course,
healthcare, famously is plural.
We might be doing
well on one dimension,
but doing terribly
on other dimensions.
The United States ranks
very low infant mortality
and maternal mortality,
largely because of racial --
race space inequalities
in those areas.
But anyway, yes, I
mean, even the notion
of health is obviously,
what's morality?
And any great health
economists like Angus Deaton,
will begin by saying health
is not a single thing.
So the multidimensional
is sort of obvious,
because you know
very well, if you --
if somebody asks me,
how are you doing?
I would not just
think of one number.
I would think, well, you know,
there's this pandemic that's
affecting the lives of a lot
of people I care about,
and then there's the fact
that one can still work.
And you know, you would think
of lots of different things,
and they're not commensurable
with one another.
But if some psychologist says,
"Oh, I want a number between one
and 10 reporting your
happiness at time T."
Then you'll be bludgeoned
and bullied
into giving a single answer.
But that isn't what
you really think.
>> Brian E. Butler: Thank you.
Now for the stability, it just
goes back to the tragically,
and the tragic stuff, and the
fragility of goodness, right?
The quest for commensurability
can really cover
up for [multiple speakers] --
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Oh,
that'll be great point.
Yes. Thank you for that point.
Yeah. I mean, you find
characters in these tragedies
who don't want to
face the conflict
of incommensurable values.
Now in Antigone, of course,
famously you have a conflict
of incommensurable values.
Antigone's concern
for the religion,
the duties of family
religion, which order her
to bury her brother, and
the wellbeing of the state,
which suggests that your
traitor must not be buried.
But both Creon and
Antigone have a way
of simplifying the
terrain of value.
So that Creon redefines
what family is
to make it just a little part
of the state; Antigone has a way
of redefining the state or
sort of almost defining it
out of existence, so that
it just becomes subordinate
to family religion.
Now, this is something
that Hegel saw long ago
and I'm really on
board with Hegel here.
He said, if you face
the conflict
as these protagonists
don't, then you are able
to ask a much more significant
question than they ask, namely,
what form of society could
make it possible for people not
to face that tragic
conflict between religion
and the state all the time?
And he thought, not
without reason
that the modern liberal
state, which protects freedom
of religion, but also, you know,
finds a way of working the
safety of the state into it,
has done much better than
the ancient cities did.
So you know, I think the
Hegelian question is always the
right way to proceed.
Is there a future we can
imagine where these things
that cause tragedy now do
not cause tragedy any longer?
But we're not going to be able
to eliminate all the tragedies
because these are
incommensurable values,
but we can make a
lot of progress.
And so it's not the case that
I fear my wonderful teacher,
Bernard Williams, thought that
tragedies give us the bad news
that there's nothing
much we can do.
I don't think that way.
I think they give us news
that we better get to work
and see what -- how far we
can eliminate these problems.
>> Brian E. Butler: Thank you.
So this is, I -- this person
says, I lead a research program
on modernizing Congress.
The COVID emergency
distance rules
for participation have
surprised me in a good way.
The intentionality
of member interaction
with each other is now mandatory
for the institutional process.
My question for you, do
you think there is a way
to re-incentivize productive
mutual participation among our
leaders as a silver
lining of COVID measures?
Do our democratically
elected leaders have the trust
or legitimacy for this without
an accompanying cultural change
of heart?
>> Martha C. Nussbaum:
Well, you know,
I think the obvious problem
is that the whole culture is
so permeated now
with the kind of --
you know, maybe it's
because of social media,
maybe it's something else, the
idea that you score more points
by humiliating somebody else.
And if so, it's like,
the argument is
like a zero sum game rather
than a search for progress
of the mind, neutral
illumination, and so forth.
You know, you find it, of
course, even in a university
where people think that you're
going to put somebody else down,
diss somebody, or
cancel somebody.
And I mean, the students come,
University of Chicago has always
been famous, and I think rightly
for defending civilized
debate and freedom of speech.
That's our theory and that's
what I think we try to practice.
But when these students
come in and they come
from undergraduate institutions
that don't have that attitude
and they are part of a kind of
cancel culture, it's very hard
to get them not to stir
things up in a bad way.
So with my Berggruen
money, one thing I did,
I gave it to several different
charitable institutions.
But the part I gave to
the law school was to set
up just a program, they're
called Nussbaum Lunches,
where we get groups of
students no more than 15
with two faculty members
who have contrasting views
on a topic, and these are all
law students, so they're older,
and we spend an hour and
a half together talking
about that problem.
And there are ground rules.
And so, but it -- that
works amazingly well,
because if I just taught a
class, you see, and I wanted
to get the people to do this in
the classroom, the problem is
that right now, people vote with
their feet and only the people
who sort of agree with me
will take a class with me.
And I think this is terrible.
The most conservative member
of our law school faculty took
feminist philosophy for me,
because really wanted
to learn, you know.
But that doesn't happen anymore.
And so the only way
to engineer it is
to have a smaller time slot.
So an hour and a half, we
can really make progress
on things like, oh, you
know, the bakery cases
and same sex marriages,
and so on.
We really did, and I
think we make progress.
I always do this
with a liberal, well,
he's really a conservative,
he's more of a libertarian,
Will Bode, who is a
wonderful gentle presence
and we have a very good rapport
and we can get the students
to see that we trust each
other, and they then come
to trust us and one another.
And even in an hour and
a half, we can do that.
And I guess, I think that's,
you know, that's the microcosm.
You have to start where
you are and try to hope
that as you replicate respect
and concern for accurate --
accuracy and respectful
argument, it will spread out.
And you know, Congress,
I think it's very hard
because when people go
back to their constituents,
it's not always that that
they're being rewarded for.
