REFIGURING UNIVERSALISM

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Nussbaum devotes a chapter in Sex and Social Justice to defending liberalism from common feminist critiques. Nussbaum claims approvingly that ‘[w]omen around the world are using the language of liberalism’, and insists that ‘[t]he deepest and most central ideas of the liberal tradition are ideas of radical force and great theoretical and practical value’ (1999b Nussbaum , Martha C. . 1999b . Sex and social justice . New York : Oxford University Press . [Google Scholar], 56). While liberalism is a diverse tradition, and while Nussbaum's own work is informed by other theoretical traditions (in particular neo-Aristotelianism), in this essay I am following Nussbaum's own practice in treating her work as an example of ‘liberal’ feminism. 2. A version of the capabilities approach has also been developed by Amartya Sen within development economics. Sen argues that a comparison of people's capabilities is the most appropriate measure to use when comparing standards of living. Nussbaum clarifies her view of the similarities and differences between her and Sen's capabilities approaches in Sex and Social Justice (1999b, 11–15; see also Sen 1985 Sen, Amartya. 1985. Commodities and capabilities, Amsterdam: North-Holland. [Google Scholar], 1992 Sen Amartya . 1992 . Inequality reexamined . Oxford and Cambridge, MA : Clarendon Press and Harvard University Press . [Google Scholar]). 3. Indeed, this alliance is likely to be palatable to neither Nussbaum nor Butler, but this need not tell against it. Butler, at least, seems to offer up the possibility of a rapprochement in pursuit of political aims in a passage from Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence: We could disagree on the status and character of modernity and yet find ourselves joined in asserting and defending the rights of indigenous women to health care, reproductive technology, decent wages, physical protection, cultural rights, freedom of assembly. If you saw me on such a protest line, would you wonder how a postmodernist was able to muster the necessary ‘agency’ to get there today? I doubt it. You would assume that I had walked or taken the subway! (Butler 2004 Butler , Judith. . 2004 . Precarious life: The powers of violence and mourning . London : Verso . [Google Scholar], 48) 4. The phrasing is borrowed from Seyla Benhabib's chapter (1994) ‘Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance’. 5. Frontiers of Justice (2006) provides an elaboration, and in some cases revision, of the capabilities approach, in the course of charting its relationship to the social contract tradition. As Nussbaum notes in Frontiers of Justice, Women and Human Development considers ‘issues of method and justification’ (2006, 5). Earlier formulations appeared in Nussbaum (1988 Nussbaum , Martha C. 1988 . Nature, function and capability: Aristotle on political distribution . Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy Supplementary vol. I . [Google Scholar], 1990 Nussbaum , Martha C. . 1990 . Aristotelian social democracy . In Liberalism and the good , R. Bruce Douglass , Gerald M. Mara , Henry S. Richardson . New York : Routledge . [Google Scholar], 1992 Nussbaum , Martha C. . 1992 . Human functioning and social justice: In defence of Aristotelian essentialism . Political Theory 20 2 : 202 46 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 1993 Nussbaum , Martha C. . 1993 . Non-relative virtues: An Aristotelian approach . In The quality of life , Martha Nussbaum Amartya Sen Oxford : Clarendon Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 1995a Nussbaum , Martha C. 1995a . Aristotle on human nature and the foundations of ethics . In World, mind and ethics: Essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams , J.E.J. Altham Ross Harrison Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . [Google Scholar], 1995b Nussbaum , Martha C. 1995b . Human capabilities, female human beings . In Women, culture and development , Martha C. Nussbaum Jonathon Glover Oxford : Clarendon Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 1997a Nussbaum , Martha C. . 1997a . Capabilities and human rights . Fordham Law Review 66 : 273 300 .[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 1997b Nussbaum , Martha C. . 1997b . The good as discipline, the good as freedom . In Ethics of consumption: The good life, justice, and global stewardship , David A. Crocker Toby Linden. Lanham , MD : Rowman & Littlefield . [Google Scholar], 1999b). 6. Butler is not alone in her criticism of Nussbaum's defence of universalism. Hilary Charlesworth (2000 Charlesworth, Hilary. 2000. Martha Nussbaum's feminist internationalism. Ethics, 111(1): 64–78. [Google Scholar], 72–77) queries the need for the strong claim of universality to undergird a feminist internationalism, preferring instead more subtle, dialogically based approaches to international collaboration. Avigail Eisenberg (2002 Eisenberg , Avigail. 2002 . Context, cultural difference, sex and social justice . Review of Sex and social justice by Martha C. Nussbaum. Canadian Journal of Political Science 35 3 : 613 28 . [Google Scholar]) suggests that Nussbaum tends to read the existence of a commitment to universal liberal principles back into the narratives of women in developing countries, and Gayatri Spivak (2004 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2004. Righting wrongs. South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2/3): 523–81. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) views Nussbaum's approach as a ‘top-down’ model of engaging with the subaltern subject. For an approach that attempts to draw Nussbaum's work on the human into critical conversation with the work of postcolonial theorists, see Quillen (2001 Quillen, Carol. 2001. Feminist theory, justice, and the lure of the human. Signs, 27(1): 87–122. [Google Scholar]). 