it's really a tremendous honor and a pleasure for us to be hosting this event on Martha Nussbaum is important new book political emotions and in particular to have Martha present to set us straight about it it's a pleasure for me in particular I first met Martha in 1999 in Australia in Canberra of all places well-known for philosophy and that was another workshop on her work very engaging one interdisciplinary and of course Martha carried all before her in her engagements with lawyers philosophers literary theorists political scientists and others but one of the things that sticks in my memory is Martha kind of casually mentioning at one point that she every morning did a major run in preparation for a half marathon and that's kind of established a motif in my mind about Martha which is simply one can't keep pace with her either physically or intellectually however it's a lot of fun trying and you learn a lot not only is it a personal pleasure I think it would be fair to say that you'd be hard-pressed to identify anyone in the post Rawls generation of moral and political philosophers who has done more to move the subject in interesting and fruitful directions and often in Martha's case that has been by elaborating on or focusing on areas that Rawls himself had Ida tended to marginalize or to give insufficient attention to so for example her investigations into the theory of the good life primary to the notion of capabilities her concerns were the place of women non-western cultures were disabled and finally the concern that we have today which is with the moral and political significance of emotions political philosophy like any domain of thought has a tendency to follow fads and so forth people have remained often imprisoned within a kind of rossion framework Martha is accepted large aspects of that framework but it's done a huge amount to elaborate it and strengthen it in very important ways and I think in this way she's been an incredibly powerful and benign influence in our discipline and I am I know that I was one of many people who was absolutely delighted with this year she's the Lak lecturer in at Oxford University perhaps the most prestigious lecture series in the discipline and Martha is only the second woman in its 60-year history to be given that honor which of course reflects extremely well on her though perhaps she might agree with me in thinking not quite so well on the attitude of the discipline to women but we're putting those sorts of concerns aside and I would like to welcome Martha to give us an account of what she was up to in political emotions I first want to start by thanking John for organizing this meeting I'm extremely grateful and grateful to all of the four speakers for putting time into reading this quite unwieldy book and giving me the benefit of your insights so thank you and I hope after each of the papers I'll make some very brief comments because I also want to hear what everyone here has to say about the book now this book was really at the confluence of two areas of thinking that have been my preoccupations throughout my career on the one hand normative political philosophy of course working for a long time on the capabilities approach as a major building block of minimal social justice and a very demanding one one that requires people to sacrifice quite a lot of their own self-interest for the sake of others on the other hand I've worked on the philosophical theory of emotions and have worked on emotions such as love and compassion but also disgust and stigma and of course Locke lectures follow that strand by talking about anger but in any case I knew that I had to bring the two together because there is this problem about political principles that even if you get good political principles and you have modeled a society in accordance with good ideals how are you gonna make it work and how are you going to sustain it over time and this is a problem that does not at all new with me and there's a long tradition of thinking about it and indeed Rawls does make a major place for that in I think one of the most interesting parts of a theory of justice part 3 where he says all right we've got the principles of justice but how do we bring up people to want to love that and support that now I think that's the right question I think his answer ends up being a bit disappointing because it's extremely abstract and in a way unreal it talks about direct love of principles in a way that I think doesn't really betray enough of an understanding of what human beings are like what makes them care intensely about something and so I wanted to tackle the problem in a rauzein spirit but with with a richer I hope account of human emotions so the question is what what makes people want to support political principles that require sacrifice of self interest and that require them to treat other people as equals not marginalizing them or stigmatizing them so we have a lot of problems on our plate and I'm imagining throughout that we're in not exactly in Roz's well-ordered society but pretty close so that we have good political principles embodied in some sort of constitutional framework written or unwritten and so the problem is how to make that more fully realized strive to implement it more fully but then also how to render it stable over time and I guess I would add that my motivation in my own political context was seeing how the admirable commitments of the new deal and to an extent also the war on poverty have just kind of gone down the drain in America because there's no will in the electorate to sustain those so how did that happen how did people how did that fail and of course in a democracy you got to do what people want to do and so the people have to want to do things that are noble says so that's what I was puzzling about now I should say right away that it's far from my intent to think that society is built on the emotions as on a foundation I still think that the core of political justice is given in the form of principles and that those principles ought to be embodied in a constitutional framework of some sort so the question is really how to sustain and support those and if we're going to do that well then the emotions have to be of a certain sort I don't say with Rawls that they have to be exactly focused on the principles themselves at least not initially but I do think that we need two