FACE-TO-FACE
Fostering human dignity and capability
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An interview with Martha C. Nussbaum by NIRMALA LAKSHMAN
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VINO JOHN
"... There should be an ethical consensus around ideas of human dignity."
One of the most distinguished philosophers of our time and scholar extraordinaire, Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, with appointments in divinity, philosophy, classics and South Asia studies, at the University of Chicago. Combining passion and intellect in the pursuit of equality and justice, Professor Nussbaum is one of those rare public intellectuals who addresses the exigencies of ordinary lives across cultures. Her subject areas range from classicism and international feminism to human rights, animal rights, social ethics and political philosophy. She has written more than a dozen books, and her work is rooted in a deeply embedded practical wisdom that draws from direct experience of contemporary international politics, economics and culture.
Martha Nussbaum's years of collaboration with Amartya Sen in his pioneering work on `substantial freedoms' or `capability space' in the context of development economics and social justice, led to her own version of the capabilities idea based on the philosopher John Rawls's political conception of justice. This is "an approach that focuses on human capabilities, that is, what people are actually able to do and be", and a "threshold level of capabilities beneath which truly human functioning is not available". In her book, Women and Human Development: the Capabilities Approach, she lists "central human capabilities", 10 of which she identifies as essential to human dignity. The list includes, among others, the ability to live a normal life span, bodily health, freedom of movement secure against assault, the use of emotion, to play, to seek a safe environment and to participate in economic and political functioning. Professor Nussbaum advocates this approach as an alternative to the human rights discourse. The latter, she feels, does not move far enough in terms of actualisation, especially for women who may technically enjoy certain rights but may not be able to realise them. For instance, India has excellent Constitutional guarantees that are, however, often not implemented at the level of the individual.
On a brief stopover in Chennai en route to a regular visit with community activists elsewhere in Tamil Nadu, Professor Nussbaum spoke at length on a wide range of issues in an exclusive interview, parts of which are excerpted here.
NIRMALA LAKSHMAN:
THE human capabilities approach has been recognised internationally and is part of political and social theory. While it is very necessary and essential to social progress, what makes it better than using the rights discourse to achieve social justice?
MARTHA NUSSBAUM:
I think we need to have a partnership with the rights discourse because the two are very closely allied. Both say that there are certain basic entitlements that people deserve, and it is the job of a decent society to give people those entitlements. The rights discourse has a number of problems that I tried to identify. One problem is that it is interpreted in so many different ways, and can mean one thing in Chicago and another thing in the UNDP. It is a question of its slipperiness; it has always been associated with private-public distinction, which I also think is very important to reject. That is why women's rights were not recognised as human rights for so long. It has problems but it also has a lot of resonance internationally. When people like Shirin Ebadi and other activists are pressing for human rights, it is of very great importance.
The one thing I do not like is this distinction between first generation and second-generation rights. What we have been trying to criticise with the capabilities perspective is that all entitlements have an economic and material basis. If you are talking about freedom of speech or freedom of religion you should not think that it is separate somehow from economic and material conditions. For example, if a child has no access to suitable education, he or she does not really have the freedom of speech. So I think, therefore, that it is not very useful to separate rights that way, to say that first we'll take care of the political and civil, and then we'll get to the social and economic. We have to think they are all social and economic, and some will be more political than others and so on.
In your work, while you have stressed pluralism and cultural difference, you insist on universal values. How do you accommodate ethnic, racial and minority perspectives in this framework?
I think one of the entitlements that people have is the entitlement to create and sustain a religious view or another cultural view that gives their life meaning. I think of that right as a right of people, that is individual people, and then of course sometimes that right requires the protection of a group. So for example, under American law, sometimes groups can in effect win some special protection because the individuals will say our religion requires it. So when the Amish children won the right to leave school a couple of years early, what was being argued was that if this way of life goes out of existence, we'll have no religion, it will strip our life of meaning. But I think that's the way it should be thought of; as a right of individual people, not a right of the group as such, because groups always contain differences of power and of course gender discrimination. So if you give a right to the group, the question is, to whom are you actually giving it? And usually it is the male leaders of the group, and often it involves the right to keep women in the group when they don't want to be there.
What I argue in, Women in Human Development, is that a good way of thinking about the claims of religion is that law should not place a great burden on people's exercise of religion, except when there is compelling state interest. But the compelling interest is always provided by the protection of people's capabilities, the most important ones. So if women's right to equal access to the political process, their equality generally is at stake, then I think you can't give religion a special privilege. What I am saying is that fundamental rights in effect trump personal laws.
When you advocate that the person has to be at the end of all rights, wouldn't it take a long time to implement this in terms of empowerment and public policy?
Basically, I think there should be an ethical consensus around ideas of human dignity. I think you can't just use the word `rights', you have to give economic and material wherewithal. You cannot separate the freedom of speech from education for example. There was actually a case in the United States where people were claiming inequality in funding public schools; where in Texas, some schools were receiving 75 times as much money as other schools.
A minority in the Supreme Court said that it was a violation of the constitutional right to the freedom of speech because we have no constitutional right to education the way you do. So they had to figure out some way to bring it into the framework of the Constitution and this was the way they did it. That minority opinion was interesting. How can you have freedom of speech if you have no access to suitable education? So I think that kind of approach is suggested strongly by the capabilities idea but not by the rights approach itself.
In the context of the resurgence of right wing politics in many countries and the kind of violence that took place in Gujarat, what is the protection for minorities and other vulnerable groups?
John Rawls has this very nice sort of phrase, he says in any country there will be a large number of reasonable comprehensive doctrines and there will be some that are unreasonable, and he says some of them are even mad. So you just have to say that if you go beyond a certain point, you'll just not be able to put your proposals for majority vote because they contravene the fundamental structure of our society. Let's say in America there are people who believe that African Americans should still be slaves, and if such people are peaceful and don't break the law, they can say that if they like and even print it. But they are not going to be able to go into Congress and propose that as the law because it is against the Constitution. I think that a lot of what the Hindu Right believes is in that league ... this is something very frightening and very new... a fundamental disregard of the equality of citizens before the law. It's one thing for violence to take place, it's quite another thing for it to be justified in any way ... you have to see it as a threat to democracy of a very grave kind, when citizens really cannot count on the equal protection of law. There has to be an alliance of resistance ... .
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