7. In a commentary on Nussbaum's advocacy of cosmopolitanism (Nussbaum 1990), Butler remarks: ‘it would be a great consolation, I suppose, to return to a ready-made universal perspective, and to compel everyone to identify with a universal moral attitude before they take on their various specific and parochial concerns’ (1996 Nussbaum , Martha C. . 1996 . Patriotism and cosmopolitanism . In For love of country: Debating the limits of patriotism , by Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents , Joshua Cohen. Boston : Beacon Press . [Google Scholar], 45; emphasis added). 8. A number of commentators have questioned Nussbaum's reading here, suggesting that Nussbaum's Aristotle may contain rather more of Nussbaum than Aristotle. See, in this regard, Antony (2000 Antony, Louise M. 2000. Natures and norms. Ethics, 111(1): 8–36. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Mulgan (2000 Mulgan, Richard. 2000. Was Aristotle an ‘Aristotelian social democrat’?. Ethics, 111(1): 79–101. [Google Scholar]). 9. Nussbaum contends that people may sign on to this conception as the freestanding moral core of a political conception, without accepting any particular metaphysical view of the world, any comprehensive ethical or religious view, or even any particular view of the person or of human nature. (2000, 76) See also Rawls (1996 Rawls, John. 1996. Political liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]). 10. Nussbaum similarly uses the figure of the Indian woman as a device in the construction of her argument. Ratna Kapur (2001 Kapur, Ratna. 2001. Imperial parody. Feminist Theory, 2(1): 79–88. [Google Scholar]) objects to Nussbaum's attack on Butler in the name of Indian women whose ‘material reality’, for Nussbaum, provides the ultimate rebuke to Butler's parodic politics. Kapur points out that this figuring relies on the self-evidence of the claim that abuse of women in India is much worse than in Nussbaum's own country, the United States (Kapur 2001, 80). Nussbaum makes a similar move in Women and Human Development, introducing the work with the stories of Indian women Vasanti and Jayamma, ‘two women trying to flourish’ (2000 Nussbaum , Martha C. . 2000 . Women and human development: The capabilities approach . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 15). 11. A number of other feminist theorists have been concerned by Butler's lack of a normative politics. In this regard, see Benhabib's and Fraser's contributions to Feminist Contentions (Benhabib 1995 Benhabib , Seyla. 1995 . Feminism and postmodernism: An uneasy alliance . In Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange Seyla Benhabib , Judith Butler , Drucilla Cornell , Nancy Fraser. New York : Routledge . [Google Scholar]; Fraser 1995 Fraser , Nancy. 1995 . False antitheses: A response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler . In Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange , Seyla Benhabib , Judith Butler , Drucilla Cornell , Nancy Fraser. New York : Routledge . [Google Scholar]), and Lois McNay (1999 Mcnay, Lois. 1999. Subject, psyche and agency: The work of Judith Butler. Theory. Culture and Society, 16(2): 175–93. [Google Scholar]). For a thoughtful engagement with Butler's work that also pushes her on normativity but suggests a normative supplement that is more in keeping with Butler's own theoretical antecedents—Foucault and (especially) Nietzsche—than the deus ex machina of notions like non-hierarchy and human dignity, see Stone (2005 Stone, Alison. 2005. Towards a genealogical feminism: A reading of Judith Butler's political thought. Contemporary Political Theory, 4: 4–24. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 12. Butler's point is not that any and all resignifications of universality are good, or positive. Butler clarifies her emphasis on resignification in Feminist Contentions: my point is that re-signification is the domain in which a certain set of ‘agentic possibilities’ can be discerned and derived, and that such a domain of possibility is immanent to power. My question is not whether certain kinds of significations are good or bad, warranted or unwarranted, but, rather: what constitutes the domain of discursive possibility within which and about which such questions can be posed? (1995b Butler , Judith. . 1995b . For a careful reading . In Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange , Seyla Benhabib , Judith Butler , Drucilla Cornell , Nancy Fraser. New York : Routledge . [Google Scholar], 138) 13. See, on this point, Antony (2000). 14. That Nussbaum would likely object to considering her capabilities approach as a ‘resignification’ in no way prevents us from doing so. 15. Nussbaum's own position on the relationship of capabilities and rights is clarified in Frontiers of Justice, where Nussbaum argues that the capabilities approach should be seen as a species of the human rights approach (2006, 285–91). 16. Butler, too, gestures towards this in her more recent work. In Precarious Life (2004) she offers an approach to conceptualising human community based on a shared corporeal vulnerability to harm. 17. In elaborating this, Nussbaum draws out another aspect of the relationship she sees between capabilities and rights. She argues that rights to, for example, political participation, free exercise of religion, free speech, should all be thought of as ‘secured to people only when the relevant capacities to function are present’. Thus, she insists on attending to the actual capability to exercise a right: by defining the securing of rights in terms of capabilities, we make it clear that a people in country C don't really have an effective right to political participation, for example … simply because this language exists on paper; they really have been given the right only if there are effective measures to make people truly capable of political exercise. (Nussbaum 2006 Nussbaum , Martha C. . 2006 . Frontiers of justice: Disability, nationality, species membership . Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press . [Google Scholar], 287)