things that I talked about in the book number one a bridge a bridge from narrower more particular istic emotions to broader more inclusive principle embracing emotions and second since emotions are always in their nature somewhat particular istic we also need a continual dialogue Anna critical dialogue between the emotions that the political culture cultivates and the principles that the political culture is built upon so how to arrange for that bridge and how to arrange for that dialogue to sub-themes that it's important to introduce now the first is the question of a critical political culture when people think about political emotions they think right away bad examples like Nazi Germany emotions that whipped up stigma against minorities or like energy against foreigners and so on and you know people think well it has to be like that no I think it doesn't have to be like that but we have to take that question off and make it very central to the project all the way through so how can there be a political culture that encourages people to feel certain emotions like let's say on Martin Luther King Day a love of the principles of racial justice and the love of our fellow citizens as members of a society striving toward justice while at the same time encouraging a genuinely critical political culture and I'll say more about that in a minute when I get to the historical part of the book so that's one sub theme throughout how can we arrange for it not to be a form of uncritical solid ristic rote learning second sub theme is political liberalism because and John will discuss this in a minute and is extremely fascinating and valuable paper I have been persuaded that Rawls was correct in thinking that the political culture of a just society ought to be built on principles that can become over time the object of an overlapping consensus among people who hold many different religious and secular comprehensive conceptions of the good and yet are themselves reasonable in the sense that they're willing to treat one another with equal respect and to propose and accept fair terms of cooperation so object of an overlapping consensus but also what what that means for Rawls is that the principles if they're really going to show equal respect for the people who have different religions and different secular conceptions must be what Rawls calls free standing that is not built upon any particular comprehensive conception of value either religious or secular but drawn from materials that are implicit in the background culture of democratic society now of course that background culture is itself heterogeneous it contains many different things so you don't have to show that it contains everything that's there that would be impossible because it's all quite contradictory but you have to show that you get it from there not from a comprehensive conception of value so that it's not establishing as it were one comprehensive doctrine and demoting the others and that means for Rawls and for me that it must be thin an extent that is refusing to pronounce uncertain divisive matters such as the life after death or the ultimate destiny of the soul and it must also be kind of metaphysically thin in the sense it's not built on a metaphysical foundation or even on specific epistemological foundations but it must be just an ethical doctrine that is narrow in extent and is the basis for the political principles so those are sub-themes and we're certainly going to talk about these later on now I want to say a little something about each section of the book ok so the first section is historical because I this is just how I think because I think by challenging ourselves by the strongest examples from the history of philosophy we end up getting the most out of ourselves and we get doctrines that are rich and nuanced rather than narrow and and continue no just built on the latest Journal article so I noticed that this is a topic that had a rich and lively history particularly right after the French Revolution I think the reason for that is that as long as the monarch told you what you had to do in a way there wasn't the question of why you would sacrifice you just had to do it or you'd be put to death but with democracy there is this danger of lapsing into narrow self-interest and and with the advent of capitalism that danger seemed to the thinkers that I've talked about to be all the more urgent so I start with Rousseau who in the very importance is the section of the social contract called on the civil religion argues that we need a culture of sentiment if we're going to sustain a democratic political culture that promotes admirable ideals and so I agree with him about the importance of that but his version of it it was in many ways frightening because it is so solid heuristic and so homogeneous that it doesn't have any room for individual diversity of view and it's enforced from the top so that people who don't fall in into line with a civil religion are going to be banished or even put to death so this gives us some ideas but also some very important warnings now the next one is Giuseppe Mazzini the great Italian Patriot who really was in favor of a regime of global justice so this is going to be come up in Sarah fines presentation but he thought that you had to begin with the love of the nation because that's something that people's minds could embrace it's just we're narrow creatures and were moved by symbols and by particularity and so he wanted to fashion a kind of patriotism that would enable people who were already mired in the self-interest that he saw as characteristic of early capitalism to go outside themselves and sacrifice for one another to create a genuine culture of equality and so then we move on and auguste comte in the 19th century I think an otherwise quite neglected the thinker today but a very important one for my project wrote extensively about what he called the religion of humanity and he too like Matson he thought that narrow compassion was our primary problem that we have a lot of sympathy but we keep it within the family or the narrow cultural group and so how to arrange to extend our sympathies first to our other fellow nationals and then eventually because he liked not seen he was in favor of a global public culture to the whole of humanity so contests elaborate proposals for this which are quite interesting and they do use the