MARTHA NUSSBAUM: So
this Is work that I've been doing for a
number of years now with the economist, Amartya
Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998. And its work that is
an attempt to provide an ethical foundation for
International Development Policy. But I keep doing work on the
more philosophical side of it, trying to think about
what social justice has to say about this approach. And so right now I've recently
been writing a general book. Which is a, kind of, summary. But also restatement with a lot
of new stuff on this approach. So, in short, it's an ongoing
philosophical project. And I just want to
give you an idea of it. Some of you may know
about it already. And then I hope to have lots
of questions and challenges about it. So all over the world,
people who are deprived are struggling for a full
and meaningful human life. A life that's worthy
of their human dignity. Countries and states
within countries often chart their achievements
in terms of economic growth alone. But people,
meanwhile, usually are looking for something
about their own lives. And what they're actually able
to do and be in their lives. So they need
theoretical approaches that can be the ally
of their struggles. Not approaches that obscure
what they're striving for. The late Mahbub ul Haq, who was
a great Pakistani economist. Who founded what are now
called the Human Development Reports of the United
Nations Development Program, wrote in the first of
those reports in 1990, "The real wealth of the
nation is its people. And the purpose
of development is to create an enabling
environment for people to enjoy long healthy
and creative lives. This simple, but powerful
truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of
material and financial wealth." End quote. Well let me give
you an example that comes from my experience working
with women's development groups in India. Consider then
Vasanthi, who's a woman in her 30s in the
Indian state of Gujarat in Northwestern India. Vasanthi's husband was a
gambler and an alcoholic. He used the household
money to get drunk. And when that money ran out,
he took the cash payment for a vasectomy that was being
offered by the state as part of its population policy. So the result was that
Vasanthi didn't even have any children to help
her out around the house. And she was unusually burdened. And as her husband
drank more and more, he became more and more abusive. He became physically violent. And she felt that she could
no longer live with him. She wanted to leave. But then the question
is, could she leave? And this is a terrible
dilemma for many women in abusive marriages in
all countries of the world. Well it happened
that her birth family was willing to take her back. That's not always the case. But her father who used to make
Singer Sewing machine parts had died. But her brothers were running
an auto parts shop in what used to be the father's shop. And so they said, you can
sleep on the floor of the shop. And we'll even give you one
of the father's machines. And so she was able to earn
a very small income making the eyelets for the
hooks on sari tops. Well that was insecure. Because she still couldn't
get even get a divorce. She had to take a
loan from her brothers to pay the lawyer to try to
get the divorce and so on. And she finally got,
through the loan from the brothers,
another machine. The one that rolls the silk
on the edges of the sari. But she was dependent
on her brothers. And so that was an insecure
source of livelihood. They were married
and had children, might have to come
up with dowry. So they might not want to
support a poor relation much longer. So then she went and
she was very lucky because one of the best women's
non-governmental organizations in the world was
right in her backyard. She went to the Self
Employed Women's Association, known as SEWA, run by the
great activist, Ela Bhatt. Who last year was honored by
this university with the Benton Medal for Public Service. First non-American
to be so honored. Well she went to SEWA and she
got a bank loan of her own and paid back her brothers. And by the time I met her,
she had paid back almost all of the bank loan. And even had two small savings
accounts in the all women's bank that SEWA runs. She also had enrolled in SEWA's
educational programs, where she was learning, for the
first time in her life, to read and write. And was beginning
to acquire skills that would promote
greater independence and other employment
opportunities. Now, what theoretical approach
could direct attention to the salient features
of Vasanthi's situation, promote an adequate
analysis of it, and make pertinent
recommendations for action? Such an approach, as
you can already see, would need to focus on things
such as basic education, health, bodily integrity,
opportunities for employment, opportunities for
political participation. And, more generally,
the importance of some degree of
meaningful freedom to shape and fashion
her own life. But the dominant
theoretical approaches in development economics for
a very long time, approaches that are still used
all over the world, are not the allies
of her struggle. Because they don't have
an adequate conception of the human goal. They simply equate
a region or nation's doing well with increase
in GDP per capita. In other words, Gujurat is
pursuing the right policies for its people, just in
case its economy is growing. And, of course, often
that doesn't even translate into greater
money per household. Because the way that
the growth occurs is through foreign investment,
a lot of the profits are repatriated by
the foreign investors. So even as a measure of
resources around in Gujurat it's not a very good one. So even if we want then
an average member-- an average measure that
is a single number-- it's far from obvious
that average GDP is the right number. In fact, the recent report
on development and quality of life by what's known
as the Sarkozy Commission, the commission of economists
and other development people convened by President of France
that has written a really quite wonderful report on these
things, says that look, if you want a single number,
average household income would be a more revealing
number than average GDP. But furthermore, any
crude single number tells us really nothing
about distribution. So it can give high marks
to nations or regions that contain alarming inequalities. In the old days, in the lists
of developing countries, South Africa used to shoot
very quickly to the top because, of course, there
were a lot of resources around in South Africa. Never mind that a very
tiny part of the population had access to them. And a large majority
were really quite unable to enjoy the fruits
of the nation's prosperity. So too in Vasanthi's case,
Gujarat is a rich state. But the benefits of its foreign
investment related policies do not reach the poor,
particularly the rural poor. And they particularly
don't reach women. Because often men
control whatever income does arrive in the household. So the standard approaches
don't direct our attention to the reasons for
Vasanthi's inability to enjoy the fruits of her
region's general prosperity. Indeed they actually distract
attention from her problems. When Narendra Modi, the
Chief Minister of Gujurat, campaigns for reelection, I
get scores of emails every day from-- I'm on their list
serves-- saying Gujurat, the big
