Martha Nussbaum, Justice and Human Development

Martha Nussbaum, Justice and Human Development
Interview by Laura Lee Downs

Martha Nussbaum, Interviewed by Laura Lee Downs
In Travail, genre et sociétés Volume 17, Issue 1, 2007, pages 5 to 20
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Martha Nussbaum
Itineraries
Justice and Human

Development
INTERVIEW
BY LAURA LEE DOWNS

INTRODUCTION
Martha 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 can-
not be filled by other, more empirical forms of inquiry. “Part of
theory’s practical value lies in its abstract and systematic char-
acter”, 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
I
Itineraries
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.
The 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 devel-
opment. 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 eco-
nomic inequalities that make it impossible for millions of indi-
vidual women (and men) to exercise their basic human capaci-
ties. 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.
The capabilities list, which includes life, bodly health and
integrity, emotions, and control over one’s environment (politi-
cal and material), is clearly informed throughout by issues
of gender inequality. For the sharp socio-economic inequali-
ties 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!
Martha 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 con-
straints 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
II
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 disproportion-
ately 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).
Laura Lee Downs
III
Itineraries
INTERVIEW
At the outset, I would like to move from the personal, that is, what-
ever you would like to say about your family, where you’re from,
any formative experiences at school, in the arts, in politics or else-
where, 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?
My father was a lawyer. He wanted to be an intellectual, prob-
ably 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 wom-
an 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 politi-
cal 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.
My 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 fam-
ily that went back to the Mayflower, but she hated all that
snobbery.
Another 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.
Bryn Mawr was stifling to me, but the teachers at my excel-
lent 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
IV
through those teachers, although I was not aware of it at the

time, because everyone there was a woman.
What impact (if any) did the political upheavals of the 1960s have
on your education, your choices and options in your early career?
In 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 libertar-
ians but racists and elitists of various sorts. Reflecting about
the problems of race, and seeing my father’s entrenched atti-
tudes, I came to the conclusion that libertarianism was insuf-
ficient; 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 individ-
ualist. So I didn’t join SDS or any other group, but just licked
stamps for the Democrats.
In particular, our readers would like to know something about how
you first came to feminism, and how feminism first came to you.
I was not aware of being a feminist until I encountered dis-
crimination, 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 educa-
tion, access to credit and equal property rights, and so forth.
But 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?
I 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
V
Itineraries
weren’t interested in the ideas of the poets, so I turned to the

ancient philosophy program, and there I discovered Aristotle.
It 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?
I’d say, first, that one really needs to see two different trajecto-
ries, 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 ex-
tremely important. But I also think that modern psychology,
anthropology, and psychoanalysis have supplied essential
ingredients for the understanding of the emotions. The cogni-
tive 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.
I see in your work a consistent move toward effecting a rap-
prochement 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.
Well, “reason” means two things, and discussions are often
slippery. On the one hand, saying that emotions contain rea-
son 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 in-
clude 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 ac-
count 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 with-
out 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 con-
dition, to later objects.
VI
In sum, it seems to me that much of your work is underpinned by

a feminist and humanist will to re-connect reason and emotion/de-
sire in the all-important realm of moral reasoning, and that this has
powerful implications for how we can think about human psychol-
ogy. It also seems linked to a broader feminist philosophical project
of bringing back together that which has been sundered in the mod-
ern west into two gendered realms: a private and feminized word of
feeling and a public, masculine world of reason.
Well, that is a very nice characterization, and I will just ac-
cept it!
I’d like to turn more specifically to your work on feminism, inter-
nationalism, 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 address-
ing 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 commit-
ment 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?
It 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 na-
tional Human Development Report. So the approach is very
international, and the U. S. is lagging behind.
The 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
VII
Itineraries
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 associa-
tion 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 advo-
cate 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 ap-
proach 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 oppor-
tunities. 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.
How was it that you came to work so closely with women’s groups
in India?
I worked with Amartya Sen from 1986 to 1993 directing a pro-
ject on Quality of Life at the World Institute for Development
Economics Research in Helsinki, a U. N. agency that was cre-
ated to foster broader interdisciplinary approaches to devel-
opment 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
VIII
already had contacts there, because people speak freely there

(unlike China), and because I love it.
So how did you actually make the connections with individual de-
velopment groups?
I 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 want-
ed 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!
In 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 sex-
ual violence to which they are exposed), but also in terms of politi-
cal 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?
There 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 vi-
olence, and also in state support for family and care labor.
As to how American feminists have responded: my dear col-
league Iris Young, who tragically died a month ago, was very
IX
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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 ar-
ticulation 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 ap-
proach: 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 in-
spiring. 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 subsist-
ence capabilities and not things like freedom of the press and
religious freedom. I have to say that I find this a rather con-
descending 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 prevent-
ing 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.

Since 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 free-
dom of religious expression and the upholding of gender equality
than the one that underpins the current Stasi law
Well, you’ll have to see my new religion book for a full discus-
sion 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 ma-
jority. So the only way to make them fair to minorities is to
give them a break. Already in the mid-17th century this was
the norm in colonial America: Quakers didn’t have to take
X
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.
I 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 in-
dividual 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 re-
flect on something other than what their families and religious com-
munities 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 none-
theless 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, communitar-
ian 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)?

The 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 de-
formed 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 school-
ing, goes much too far in the direction of allowing parents to
teach whatever they like. But I also think that the French sys-
tem goes not far enough in the direction of honouring a diver-
sity of religious lifestyles. Amy Gutmann had a fine sugges-
tion 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.
XI
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I 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 ex-
ercise 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.
French feminists have long been aware that republican universal-
ism, with its insistence on public neutrality as a guarantee of citi-
zen 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 depar-
ture from republican universalism?
I 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 posi-
tions 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 repre-
sentation on the local village councils has been working very
well, leading families to seek more education for their daugh-
ters and so on.
Can 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?
I’ve cared about gay rights since the days when I was act-
ing 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 repres-
sion was utterly ridiculous and very cruel. Studying Greek
homosexuality was also important, because it showed me
XII
how differently a reasonable other culture could think about

these things. Some of the founding scholars of the “gay stud-
ies” 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 re-
spect.
Your 1997 book Cultivating Humanity is a fundamentally opti-
mistic 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 21st-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?
I 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 any-
thing. 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, spon-
sored 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 4th year to university education. It would also
mean small classes with lots of discussion and lots of feed-
back 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 popula-
tion 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.
I am very worried about the way in which the global market
is affecting primary and secondary education, in all coun-
tries. There is increasing pressure to focus on subjects that
XIII
Itineraries
are connected to national profit, such as science, technology,

and economics, and the humanities and arts are getting mar-
ginalized. 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 hu-
manities 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 slip-
ping in that direction here too, even with our rich heritage of
Deweyan ideas.
XIV

Martha Nussbaum, Justice and Human Development

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Martha Nussbaum, Justice and Human Development

Interview by Laura Lee Downs

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Justice and Human

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Nussbaum’s philosophical inquiry, but it should give some idea

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growth, what the economy is supposed to be doing for people,

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through those teachers, although I was not aware of it at the

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weren’t interested in the ideas of the poets, so I turned to the

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In sum, it seems to me that much of your work is underpinned by

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already had contacts there, because people speak freely there

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enthusiastic about the approach, supervised dissertations on

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I don’t think that religious freedom need be conceived in

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how differently a reasonable other culture could think about

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are connected to national profit, such as science, technology,

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