arts and other things that I favor but again like Rousseau it's much too solid heuristic there's no room for individual critique there's no room for individual variation there's going to be this Council of philosophers situated in France of course and they are gonna tell you what you have to do in the most Manute respects you have to observe certain rituals because he studied Roman Catholic worship quite in detail and he thought we have to have exerting religion of humanity substitutes for every motivationally affective part of Roman Catholic worship so you have rituals where you kneel and pray to great heroes of humanity and so on and Tran Stuart Mill who knew Kant's work well and thought of it is extremely important still feels that this is both objectionable and ridiculous so now we move to the two real archetypes of the book and the first of these is indeed Mill who in utilitarianism there's this very interesting part where he says how how are we gonna bring the individual pursuit of individual utility in line with the desired pursuit of general utility well we have to do something like what Auguste Comte did and teach people to care for all of humanity and how are we gonna do that well in his book on calm he basically that's basically a negative book he says we can't do it the way Conte did it in a way that suppresses individual liberty and critique and then he says very little more about the positive project in the utility of religion he does talk about a religion of humanity that can teach us to identify our own good and our own success with that of humanity but it's all very abstract the only time he gets a little more detailed is in his rector's address as rector of st. Andrews University in Scotland where he says that Scotland is on the right track by teaching critical thinking but also aesthetic education which teaches us things about human life gives us a richer understanding of the human sentiments and he thinks England which has a narrower conception of higher education is on the wrong track but again it's pretty thin and it doesn't talk about childhood which is of course a crucial part of this so I then turn since the book is about us but also focuses quite a lot on India who and my second country so to speak to herb in turneth Tagore who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 but he was also a pioneering philosopher who gave the Hibbert lectures in Oxford in 1930 in a book that he wrote in English called the religion of Manon so it's direct continuation of these projects he knew both quant and mill extremely well and he also was an educator who set up a school in Chandini Kenton which actually put these ideas into practice so Tagore is in much richer field for me and I talked about his effort and I think quite successful effort to show how you can have rich emotional culture based on love and his archetype is the child's the mutual love between parent and child based on love but also allowing for an encouraging individual critique and individual freedom and he has quite a lot to say about how you do this in the school through a kind of Socratic pedagogy through the use of the Arts and then he uses this amazing example that the citizen of the future will be like one of the bowels of Bengali who are countercultural singers who practice a lot of the kind of countercultural sexual and unconventional practices but what they have to offer is an overwhelming love of humanity that's very generous and does not involve clinging to their own narrow self-interest so so anyway I talk a lot about how to Gore cultivates these emotions through the school and in particular he wants to invest and include women in this search because he actually believed that women were a neglected part of the future of humanity because they they're in a way more countercultural than ed because they've never been the diamond group and so he focused a lot in the school on empowering women and at this point I turn to a book by a woman who herself was a leading dancer in his dance dramas the mother of a Martius and in fact but anyway a thinker in her own right named Amita sin who talked about how the arts empowered us to think of citizenship in a particular way so that's the historical part of the book the second part of the book is called resources and problems and it really says well so far the historical thinkers that we've looked at see a narrow compassion as our primary problem but there may be other problems and we have to learn what we really should say about human psychology we better understand as well as we can what resources we have in human psychology and what problems we have to contend with I begin by a kind of sketch of the goals that we're heading towards because of course any kind of political conception can invest the emotions in its own direction so I spell out a kind of abstract version of my own capabilities approach to give give a sense of where we're heading and therefore that helps us target what problems in human psychology might be in our way because of course we first of all talking about carefully distinguish which is a kind of condescending emotion looking down at someone who's suffering whom you think to be below you compassion as the name etymologically suggests his fellow feeling it's feeling with someone that involves the idea that what they're suffering is something seriously bad and that it was not brought on by their own fault and that you are in the same boat that is we share a kind of common human vulnerability and you yourself might expect to suffer similar things and then I go on to show that in modern research shows that indeed compassion is something we can develop by narrative art that's one thing that I'm interested in a second that it can indeed lead quite powerfully to helping behavior Daniel Batson who has done wonderful experimental research over the years has I think shown that quite well you know other things equal of course they're not usually equal but the third problem that we get to is the compassion really is in its original state quite narrow what Batson shows is that if you know some Universal principle directing your helping efforts but then you hear one person's story that will often cause you to diverge from the helpful principle and you'll just focus on the one person so if you know what the fair principle for allocating scarce kidneys is and then you hear one story