development success. And it's all about
these numbers. But of course the inequalities
are just simply ignored. Another shortcoming
of approaches focused on economic
growth is that even when distribution is
factored in, they fail to direct
attention to aspects of the quality of the
human life that are not very well correlated
with growth, even if you did factor distribution in. Research shows clearly that
promoting economic growth does not automatically
trickle out, so to speak, to promote
adequate health care and adequate education. Those two areas there's
particularly a large amount of empirical evidence
that growth is not correlated with improvement
in those two areas. And, of course,
political liberties is another case where
we know that nations can grow very nicely and
not deliver those goods. Evidence of that
kind of independence is given particularly nicely in
a study that Sen his co-author, Jean Dreze, did of the
different Indian states. Because they control health and
education at the state level. And so it's a nice kind
of experimental laboratory about how different
economic policies, different educational
and health policies, factor in and
influence each other. And they found dramatic evidence
that for the states that work to promote growth, really
didn't deliver the goods in health and education. And other poorer states whose
economy had not grown well because of their independent
educational and health policies, did do well. So that's another problem. And Kerala is a very interesting
case, a southern Indian state. Which has very good
educational achievements. 99% literacy among adolescents
for both boys and girls. As against a background of 65%
male literacy and 50% female literacy in the
nation as a whole. So stunningly above
the national average. And in health too,
its stunningly above the national average. It has the same health
data as Harlem in New York. Now that's bad for
New York, but it's quite good for a
poor Indian state. And much better, again,
than the national average. So Kerala did that
without actually having much economic growth,
because its economic policies have been a failure. So, in short, if we want
to know how Vasanthi's doing in an insightful
way, we need to ask lots of
distinct questions. We need to determine what
she's able to do and to be in quite a few different
areas of human life. And the answer to
this question simply is not present in
the GDP number. How have her different
circumstances-- familial, social, political--
affected her ability to enjoy good health, to
protect her bodily integrity, to attain an adequate
education, to work on terms of mutual respect,
and some degree of choice with other workers, to
participate in politics. And so on. So development workers like
to ask these questions. These are the questions
that good non-governmental organizations ask all the time. But the dominant
theoretical approaches were not asking them. And so what we give the
name "human capabilities" to is these substantive
opportunities. What people are
actually able to do and to be in shaping their own
lives in these different areas. Well so, as you
already know by now, there's a new
theoretical paradigm in the developed world. It's known sometimes as
the Human Development Approach, that's what it's
called in the UN reports. But Sen and I tend to call
it the capabilities approach. And I attach particular
importance to that because I use it as an approach
to talk about animal welfare as well. So it's not just about humans. And this approach begins
with a very simple question. Which is, what are people
actually able to do and be? And, of course, that's
simple in a way. But it's also complex because
we insist, from the start, that the quality
of the human life contains many components
that are not the same, not commensurable by any single
metric with one another. Now this approach has had
by now an increasing amount of influence in the UN
development reports, in the Sarkozy
Commission, and, finally-- and I like this
particularly because you all could join in on this-- in an association that's
called the Human Development and Capability Association. Which is an
International association that anyone can join,
anyone can submit a paper to its annual meeting. We have meetings. We have 700 members
in 80 countries. But meetings all over the world. And most of the
members are very young and are beginning work on
this and join it in order to meet people from
other countries who are interested in this approach. And so it's a very
exciting thing to be at one of those
meetings and see the interest of many young
people in pursuing this. So what I'll now do is
to say just a little more about the approach
in its relationship to other alternative approaches. And then I'm going
to say a few words about the very delicate
question of cultural relativism and universalism. So, why capabilities? Well we've already seen
some reasons why GDP, alone, doesn't tell us enough. It fails to look at
questions of distribution, it fails to disaggregate
and separately pursue different aspects of human life. But one step up in
adequacy, we have approaches that are based on utility. Which measure the
quality of life by looking at the
satisfaction of preferences. And viewing the aim is that
of maximizing satisfaction. This approach, of
course, is much better because it focuses on
the experience of people. And it's about
people rather than about some stuff sitting
there, somewhere in the state. And I actually think that if you
make enough refinements in this approach-- and I talked about
this in the law philosophy workshop yesterday-- you can make it adequate. I won't try to do that here. I might in the questioning
period if you press me. But I actually think
that, you know, John Stuart Mill already
was ahead of the game. And made a lot of
the corrections in utilitarianism that
would make it adequate. But I'm just going to address
the crude versions of it that are used by
development economists. And I'm going to say why those
versions are not adequate. Well first of all,
like the GDP approach, it neglects distribution. The satisfactions
of different people are just funneled
together to promote total or average utility. And that, notoriously,
can give you a result where the best
total or average is produced by a structure that
deprives, very severely, some people at the bottom. So that's already
a problem if you think that any approach
focused on social justice should focus particularly keenly
on the situation of people at the bottom. Second, again like
the GDP approach, it aggregates and
doesn't separately consider the different
aspects of human life. So bodily integrity, political
participation, health, and so on, all are viewed as
sources of a single thing-- satisfaction. And their separateness is
really not attended to. And, of course, this
something that Bentham already introduced
in the 18th century when he founded utilitarianism,
as a simplifying device. But that simplicity is
initially perhaps clarifying. But in the end, it can obscure
the important separateness of these different
aspects of human life. Third, utilitarianism,
by focusing on the satisfaction
of preferences, it neglects a phenomenon that
economists have increasingly talked about. And that is called
the phenomenon of adaptive preferences. People adjust
their satisfactions to what they think they
can actually achieve. And it's well known
by now empirically, that even in the area
