Martha Nussbaum

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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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Elucidations · Episode 4: Martha Nussbaum discusses sexuality and the law · 1 Oct 2009 podcast

Uh and the cognitive content of disgust is a thought about defilement and contamination.

Cognitive content of indignation and usually

centers around the idea of a a wrong or an offence.

But if what you mean is a normative notion of rationality, that is,

source of good reasons for action, well, sometimes anger and indignation are not uh sources of good reasons.

It depends whether you've got the facts right, uh did the person really kill the person, but also whether you've got the sense of importance right.

If you get very upset, Aristotle points this out, because somebody forgets your name, well you've probably got the values uh skewed and and so you're reacting irrationally.

So on.

So so I

think with disgust the question is are there any instances in which disgust is rational?

Well, basically when it tracks primary objects where there's a close overlap between disgust and danger.

That's probably how disgust evolved, that it keeps us away from danger.

So there's something

It's reasonable for us to throw away the milk when it smells disgusting.

That's it doesn't perfectly track the sense of danger, but probably pretty prudent to follow it in those cases.

Absolutely.

And I my theoretical position has always been that empathy is not sufficient for sympathy or compassion is the word that I prefer to use.

Because uh you could have plenty of empathy and use it sadistically to torture people.

So um it may not even be necessary for sympathy because you could quite well have the right moral attitudes without being able to imagine very well what the creature is like.

For example, we can't easily imagine uh what the mental life of animals is like, and yet we could refrain from treating them badly just on the basis

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