of let's say Rachel who needs a kidney and her boyfriend broke up with her last year and she's just lost her mother and so you hear this detailed story you want to help Rachel even if the fair principal doesn't put her at the top of the list so that's a compassion is its own worst enemy in wet and so we have to engineer a bridge from the normal compassion that has those vicissitudes to the more principal related compassion so that's the notion of the bridge but then of course we still need to have a dialogue as well between principle and emotion to make sure the emotions on the right track so confession has value but it also has problems I then turned to an emotion that I've spent a lot of time with in my career that the emotion of disgust because I think that they were all wrong to ignore a kind of darker side to human nature except for Tagore who I think implicitly not in great detail but he does gesture towards this we have something wrong with us that no other animal does and I extend part of the book studying the altruism of other animals we're infected by the desire not to be animals and that is something that's not true of elephants or dogs or whatever so this desire which the great primatologist Fran's de Valle calls anthropo denial the denial the word an anthropos of species of animal infects our projects from a very early stage we feel like we want to dominate our fate we don't want to be at the mercy of nature like the animals and we can have this experience already quite early in infancy and childhood the idea of being helpless while you really think you have to control things is a part of the human life cycle because unlike other animals we are helpless physically while we're cognitively quite mature and so that sets the stage for a kind of gainful dynamic where we ask ourselves to rise above our animality and that leads to the formation and the argue of emotions that target the body and the bodily fluids for a negative and pejorative attitude which is basically what I define as disgust but disgust is directed in the first instance at the bodily waste products the things that are associated with animality there psychologists who've studied it Paul Rozin in particular these objects of primary disgust animal reminders but then what happens in every society we know is that disgust is also projected onto groups of human beings that we then subordinate we define them as hyper animal hyper bodily and we use our domination of them we being whoever's in the dominant group to help us get further away from our own animality so if we can say african-americans are smelly dirty they're like animals then we feel further away from being animals ourselves and so this irrational and very ugly dynamic is present towards some group or other in I think every society we've known whether it's the caste hierarchy in India and I spend time with Tagore's novel gora at this point whether it's discrimination against African Americans in America whether it is discrimination against gays and lesbians or and I think in so many cultures women are targeted by this dynamic because they're thought to be more bodily and therefore more animal stuff we got to figure out what to do about that and that gives us a further challenge that the emphasis unlimited compassion by itself does not already give us in the process of talking about human development I mean it's a long section that I can't give all the arguments now but I spend a lot of time on trying to argue that at each stage when we encounter these difficulties in ourselves it's only a spirit of love which I think initially is engendered by parental or caretaker relations but of course quickly moves beyond that it's only a spirit of love often nourished by play and imaginative playing and here I'm drawing a lot on Donald Winnicott that can help us move beyond the bad tendencies in ourselves so it's in that part of the book do you get the my view about why love is a necessary antidote and while a more non emotional attitude such as respect will probably be insufficient to contend with very powerful negative forces in the human personality okay so that's the second part and in a transitional set of remarks I know that I say well why do modern societies have to work with there are many places where they can engender emotions they can use political rhetoric they can use art public sculpture architecture the construction of public parks but in every case if it's going to be done well number one it has to be in tandem with the robust cultivation of a critical public culture and number two it has to be done in a way that's contextually sensitive so there's no I mean that's why the third part of the book is it's full of examples because there's no solution that one can get in the form of an abstract theory because each country has to think of its own materials and what it can draw what it must particularly avoid and so on so the third part of the book has three topics and in each case it's there's an argument but also a series of examples the first chapter in part 3 is indeed about patriotism so people think of patriotism is something dangerous indeed it is dangerous but I agree with Mazzini that rightly cultivated a strong love directed at the country can be a very valuable thing both in sustaining sacrifice and in overcoming disgust so patriotism I agree that the nation itself is more than a set of abstract principles so agreeing with Ernst Roehm all and what is a nation I say a nation is really a narrative and so the way that you would harness these more particular istic emotions to the nation is in the first instance through the narrative of the struggles of the nation and the future aspirations of the nation what is it that holds us together of people but of course the narrative has to be of the right sort one that will lead you ultimately as with a bridge to the just political principles and it must also be one that's at every stage infused by a kind of critical dialogue in which the principles play an active speaking part and so so I talk about various instances of where that's done done well and I think my heroes here are Lincoln Gandhi Franklin Delano Roosevelt and so all of whom reconstructed the narrative of the nation in a way that promoted greater aspiration toward the just political principles and just one central example I'll mention here is Martin Luther King jr. who in his I