of physical health, people can get used
to the way they feel. You know, if they think
a woman should feel weak, well then they're satisfied
with feeling weak. Because they don't
know that if they were to be better
nourished, they would feel quite differently. So that the satisfactions
that people actually report are extremely malleable. And they're likely to be
hijacked by an unjust status quo. So that if women
report that they're satisfied with the
level of education that they've actually
received, not clear that we should chart
our course by that answer. Because that might
just be because it's been dinned into them,
from the very beginning, that a good woman
doesn't get educated. And they're not aware of
the opportunities that would be opened to them by education. And of the various
ways in which education could transform their life. And then finally
utilitarianism, typically by focusing on the
state of satisfaction, doesn't give enough weight
to the importance of agency. People don't just want
to feel satisfied. In fact, they might
be much happier feeling dissatisfied if
they were active agents in their struggle. So that when you think about
what kind of food policy, what kind of family policy
you want to have, to focus only on satisfaction is
to neglect the fact that people want to have a hand. They want to be choice
makers in the policies that govern their lives. So those are things that are
wrong with utilitarianism. Now, one step further up,
you might have an approach that focuses on resources. And says that justice
is best promoted by distributing to all some
basic all purpose resources. Such as income and wealth. And, of course,
that's much better. Because we're talking
now about distribution. And we're talking about
giving everyone something that they can use to
make choices and shape their own lives. But there are still
some problems. Because although income and
wealth are good things to have, they are not really good proxies
for all the diverse aspects of development. It's just not the
case that you can solve problems of
domestic violence or lack of public schools and
so on, by giving people a certain amount of money. It just can't change the
institutional structure sufficiently. And, moreover, as
Sen has stressed-- depending on your
starting point-- you need different
amounts of resources to come up to the same level
of actual ability to function. An example that he
famously used was a person who uses
a wheelchair, needs to have more spent on them-- in connection with
their mobility-- than a person who has,
so-called, normal mobility. Because, of course,
society is already designed for the needs
of the second person. And not of the first person. So in order to make
the changes that would make mobility possible
for the first person, we need to spend more
money for that person than for the, so-called,
normal person. So in short, background
conditions are an equal. Certain people start from
a marginalized position. And, therefore, there
are good reasons to spend more on those people. And so that needs
to be factored in. And the best way to do that
is to think, what would it take to equalize the
actual level of opportunity for functioning? So taking stock of all these
problems, the capabilities approach, instead, says,
well what are people actually able to do and to be? And the answer to that
question is the set of capabilities or
substantive opportunities that people actually have. Now what I've tried
to do with the list that you have in
front of you, is to use this not just as a
comparative measure of quality of life-- that's how it's used in
the Sarkozy commission and in the UN reports-- but as the building block
of a normative theory of social justice. And what I say is let's focus
on these 10 capabilities. And say that a nation has only
secured meaningful justice to its people in case all
10 are secured to them up to a certain threshold level. Which would then
need to be specified. So the central capabilities
are closely linked to the idea of rights, they
include an idea of entitlement. But rights could be
understood in a thin way. That is, rights are
secured just in case the state does nothing
or keeps its hands off, by capabilities all are, as it
were, positive entitlements. That is the duty
of the government is to secure them by some
form of government action. So then you can study
the list and I'd be happy to talk
about why the list has got those 10 items and so on. It's very important that
the items are separate. That is, just as in
the Bill of Rights, we know that these
are separate rights. You can't satisfy one of
them by just giving people a very large amount
of another one. People have the right
to freedom of speech. And giving them an
especially large amount of freedom of religion
doesn't atone for deficiencies in the speech area. So, too, with all
of my capabilities. You can't atone for a
deficiency in one area by just giving people a very
large amount of another one. But, of course, they do
reinforce and support each other so you ought to think
of them as an interlocking set. One of the best ways, actually,
to promote women's employment opportunities and
their ability to exit from an abusive or
violent relationship, is to promote basic education. It's pretty obvious. Because that's a source of
employment opportunities. And employment opportunities
translates into exit. So, once again, important
research by my colleague, Bina Agarwal, the head of
the Institute for Economic Growth in India, shows
that actually land rights are another very important
source of exit and employment opportunity for women. And in some regions, more
important than education. Because having land
ownership in her own name, a woman has a very
important asset. And if she leaves the family,
she can take that away. And so that gives
her a, kind of, calim to be treated
better in her family. So, in short, it's important to
study the interrelationships. But the basic
intuition, from which the philosophical aspect
of the approach begins, is that human abilities
exert a moral claim that they should be developed. Adam Smith, observing
the children in England who got no education,
but were sent straight to work in the factories, said
that their human powers had been mutilated and deformed. In other words, they
never got a chance to unfold themselves
as human beings. Because they were forced into
a situation where they couldn't think or unfold their
minds, contemplate the political
issues of their day, and they just had to do
this monotonous factory labor the whole time. And he contrasted
the poor children of Scotland, who even
though they are very poor, they had primary education
provided at low cost. It wasn't completely cost free. But it should have
been, he thought. And then, even though
later they might work at a very
demanding job, they had a head start because their
human abilities had unfolded. So that's basically
the sort of intuition that I'm working with. But let's go back
now to Vasanthi. And see how the lens of
the capabilities approach does illuminate her situation. Now one thing to
notice is that going in, Vasanthi had very few
capabilities of any kind, very little freedom. Because the script of her
life had been pretty much entirely written by men. Her father who married
her, her husband who controlled her
life, the brothers who received her kindly,
but then kept her as a poor dependent. So this dependency put