I really love it when, I mean,
I don't know very many Congress
people, but if I have some
who really stand for that kind
of respectful interaction,
I really want to give
them a special shout out.
And I mean, one that I do
know is a local woman who's --
who won in a Republican
district and she's a Democrat,
but she's really on the middle
of us, were Lauren Underwood,
a very wonderful African
American woman who was a nurse.
And I've kind of
helped her campaign
by hosting a fundraiser, because
I think she illustrates this
kind of fact based,
science based,
argument based respectful
interaction.
And that's how she won because
these people in the suburbs,
that's where she is, they --
you know, the district voted
overwhelmingly for Trump,
but they voted for her
because she listened,
and she took them
seriously and she argued.
And there are other individuals
of both parties that
I would mention.
There're certainly plenty
of former, I don't know
if they're still Republicans
that I think are trying
to make the discourse
richer and more diverse.
I think George Will, whom
I followed with interest
for a long time, I was actually
supposed to have a public debate
with George Will in
October at Cornell,
but I think we got
to postpone it now.
But anyway, you know,
I think someone
like that shows the capacity to
listen, and make up his mind,
and not just to have
the knee jerk reaction.
But you know, he's a columnist,
so he can do what he wants
and not charter in Congress.
And I just hope that
people will keep working
on that and make it happen.
>> Brian E. Butler: So
I think we have time
for one more, it looks like.
So this is, Professor Nussbaum,
thank you so much for your time
and thoughtfulness
this afternoon.
Drawing on your concept
of anger,
what implications does your
theory hold for, for instance,
calls for reparations to
Black Americans as part
of a larger national
reckoning about the role
of race in American history?
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: Yeah.
Well, this is an
excellent question.
Of course, reparations can be
defended in a variety of ways.
And I think the retributive
way, isn't all that promising
when you think of it,
because the people
who did the bad things
are not the same people
who were paying the money.
I mean, our population
has changed so much
over the centuries through
immigration and so on.
Somebody whose family
immigrated from India,
why should they be paying as
though they did something bad?
And of course the people who are
receiving the funds are not the
same, either.
Some of them are
immigrants and so on.
I think the real question
is, going forward,
how can we achieve both
correction of the problems
that so massively exist?
And then a kind of spirit
of love and reconciliation.
And maybe, you know,
I think the renaming
of monuments has great
symbolic power to achieve that.
Within limits, I
think the naming --
renaming the Fort
Bragg is a no brainer,
because why should
you name a Fort
for a trader in the first place?
But anyway, there're, you know,
there're big questions
about this.
We have had a long
debate here in Chicago
about the Stephen Douglas
Park, which is very near
where I live actually.
And people have said,
"Well, you know,
so easy to put one more S on it.
And it can be the
Frederick Douglas Park."
And I think that's a pretty
good one too, because you know,
Stephen Douglas defender
of slavery.
Going forward, that's
not a name that helps us,
but you know, it's
piece by piece.
I don't think we should
take down every monument.
And I guess the question to ask
about money is what would
be the source of this money?
It's got to come
from taxes somehow.
So what is it taking away from?
The National Budget is a certain
sum, and if you designate part
of it for reparations, what are
you not using that money for?
And then, you know, what is
the money actually doing?
I guess my thought is the real
crying need of communities
of color in this
country is better access
to health and education.
And I'd be much happier with a
kind of scheme for reparations
that tried to remedy those
terrible defects that --
I mean, I see it just down the
street from me; lack of access
to fresh food and produce,
lack of access to healthcare.
Well, we're trying
to help with that.
We've opened a trauma
center at the University
of Chicago Hospital this year.
But see, I think those
are the things that --
where people's lives
are suffering.
And education, particularly,
you know, what are you going
to really do about not
just elementary education,
but then access to
university education.
If I thought that there was
some connection from the giving
of cash to the solving of those
real problems, I'd be happier
with it, but so far,
well, somebody needs
to make a proposal and
then we can evaluate it.
>> Brian E. Butler: Thank you.
I think we should probably stop
right there and hand it back
over to the people at the
Library [brief laughter].
>> Martha C. Nussbaum: I
want to thank you, Brian.
I really -- it's
great to see you.
I hope I can see you
in beautiful Asheville
before long, but thank you.
And thanks again, Fred and
Molly, and thanks to the Library
for hosting this event.
>> Jane Sánchez: Okay.
Thank you, Dr. Nussbaum, for
this wonderful presentation.
Dr. Butler, thank
you for guiding us
through today's event.
Fred and Molly, once again,
thank you for your generosity
and your continuing support
for the past 11 years
and into the future.
And for all of you
attending today,
thank you for attending the
sixth Biennial Kellogg Lecture
on Jurisprudence.
To learn about the Law
Library's news event --
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So you can keep up with
news -- our news and events.
I'd like to take this
opportunity to announce
and invite you to join
us at our next event,
the 2020 Constitution
Day on September 17th.
The Law Library will
host Michael J. Murphy,
a historical publications
specialist in the Office
of the Historian for the U.S.
House of Representatives.
He will discuss the lives
of the first African
American members of Congress.
His presentation is entitled,
The Bulwark of Freedom:
African-American
Members of Congress
and the Constitution
During Reconstruction.
We also hope to see many of you
and that you will
visit our virtual booth
at this year's National Book
Festival that will take place
from September 25th
through 27th.
This year, because
of the crazy events
that we find ourselves in,
the National Book Festival
will be all virtual
for those three days.
Dr. Nussbaum and Dr. Butler,
once again, thank you for being
with us today, and I
hope everyone has a
wonderful evening.
Thank you all.