have a dream speech situates himself in the historical tradition but which he then radically renew rates so of course Lincoln began his Gettysburg Address four score and seven years ago and he gave a radical reformulations of America saying that it stands for racial equality when of course it never did before the had a king it says starts his speech five score years ago harking back to the Emancipation Proclamation and then once again he continues Lincoln's project of redefining the narrative of America as one that is a an arc bending toward justice one that has racial justice in its sights but he does it I argue in an in a way that we're poetry particular istic imagery a love of America's geographical features the curvaceous slopes of California the heightening Alleghenies of Pittsburgh all these quite erotic images are a crucial part of what gets people invested in this project of pursuing the arc of justice so that's the patriotism chapter then there's a chapter called tragic and comic festivals and this is the tragic part is about what do we do to get people to care about bad things that are happening to people who are at a distance from them because we find that in every society there are people who are victims of injustice ultimately but if we don't care about them we're not going to do anything about them if we see them as just animals or as not like us and so on then we won't we won't be moved to figure out what we could do about that now the ancient Greek tragic festivals I believe had this project and they devised ways in that limited very narrow Society of extending compassion in creating the bridge that I talked about from narrow emotion to general emotion and I take the film tdys as my case in point and then we also can then at that point have a dialogue between whatever principles we might favor and the emotions that are thereby constructed so how might a modern society contrive to do that we can't come face-to-face watching the same drama and so on well there are a number of different responses but I'll just just exemplify the many and responses by one of them and that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial which arranges indeed to bring us together in an experience of shared mourning that is one one in the same time highly particular istic so it's got all the names of the American dead on it and families actually mourn for individual people and people see the families mourning for the individual people but at the same time it extends our concern to people we never met before I think of course it doesn't do enough with the Vietnamese dead because that was not part of the commission that my Linh was given but at the same time she figured out a way of solving that problem too because the wall is reflective it's a granite wall the names are on this wall but as you look at the wall you also see your own face reflected and so it creates a kind of Socratic self-criticism where were you during the war what did you really think about that was it worth it was it just and so on so I think that monument especially positioned as it is between the Washington Monument with its high aspirational obelisk the Lincoln Memorial with its image of grief and mourning it helps the nation come together around a kind of interrogative memory of the war as an extremely problematic event in our history but one where we we share a kind of sense of loss and mourning comic I associate the comic festivals of ancient Athens particularly with the project of overcoming disgust at the body they did have the the function of glorifying in a way the bodily fluids and the bodily humors and making them seem objects of play and fun rather than of disgust so what could a modern society do to do that well I don't have much time here so I'll just briefly say that Chicago's Millennium Park which is an amazing three-part park it has contrived I think a solution to that problem at least within the culture of a city where we have this pool of water and at one end of the adichie end of it are these huge screens where faces of Chicagoans of different races and ages are displayed moving in slow motion so it's very funny one will raise an eyebrow and it'll take two minutes for the eyebrow to go up and then at the end of each screen each faces time on the screen as if out of the mouths of the face comes a jet of water and it wets the people below and everyone gets in the water together and is delighting in the spray of water and there's an interfacial kind of mixing which of course shared swimming pools were one of the flash points of American racism but it creates a shared swimming pool with these faces of different races and ages and in that way overcomes in a very powerful way bodily discussed and Anish Kapoor's wonderful sculpture Cloud Gate which is up on the hill near there does the same thing by associating it's a stainless-steel kidney bean shape huge reflecting the clouds in the building so it has great beauty but also reflecting the human body with great comedy and so people enjoy seeing their distorted body like funhouse mirror and it again it overcomes disgust at the human body so there's much more to say and I haven't even mentioned the third part the Frank Gehry van shell but but anyway so that's this kind of thing how a society can get people together overcoming disgust the body and finally the final chapter is about various other enemies of compassion so far I focused on the way in which compassion is an enemy of itself if it remains narrow and too particular istic and I focused on disgust but now in this final chapter I focus on three further emotions shame Envy and fear which also have the potential to disrupt good projects and in each case I give examples both from the US and from India about how those painful emotions might be overcome at the very end of the book I take up some more speculative questions and one of them which I'll just mention here is the question whether these political emotions that I imagined are intrinsically valuable or only instrumentally valuable and I think that's a very tough question I don't need it for my project because all I need to rely on is the instrumental claim but I'm tempted to the intrinsic view because I guess I think a citizen who had none of these emotions but still did all the right things there would still be something lacking but anyway that's a kind of speculative no you you