her at risk with respect to life and health. It denied her an
education that would have developed her powers
of thought and perception. And it prevented her
from thinking of herself as a person who had a
plan of life of her own to shape and choices to make. In the marriage,
she did worst of all because she lost
her bodily integrity to domestic violence, her
emotional equanimity to fear. And she was just totally cut
off from meaningful forms of affiliation. Familial, civic, political. She couldn't go out of house. Like many upper caste
women in a bad marriage, one of the worst aspects of it
was to just be totally confined to the house. So she really didn't have
the conception of herself as a free being whose worth
is equal to that of others. The SEWA, alone,
changed that picture. She now had not only an income,
but also independent control over her livelihood. Even when she still
owed a lot of money, it was a lot better to
owe it to a group of women who were fostering values
of equality and self respect than to owe it to your brothers. And she became, right away,
part of a mutually supportive network. And she developed relationships
such as she had never known. And that was what
she she told me. One of the most
remarkable surprises for her of the situation,
that she formed friendships based on equality. She came in to talk to me
with a lower caste woman, that in her earlier
life she never would have been
permitted to talk to. And she was a brahmin and this
woman was probably a dhalid. I never really found
that out for sure. But in any case,
this is a friendship based on equality
across lines of caste. And these two women
had decided that what they were going to do
with their leisure time was to organize women
in their neighborhood to fight domestic violence. And to try to provide shelters
from domestic violence. So she was politically
active in a way that she never was before. And her sense of her
dignity increased. Reflecting on her
situation, I think one of the things we
have to notice right away is that the choices made
by the state of Gujarat did nothing for her. And she was just
very lucky that one of the best non-governmental
organizations in the world was right in her backyard. Gujarat, as I say, has
pursued a foreign investment growth based agenda. The results of that growth
do not reach the rural poor and they do not reach
women, urban or rural. Government failed to
assure her in education. It failed to give her
easy access to divorce. She had to struggle and pay
a lawyer for about 10 years. It failed to give
her any protection from domestic violence. No women's shelters,
virtually, in the whole state. And, in fact, the only role
the government played markedly in her life was a negative one. Remember the cash
payment for the vasectomy that the husband got. And that made her insecure and
vulnerable situation much more vulnerable. So we can see, though,
that the pertinent features of her situation are
much more fully opened up for diagnosis and
eventual treatment by the capabilities
list than by the rivals. And I think this diagnostic and
remedial value derives directly from the fact that the approach
is interdisciplinary in the way that it is. Economists have been
working with philosophers. And they have been working with
people from gender studies. And all of this is
informed by a close study of regional and
national history. In fact one reason
that I've always focused on India-- besides
just the sheer love of India-- is that I think
you can't implement this approach in
any meaningful way without knowing the
context extremely well. And it's different
regional differences. But what about the fact
that obviously we're recommending some kind
of universal approach to nations and regions
of very different kinds? And, well it helps
to assuage the worry, that the primary
members of this team-- or at least the ones
who started it-- come from the South. And are from the formerly
colonized nation. So the worry about whether this
is a covert form of imperialism is partly assuaged by that. But still it doesn't
really remove the worry about Universalism. Wouldn't any prescription for
all these different nations be almost certain to
be too dictatorial? Or perhaps, even, a, kind
of, outside imposition. So, you know, from the
very beginning of my work on the approach, I've
been very worried about that kind of critique. And I've, therefore,
tried to answer it. And to build a sensitivity
to cultural difference in the approach in many ways. First, the list is just
a set of suggestions. I think you have
to start somewhere. But it's only by
throwing something out that you get criticisms
that help remake it. And so that's the spirit
in which it's offered. It's subject to ongoing
revision and rethinking. And very much in the way
that any country's first take about its constitutional
entitlements will always be
subject to debate. Second, I also insist that these
very abstract items on the list need to be specified in a
concrete way, by each country, taking its own history and its
own particular circumstances into account. Within certain parameters,
it's perfectly right that different countries
should do this differently. For example, a free speech right
that suits Germany quite well-- which forbids the dissemination
or even Xeroxing of all anti-Semitic materials and the
organizing of all anti-Semitic groups-- seems too restrictive for the
different history and climate of the United States. And I think what I
would want to say is that both nations
are correct in making the different choices
that correspond to different histories. Third point is that
I think of this list as a list for political
purposes, which can be the point of convergence
among people who otherwise have very different
overall ideas of what a worthwhile human life is. Here I borrow a page from
John Rawls and his idea of political
liberalism, where he says that the political
principles for a country that contains different
religions, different secular conceptions of the
good life, must be, as it were thin
and not articulated in terms of ideas
that belong to one dominant religion or
dominant secular view rather than another. So they must not
contain ideas, let's say for example, ideas of the
human soul or the immortal soul that that would divide people
along lines of religion and comprehensive view. So there are notions,
there, such as the notion of human dignity, that just will
be understood in different ways by different people, given
their different religious and other views of human life. But all can agree. And I think that has happened
in the modern human rights movement. That people have
agreed to endorse certain ideas of human
rights and human dignity, without agreeing at
all about the deeper metaphysical grounding of that. Fourth point is that, notice
that the political goal is specified as securing
capabilities, not actual functioning. Give people options, then the
choice whether to pursue it or not is left entirely to them. And so, I think
that's very important. Because the right
to vote could be endorsed by a member
of the Old Order Amish, who thinks that it's
always wrong to participate in politics. But they could support the
existence of that capability for all citizens. They're just not
going to use it. Again, religious
freedom can be endorsed by people who think
that all religion is bad and even destructive. They're not going to
