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August 24, 2005
I've just come back home from attending a public lecture by Martha Nussbaum on 'Disability and Issues About the Social Contract Tradition'. There is some material on this issue here. Going to the lecture was like returning to the world of a conservative academic philosophy after doing a stint in the legislature as a political advisor. I say conservative because many there would approve of this side of Nussbaum because it is critical of 'postmodernism', even though the shots are cheap.
In the lecture Nussbaum argued against the social contract tradition in favour of the Aristotelian account of human life in the form of a capabilities approach. In Nussbaum's view, the core role of governments as well as development actors is to endow citizens with the required conditions for actualizing centrally human functionings, in other words, to provide them with the necessary capacities and opportunities to live flourishing lives. It is the central human functional capabilities that indicate what it is for us to live a good life.
As she puts it:
The basic intuition from which the capability approach begins, in the political arena, is that human abilities 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 these human functions. That is, they are creatures with certain lower-level capabilities (which I call "basic capabilities") to perform the functions in question. When these capabilities are deprived of the nourishment that would transform them into the high-level capabilities that figure on my list, they are fruitless, cut off, in some way but a shadow of themselves.
Nussbaum's approach to social justice, with its emphasis on capabilities---the potential to function-- and functionings---the realization of capabilities-- talks in terms of real people, real life, not thin abstractions; talks in terms what is a full human life; real people, real life rather than not thin abstractions; rejects the classic dichotomy between emotions and reason; and holds that a just society aims at well-being.
I was suprised by Nussbaum's embrace or adoption of a Rawlsian political liberalism, given her explict rejection of both the social contract tradition and Rawls' strong version of it; on the grounds that the inner logic of the social contract is unable to incorporate physical and mental disability of citizens.
I guess it was a way for her to lighten the metaphysical burden of her Aristotlean conception of the good life in a liberal polity based on the fact of "reasonable pluralism". She accepted liberal pluralism and the idea of an overlapping consensus---or agreement on justice as fairness between citizens who hold different religious and philosophical views (or conceptions of the good).
Nussbaum reworked Political Liberalism's idea of public reason--the common reason of all citizens--in the light of her capablities approach.
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I have become very interested in, or at least curious about, contemporary neo-Aristotelianism (what I have heard referred to as the aretaic turn). Though my work so far (on the political theory of education) has been in the realm of liberalism shading over into contemporary Frankfurt School, I've come to think it just impossible to embrace a theory that has nothing substantive to say about the nature of the good, particularly in two areas: the environment, and education.
I was surprised to discover that one can engage in Aristotelian thought in ways more progressive than, say, Mortimer Adler. Yet I still don't see how Aristotelian ethics cashes out into a political theory. I need to read much (in that mythical someday when I have time), including Nussbaum, but I'm quite skeptical of the idea of aretaic ethics with a liberal political face.
I guess what I'm looking for is an approach where we encourage and facilitate for ourselves and one another great development of our various cultural potentials, while living as the natural beings within natural environments that we are. (Which ends up being, I think, neither precisely liberal nor conservative.)
(I could probably say this all more clearly if it weren't a quick 2am note...)