Martha Nussbaum
speaker
170 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2009
last heard Oct 2009
Martha Nussbaum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, hi.
It's very good to be here, Mark and Matt.
Yeah, that's basically right.
But let me step back a little bit.
Uh in two thousand four I wrote a book called Hiding from Humanity, which was a very broad philosophical investigation of both disgust and shame, where I looked at, first of all, the cognitive content of both of those emotions, but in the case of disgust, the idea is the rejection of something that's seen as a contaminant.
The
feeling, yuck, let me get that away from me.
But experiments have shown that it isn't just a bodily reaction, it's a it i there is a thought process involved there.
And what I tried to show there was that not only do we reject feces, urine, other waste products, but m all societies identify a group of people whom they stigmatize as low, bestial, dirty, and then they reject
them as contaminating to them.
So disgust uh which could be useful in some context then becomes socially very uh pernicious.
And and I looked at the role of disgust in social hierarchies of various types, including anti-Semitism, misogyny, uh the Indian caste system, and so on.
But of course, uh in America, I think if we want to find a place where we see the politics of disgust operating, it's in the area of sexuality above all that we see it.
And we don't just see it, but we find very influential theoreticians defending it.
So the most inf one of the most influential legal theorists of the 20th century, Lord Devlin, argued that a society needs to be
able to defend itself against intrusion, contamination, defilement, and that therefore people were within their rights, if they used their very strong feelings of disgust to identify things that should be illegal, even if they caused no harm to anyone else.
His great adversary was John Stuart Mill, who of course holds that
It's only when something either harms or imminently threatens to harm another person that it could possibly be within the realm of legal regulation.
So Devlin argued that disgust was enough, and and and part of what I uh did in the earlier book was to try to show how unreliable disgust is, how connected it is with completely irrational stigmatization and subordination.
So in this new book, I I zero in on the politics of sexual orientation in America, and I say, look, here we see the politics of disgust operating in a particularly pernicious form.
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