use it, but they think-- I think most such
people do think-- that it's good for a
country to have it. And so, even at the level of
physical health, that's true. That is to say making
adequate health care available gives you the option
if you then choose to lead an unhealthy life. Well, that's your choice. There's a huge
difference between being ill nourished because that's
the only choice you have. And being ill
nourished because you choose to fast or in other
ways lead to an unhealthy life. Final point, is that I insist
on a very strong separation between issues of justification
and issues of implementation. I think that it's one thing to
have an international debate. And to come to some
agreement that these are good things for people
in all nations to have. But, what happens next? What happens next is
a nation then decides, do we want to put that into
our constitution or not? And I just hope they will. But, going beyond that to
any kind of intervention in the affairs of
another sovereign nation, actually I'm quite
strongly opposed to. And I think that any kind
of humanitarian intervention to secure human rights should
be undertaken, if at all, only in the gravest possible
circumstances of genocide or gross crimes
against humanity. So that means that the
idea behind the charge of imperialism, I think,
is the idea that-- well, if we decide that
India hasn't done enough, then we'll bring our
troops in and make them protect the capabilities. And that is not my idea at all. The idea is this is an argument. If you don't agree
with the argument, well then do something else. But, in any case, you know,
we try to persuade you. So let me now go
back, in conclusion, to Vasanthi this
very determined. And, I think, very
eloquent woman, who showed up one afternoon to
meet me in the office of SEWA. what she said to me in
conclusion was, women in India have a lot of hardship. But out of our suffering,
our strength is born. And she says, now I feel that
I'm actually a stronger person. Because I can now use my life to
give some help to other people. Well the struggle for
opportunity, for capability, is one that's being waged
by many deprived people all over the world. Many, disgracefully, are in
rich and developed countries. I think the US
should hang its head in shame at the notorious
fact that the health status of, remember, inner
city New Yorkers in Harlem is just slightly less robust
than the average in Kerala, one of the poorest states
in quite a poor nation. But one that happens to
care about health care. And, once again, I think we
should hang our head in shame at the fact that the Bureau
of Justice Statistics estimates that 18%
of US women have experienced rape
or attempted rape, usually from an
intimate partner. And the rate of
physical violence is approximately double that. Well, we don't have good
data about domestic violence in our country, or in
the world as a whole, but under-reporting is probably
much more likely to be the norm than over reporting. So all nations
have a lot of work to do if they want to secure
the capabilities of all their people, even those
10 that are on my list. India has made some heroic
strides in recent years to address some problems
that face all nations. So one question is how nations
can help one another out in fighting the struggle
for human capabilities. One way, surely,
is financial aid. And I do believe that the
richer nations of the world owe a great deal more
than they currently give to poor nations
in connection with economic and
educational development. Norway currently gives
close to 2% of GDP. And that should be, I think, a
minimum norm for all nations. But from another
aid in this struggle is good intellectual work. Theories influence
the way things happen. The old development
theories were used by the IMF and the World Bank. They effected the way
aid was doled out, the way data were gathered. And, for example,
you couldn't even get data about how women were
doing because all the data was about households. And they didn't disaggregate it. In many ways, they
deflected attention from the struggles
of the most deprived. The capabilities
approach is not exactly telling Vasanthi anything
that by now she doesn't know after her education in SEWA. But it's able to go to bat
in the corridors of power. To combat the defective
theoretical approaches. And, in that way,
serving as a kind of ally of the poor and the excluded. A kind of advocate
arguing their case. Well people are what matter,
as Mahbub ul Haq said, and ideas matter only
because people matter. But ideas do matter for people. And I think that this
is one thing that integrate law school, which does
have human rights internship programs and other
programs that reach out to the rest of the world. You can all be thinking
about, because I think we all need to put our heads together
across boundaries of country, discipline, that divide
us, if the world's most pressing problems of
exclusion and inequality are to be solved. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] Yes. STUDENT: Yes, thank
you very much. [INAUDIBLE] And I
wanted to ask you a question about your statement
about education and health and other political
outcomes [INAUDIBLE]. As far as I see it, I agree
that [INAUDIBLE] is not a sufficient condition
that involves these other social avenues. But [INAUDIBLE] growth as a
necessary condition, we do observe, we compare
around the world that the richer
nations are better fit, and successful after
promoting these [INAUDIBLE]. So I worry that your approach
would undermine policies that are promoting growth. MARTHA NUSSBAUM:
Well I think growth is a positive contributor. I wouldn't go so far
as to say necessary. Because Kerala,
as I pointed out-- and Kerala was controlled
by a Marxist government for most of its history. And its economy,
kind of, collapsed because the unions were
allowed to drive up wages so high that the labor market
fled to adjacent states. And often men went
to the Gulf to work. So they didn't have
any economic growth. They had negative growth. And they still had
these great achievements in education and health. So necessary, I
wouldn't go so far. But I think the data do suggest
that on balance, it's a very good thing to shoot for, sure. Whether to shoot for it
in the form of encouraging a lot of foreign investment,
that's a separate question. One of the problems
you get into there is if you do that
without, first, having prepared the ground
by having good education and health policies. Then the people
in your own state won't be equipped to
take the jobs in the firm that you've invited in. This has happened in
West Bengal, where they invited a chemical factory in. And then they say
to these peasants, well, sorry, now just
get off your land. Well, it would
have been one thing if the peasants
were invited to move from subsistence agriculture
to work in the chemical plant. But because they
had no schooling-- I mean 20% of the teachers in
West Bengal, on any given day, do not show up in the classroom. So the education system
is such a dismal failure, particularly in rural areas,
that those individuals could not take the jobs
that were being created. And, therefore,
they, quite sensibly, didn't want to get
off their land. And a huge conflict
ensued in which the communist government
of West Bengal was shooting rural
peasants in the back. It was quite an amazing thing. So disgraceful thing, in fact. And so, I think, good growth
