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January 7, 2007
An interview with Martha Nussbaum, who is noted for her views on linking liberalism to Aristotlean ideas of human functioning and human flourishing. In the interview she affirms the liberal ideas of choice and freedom as being very important, adds that we don't have choice if people are just left to their own devices, and that the state has to act positively to create the conditions for choice.
She argues that the libertarian position (as held by Richard Eptsein her Chicago Law School colleague?) is actually quite incoherent. Nussbaum's argument is that there is no such thing as absence of state action. Even to defend contract and property rights, and the rule of law itself, the state must take positive action:
If you go out into the rural areas of Bihar in India, then you see what "negative liberty" comes to. Total chaos, where nothing is being done, where there no roads, no clean water supply, no electricity, and therefore where no one can do anything, no one has anything. I am sure my colleague Richard Epstein will agree, up to a point, that a state that's going to create liberty has got to act, has at least got to protect property rights and contracts and have a police force and a fire department. But then why draw the line at that? Why not also say that the State has to create public education, has to create the systems of social welfare that makes it possible for people to access health care, unemployment benefits, and so on? So I don't see any principled way of dividing those different spheres of state action.
She adds that she is happy for the State to sometimes delegate part of its function to the private sphere when it judges that that's sufficient, but her position is that the State is the one that bears the final responsibility.
The State is a system for the allocation of human basic entitlements. Its job is to promote justice and wellbeing for human beings; if it's simply delegated to private industry and that doesn't work, then the State hasn't done its job. Hence the linking of liberalism to Aristotlean ideas Aristotlean ideas of human functioning and human flourishing gives a philosophical underpinning for social democracy. Sociall democracy provides conditions for choice and freedom.
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