has to go hand in hand, in this situation,
with education. Because, otherwise,
who are you helping? You're not helping your people. You're going to help some
group of foreign workers who will come in. But it won't be your own
people who will get help. So there are good
ways of doing this and there are bad
ways of doing this. And I think one
of the nice things about studying the
Indian states-- because the Constitution has
left health and education to be managed by the states and not
by the central government-- is that it is like a laboratory. Where you can see how different
combinations of economic policy and education health policy
have led to different results. Yeah, I mean, the conclusion
that I would draw, and that Sen,
himself, also draws, is that we should
reject the old, kind of, leftist approaches
that say economic growth is not important. We should insist that
it's very important. But we should also insist that
it's not the only thing that's important. And indeed you can't
reap the fruits of it without paying attention
to those other things. Yes. STUDENT: I was just curious. You started off by mentioning
that it's an ongoing project and that you're
still working on it. And the last thing I
read about anything was Frontiers of Justice. So I was curious if maybe
you could outline a few more recent developments that
you've been working on with the capabilities lists. MARTHA NUSSBAUM: OK, great. Well, the first thing to say
is that I got much more deeply into the Indian aspect of it. Because one thing
that I think nicely happens when you
focus on a country-- and I focused on India simply
for theoretical reasons, that I wanted to have an
approach that was grounded. And that you could show
how it would play out in a very concrete situation. But then, being there, and
being involved in the conflicts, I got asked and urged to write
for Americans about things that were going on in India. So I wrote a book about the
Hindu right and its assault on religious liberty. And that came out in 2007. So that was, you know, connected
with the capabilities approach, to be sure. But it was a, kind
of, spin off project. But then the other thing I did. Since I think that
each the capabilities really deserves a book,
or perhaps many books. Because you want to
show, first of all, what the structure of
that capability would be. But then you want to show
that, for a given country-- and it might be subtly
different in other countries. So I wrote a book in 2008 called
Liberty of Conscience, which was about religious liberty
and non-establishment in the United States tradition. But with a lot of reflections
on how this might play out in other nations. And, of course, my India
work always looking over my shoulder. And so I feel like that's an
example of what it might be. And I was challenged by an
excellent philosopher, Henry Richardson, who gave a plenary
address to our annual meeting. Saying that look it's not enough
to just list these liberties, but you have to show how they
form an integrated system, what it would be to implement them. So I thought I was taking on
that challenge for the case of just one liberty. I'm not going to just march
through them all, sequentially. But I thought that exercise
was very, very helpful. What I'm doing now-- OK so then the next
thing that happened is two young philosophers
wrote a wonderful book called, Disadvantage. One of them is Jonathan Wolfe
from University College London. The other is Avner
de-Shalit from Israel. And it was a book based
on empirical studies of immigrant groups in
their two countries. Which they had done
they had to talk with these groups about
my capabilities list, gotten their reactions to it. So it had an empirical aspect. But it also had, and
think more importantly, a theoretical aspect. Where they made
various suggestions for modifying and
expanding the approach. Which I thought, I mean--
of course a lot of things are written and only some of
them are, really, first rate. But this was really first rate. And it really made me want
to sit up and take notice. They said, first
of all, you want to specify not just capability,
but capability security. So you want to develop a concept
of capabilities as guaranteed over time. Because one of the
things they found in their immigrant
populations, not surprisingly, they didn't know what the case
would be tomorrow, you know. And they wanted a
sense of security. So that was one thing
that they added. And then they had
these two concepts that I thought
were very valuable. One was fertile functioning. And the other is
corrosive disadvantage. Fertile functioning--
and of course they did it for alliterative purposes, but
I think they should have said fertile capability-- is a capability that
when you secure it, is particularly valuable
in opening up others. Now I already said that
education was like that. But, you know, just thinking
about that conceptually is actually very clarifying. And a corrosive disadvantage,
by the same token, is a disadvantage that has
the consequence of eating away at all the others. So those were the
suggestions they made. They also made other, more
concrete, suggestions. Like, access to instruction
in the majority language, was one of the things their
immigrant groups particularly needed and didn't have. So anyhow, I wrote
about that book and I really built it
into what I'm doing now. So what I'm doing
now is this overview. But it's not just an overview,
it's actually a rethinking. And it has all these
new wrinkles in it. And all kinds of
things that people have brought to my attention. And, therefore, it's proven. I mean, I thought, initially,
it might just be a chore. To write something that could be
used in undergraduate teaching was the task. But it's actually proven to
be extremely exhilarating. Because I rethink everything. What I'll do after that, I've
got this project underway that's been underway
for some time. Thinking about how to
bring my work my long term work on emotions together
with the work on capabilities, by thinking about the way
in which public cultivation of emotions can affect the
stability of a society that's built on the idea
of human capability. My great editor, Terry Moore,
from Cambridge University Press said, why don't you
write a book called Compassion and Capabilities,
bringing these two sides of yourself together. And he died shortly after that. But anyway, I did think
that was a challenge that I want to meet. And think about the various
ways in which, by public symbol, ceremony, but also by
educational strategies, countries do nourish a, kind
of, emotional attachment to good principles. And, thereby, underwrite
the stability. So I've been thinking a lot
about good and bad forms of patriotism and nationalism. And all of that. So that's the current work. Yes. STUDENT: I have another
question about the limits on or having unlimited
capabilities. For example, you
mentioned the twist on healthy and also high
rates of sexual abuse. And insofar as unhealthy choices
might lead to such abuse, how would you think
about limiting all these, sort of, positive capabilities
by external things like duty and shame from
outside of the person? MARTHA NUSSBAUM: Well, I think-- what I'm thinking about here
is the job of government. And I think the
job of government stops when you feel that
a full fledged choice is available to people. Now, when that point is
reached is of course, very hard to know. And I think you do have to
think about family pressures and community pressures in
thinking about that question. So you certainly want children
to feel that they have a choice to leave their community. And you want them
not just to feel that, you want them to have
employment options that make that choice possible. But beyond that, I
guess I think it's a different question,
what to do about people who make bad choices. And who might do so because,
even, of adaptive preferences. If women choose
abusive relationships, well I'm not prepared to say
that people never choose that. I think what a good state
should do is make available plenty of exit options,
plenty of education about your worth and dignity,
and plenty of economic support. So that you don't
have to be stuck there because you can't get a job-- and plenty of
shelters and so on. But as to whether, you don't
go and rescue somebody forcibly from that situation. I wouldn't, myself, go that far. Even though, of course,
capabilities are at risk. So that's where
in my own version of the implementation
of the approach, I'm at the
Libertarian end of it. There are people who
think that with respect to health, bodily integrity,
and so on, the state is entitled to promote
healthy function. You know, by just
penalizing people who lead an unhealthy lifestyle. And so within the
group of people who are working on the approach,
there are different positions. But my position is more that
what we have to think about is what is meaningful choice? Once that point is there, well
then the other mechanisms that shape human life, such as,
as you say, honor and shame, we should not try to
interfere with those. Now, of course I think
that shame is often used publicly in ways that
are bad and deforming. And actually I wrote
a book that discussed shame and the law in
order to talk about things like punishments
based on shaming, why that's a bad
thing, and so on. So it's not like shame
doesn't have a public face that I'm concerned with. But I also think it
has a nonpublic face. And that, up to a
point, we really don't want to interfere
with its operations, so long as sufficient
work has been done in all these different
areas of human life to guarantee meaningful choice. Yeah. STUDENT: What data not currently
collected or collected well, would lead to a
better implementation of the capabilities approach
in countries around the world? MARTHA NUSSBAUM: Yeah. Yeah, thanks. That's great. Well we just need to
know more about what goes on in the household. And I fear that Gary Becker's
great work on the family has actually been
an impediment here. Because in his
treatise on the family, he made the assumption that
the head of the household is a benevolent altruist who
will take care adequately for internal distributions. Everyone was influenced by that. And, of course, it was an
enormously valuable work. It put the family on the
agenda the economics. So it was a great book. But it had this one feature
that was rather unfortunate. Because, actually,
heads of households, mostly male, are not
beneficent altruists. And when little
girls are starving or are not taken to the
doctor when they're sick-- all these very
familiar phenomena of developing country life-- it's because the
head of the household has decreed that some lives are
more worth saving than others. Now, of course,
it might actually be the mother who
implements this. But it's not without the
collaboration of the husband. So we need a lot
more information about different family members. And some of the data about
sex ratios in morbidity and mortality has to be based
on very indirect things, like the sex ratio
in the nation. And that's not
really good enough. All the more since the
census is notoriously prone to inaccuracies. I mean, the sex ratio
that demographers expect if women and men
are given equal nutrition and health care is one
or two women to 100 men. In India, the latest census
gives 92 women to 100 men. So we know there's a lot of
something happening to women. And it's some combination
of differential nutrition, differential health
care, some infanticide. But more often now,
sex selective abortion. Because at least we do
have the natality ratio. So we could pick up on that. But what actually it is,
you see, we don't know. And we don't even know if
these numbers are accurate. And a group that I
worked with in Bihar, did a house to house count
and found 75 women to 100 men. So that's very different
from the state data. But the Bihar is a
notoriously corrupt state. So we need better data. And particularly data about
the household, I would say. And then, just in
every region, we need data that are
independently gathered by responsible agencies. And that don't depend on the
corrupt procedures of states that usually want to
make themselves look good and win re-election. Yeah. STUDENT: It seems
like a system that endorses a list of
incommensurate rights might not serve
as a particularly good guide to state action in
a world with limited resources. If we only have
enough money to build either a school or a
hospital, but not both, the state's going to have
to, self-consciously, value either
senses, imagination, and though or bodily integrity. And sacrifice one for the other. How can the capabilities
approach, conceptually, deal with that sort of thing? MARTHA NUSSBAUM:
Yeah, of course, that's a very big question. That comes up prominently
in this approach. And, actually, if you really
want to read something about it, there's a volume
that my colleague Eric Posner edited with Matt Adler,
called Cost Benefit Analysis. It came from an issue of the
Journal of Legal Studies, so it's in there too. And I have an article,
called "The Cost of Tragedy", where I really address
this in detail. But, briefly, I
think what you first want to say is, where you
do have that situation, assuming you really have to
make that terrible choice, then you know that you're
in a tragic situation where full justice
is not being done. And it's important to
acknowledge that, to say, well we are not in
the position, yet, of being a minimally
just society. Because we can't deliver
both of these important goods up to a minimal threshold level. Now that's not just piteous
hand-wringing, I think. Because it can motivate
you to think ahead. And to design things
in a better way. So then you-- and is what
Hegel said about the value of tragedy, right-- you think, how did I get
into this predicament, where I can't do justice to
both of these values? And then you might look around. And you might notice
that someone else thought more creatively and
didn't get into that pickle. And I think this does happen in
India, in the following sense. A lot of parents face
a terrible choice between sending their
children to school and getting enough to eat. Because if they don't send
the children out to work, they don't get enough to eat. Well, but then we
notice that Kerala, an unusually poor state, has
actually got 99% literacy. And the people are in
pretty good health. How did it do that? And this is the question
the Supreme Court of India asked when it was
about to interpret the new constitutional
right to education. The way they did it was
multi-session school days. So that working children could
go at various different times. Plus, a nutritious midday
meal served in the school. That would be like a
carrot to the poor parents to send the child to school. The Supreme Court of India
ordered all schools in India to serve a mid-day meal that
had at least 350 calories and 18 grams of protein. That's judicial
activism for you. But, anyway, so the
claim is that's the way to cut through this tragedy. We see a path that has
cut its way through. And so we know that this is
not inevitability of life. And I think we usually
should think that way. Now, of course, goals should
not be set unrealistically given where we are. So if we said, well the
minimum of education is that all people should
have post-graduate degrees. And we were trying to shoot
for that right away starting from a position
of great poverty, that that might be too Utopian. And it might be a recipe
for hand-wringing that wouldn't be very productive. So I think you have to set
the goals realistically. And what India has
done is to make constitutional entitlement of
primary and secondary education cost-free. And then implement it in a
creative and thoughtful way. And then if you can't
do that, you better ask for help from outside. That's the next part. So if you're really not corrupt
and you've thought very well. And you're just plain poor. Then, I think that that's
the situation where it's the duty of the richer
nations to help you out. But then they better do it,
once again, in a creative way. Not just throwing
some cash around. But thinking what
are the programs that would really be helpful here? And, in your case,
where you have to build either a
school or a hospital. I mean, once again, I don't
think that such choices ever occur in exactly that form. Because good schooling
costs next to nothing. Some of the best education
that I've ever seen in India is provided by NGOs, who-- they're supported themselves
by some grants from, usually, Sweden or the Netherlands. But they they don't
have much money and they use no resources. They sit on the ground,
they use a slate. But it's the passion and the
commitment of the teachers that drives the education. And it's much better than what's
happening in most government schools. So I think the school
could be done on the cheap, so long as you have
people with passion. The hospital, obviously, needs
a lot more money and equipment. So that would be the way I would
approach that particular one in the short run. Yes. STUDENT: So this is
kind of a related point. I'm wondering to
what extent do you have a theory about
intergenerational capabilities. So it's the question
of, should we spend money giving
people capabilities today or invest in things
that will lead to development capabilities
for their children and future? MARTHA NUSSBAUM: That's
one of the big things that I think remains to be
worked on for the future. And in some tiers
of justice I said, Rawls mentioned four areas
that his theory had not dealt with yet. And I was going to
address three of them. And the one I didn't
address was actually justice for future generations. Partly because I thought he
did pretty well on that one with adjust savings principle. And so I do think that that's
a good starting point if you want to think about that. But I also think that
it's going to have to involve thinking about
environment in a way that I'm not yet equipped to do. And, therefore--
one thing is I'm going to do a lot more
teaching with my colleagues and thinking about
this with people who do work on
that kind of thing, like David Weisbach and others. But, you know, that's why
we have an association. That people who are
expert in different areas should work out. And I've had graduate students
who are off teaching now, who we're working on
capabilities and environment. So I think that's a
collaborative project. And it's not one that
I feel I can do alone. Because it does involve
technical issues about discounting and so on. But it's very, very important. Now I do think that a society
shouldn't be able to get off the hook very easily. Because I do think most
societies well and honestly run can deliver the capabilities up
to some reasonable threshold. That's why Kerala
is a good example. Because it's not actually all
that well-run in some respects. But even then, it
somehow managed to deliver the goods in
important areas, while still being quite poor. And so it gives
people less excuse. They can't pass the buck
to the next generation quite so easily. So I think that's
very important. And I guess, in
any case of India, I feel like so much is
deferred, basic justice. I mean a woman who wants
to file rape complaint will have to wait 10 years
before her case gets to court. So I would, in
practical terms, I would put the onus
on the government to do something about
it here and now. Yes. STUDENT: What's [INAUDIBLE] that
these capabilities correlate with or trade off with just
a conception of happiness. For example, bodily health,
we touched on earlier. Like soda might make
someone very happy. But then, you know,
too much of it might harm a society's
health standard. To what extent do these
capabilities shred off on that? MARTHA NUSSBAUM:
Well, it depends what one means by happiness. The new research on happiness is
not terribly clear about that. Because sometimes
they seem to be talking about a feeling of
pleasure, which is what Bentham meant by happiness. Sometimes they mean
something much more nebulous, like the feeling of satisfaction
with your life as a whole. And when they ask questions,
like, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole? Even that question is ambiguous. Because is it asking, do you
have a feeling of satisfaction? Or is it asking, do
you, on reflection, judge that your life is a
whole has been successful? We had a conference on happiness
a couple of years ago, here, there's an issue of The Journal
of Legal Studies devoted to that, where some
of us have weighed in with some critical judgments. But think about John Stuart
Mill on his deathbed. Now, he was in a lot of pain. He also knew, as
he states, that he would not-- because he didn't
believe in an afterlife-- that he would never be
reunited with Harriet, which was something he
passionately desired. His wife, who had
that died before him. And so he was unhappy, in the
sense of not feeling satisfied or pleased . On the other, hand,
his last words were, "I have done my work." And I think those words
express a judgment. That his life, as a whole, had
been a success, in some sense. And so, you know, which
one are they asking about? So thinking about, was Mill
judging that he was satisfied with his life as a whole. I think the answer is yes. But was he feeling
pleased or satisfied, no. So I think these questions
are profoundly ambiguous. And once we clear it up, then
we can start posing questions. And I guess I think, Mill's own
conception of happiness, which is one which involves a lot of
different kinds of activities managed by your own choice. But also, feelings of delight. That's a good
conception of happiness. Because I think it is important
to include feelings of delight. This is something that
Aristotle didn't do. So I think it makes the best
combination between Bentham and Aristotle by
emphasizing both. Lots of activity
and lots of choice. And feelings of delight. So I like that
conception of happiness. And I think that's an
important one to shoot for. But so anyway, it
just depends what we think we're talking about. I'm afraid that our time is up. But thanks very much. And ask me any other
questions by email. [APPLAUSE]
