Philosophy

Martha Nussbaum on Preference and Desire

Excerpts from Martha Nussbaum's Women and Human Development. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

The Examples of Asanti and Jayamma 21-22. The problems faced by Jayamma and Vasanti are particular to the social situation of women in particular caste and regional circumstances in India. One cannot understand Jayamma’s choices and constraints without understanding, at many different levels of specificity and generality, how she is socially placed: what it means to be an Ezhava rather than a Pulaya, what it means that she lives in Kerala rather than some other state, what it means that she is in the city rather than a rural area, what it means that she is Hindu in Kerala rather than Christian, why she prays every evening and why she thinks it matters, and, of course, what it means more generally that she was born in India rather than in Europe or the U.S.

22a. One cannot understand Vasanti without understanding the double bind of being both upper-caste – with lots of rules limiting what it’s proper to do – and very poor, with few opportunities to do nice proper things that bring in a living. One also cannot understand her story without knowing about family planning programs in Gujarat, the progress of the SEWA [the Self-Employed Women's Association] movement, the background Gandhian tradition of self-sufficiency on which the Gujarati women’s movement draws, and many other highly particular things.

Circumstances Affecting Inner Life 22b. No doubt all this particularity shapes the inner life of each woman, in ways that it is hard for an outsider to begin to understand. ¶ On the other hand, in this highly concrete set of circumstances, in some ways so unlike the circumstances of poor working women in the U.S., are two recognizable and imaginable women, with problems not altogether and unrecognizably different from problems of many women (and many poor people generally) in many parts of the world. The body that labors is in a sense the same body all over the world, and its needs for food and nutrition and health care are the same – so it is not too surprising that the female manual laborer in Trivandrum is in many ways comparable to a female manual laborer in Alabama or Chicago, that she doesn’t seem to have an utterly alien

consciousness or an identity unrecognizably strange, strange though the circumstances are in which her efforts and her consciousness take root.

23. Again, the fact that Vasanti did not go to school again seems odd, but the more general idea that women are basically wives and mothers and that men are workers in the outside world is not in the least unfamiliar. The fact that she does not even seem to want to go to school is not so surprising either, or the sign of an alien consciousness, given that she does not see any signs of a better way of life that she could enjoy by becoming educated. (As we shall see, many women in the SEWA organization become literate quickly enough – when they see women serving as bank tellers and union organizers, and using literacy to better their lives.)

31a. We should do as much as we can to master these and many other facts that construct the circumstances within which women like Vasanti and Jayamma attempt to flourish. These circumstances affect the inner lives of people, not just their external options: what they hope for, what they love, what they fear, as well as what they are able to do. Neither Vasanti nor Jayamma even thinks about getting a college degree – that would be totally alien to their sense of what is possible for them, and there would be no point in even entertaining the thought, however strong-willed, able, and determined they are. By contrast, Meeghan D., a cashier at the Hyde Park Co-op who sometimes rings up my groceries, is finishing her B.A. at Roosevelt College while working full time, and has already been accepted for graduate study in social science at Howard University. She doesn’t know how easy it will be to get a job to support herself in Washington, but she says, ‘‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll make it somehow.’’

Universalism 31b. This [Meeghan D.’s situation] both is and is not similar to the determination and strength of both Vasanti and Jayamma. We should not underrate the extent to which such differences in options construct differences in thought; neither, however, should we overrate these differences, thinking of them as creating an Indian ‘‘essence’’ that is utterly incomprehensible to other imaginations. Certain basic aspirations to human flourishing are recognizable across differences of class and context,

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Martha Nussbaum on Preference and Desire

however crucial it remains to understand how context shapes both choice and aspiration.

31b. There are obtuse ways of thinking [blunt, unsubtle] across cultural boundaries. Some of these ways were characteristic of colonialism all over the world, which typically assumed that the ways of the colonial power were progressive and enlightened, the ways of the colonized people primitive. Such mistaken judgments can still be found today, even among feminists, who sometimes characterize developing cultures as uniformly reactionary and their own as progressive, neglecting the history of sexism in the West and of progressive traditions in the ‘‘East.’’ Such blindness to complexity has made many sensitive thinkers skeptical about all forms of universalism; but of course universalism need not have these defects, and universal values may even be necessary for an adequate critique of colonialism itself.

31-32. Other forms of obtuse universalizing can be found in the current global economy, where it is sometimes assumed that people are all simply rational agents in the global market, seeking to maximize utility whatever their traditions or context. It is because such approaches seem obtuse – neglecting tradition and context and their role in constructing desire and preference, neglecting the many different conceptions of the good that citizens of different nations have and their urgent need to be able to live in accordance with these conceptions – that many sensitive thinkers feel all universalizing approaches are bound to be obtuse, and mere accomplices of a baneful globalizing process. Such thinkers see before them the prospect of a world in which all interesting differences, all the rich texture of value, have been flattened out, and we all go to McDonald’s together. But the fact that some universal approaches are obtuse does not indict them all. Pluralism and respect for difference are themselves universal values that are not everywhere observed; they require a normative articulation and defense. . .

Influences on Desires/Preferences 113a. ...when her husband took his earnings and spent them on himself in somewhat unthrifty ways, leaving Jayamma to support the children financially through her labor, as well as doing all of the housework, this

didn’t strike her as wrong or bad, it was just the way things were, and she didn’t waste time yearning for another way. Unlike Vasanti, Jayamma seemed to lack not only the concept of herself as a person with rights that could be violated, but also the sense that what was happening to her was a wrong.

113b. ...let me introduce one new example, to show the way entrenched preferences can clash with universal norms even at the level of basic nutrition and health. In the desert area outside Mahabubnagar, Andhra Pradesh, I talked with women who were severely malnourished, and whose village had no reliable clean water supply. Before the arrival of a government consciousness-raising program, these women apparently had no feeling of anger or protest about their physical situation. They knew no other way. They did not consider their conditions unhealthful or unsanitary, and they did not consider themselves to be malnourished. Now their level of discontent has gone way up: they protest to the local government, asking for clean water, for electricity, for a health visitor. They protect their food supplies from flies, they wash their bodies more often. Asked what was the biggest change that the government program had brought to their lives, they immediately said, as if in chorus, ‘‘We are cleaner now.’’ The consciousness-raising program has clearly challenged entrenched preferences and satisfactions, taking a normative approach based on an idea of good human functioning.

114. ...feminists who challenge entrenched satisfactions are frequently charged with being totalitarian and antidemocratic for just this way of proceeding. Who are they to tell real women what is good for them, or to march into an area shaped by tradition and custom with universal standards of what one should demand and what one should desire? Aren’t they just brainwashing women, who already had their own ideas of what was right and proper?

115. One of the things this liberal tradition has emphasized is that people’s preference for basic liberties can itself be manipulated by tradition and intimidation; thus a position that refuses to criticize entrenched desire, while sounding democratic on its face, may actually serve democratic institutions

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Martha Nussbaum on Preference and Desire

less well than one that takes a strong normative stand about such matters, to some extent independently of people’s existing desires.

Considering something like informed-desire theory 125. ...when we think of our cases we can easily spot some people who are not in a state of mind that seems conducive to rational choice: Vasanti, intimidated by her husband’s physical abuse and terrified about her survival prospects should she leave him; Jayamma, habituated to thinking that unequal control over household income is just women’s lot.

Second Epigraph, Chapter Two: When we make videos, and women like us watch them, we get confidence to try and make changes. When we see women like us who have done something brave and new, then we get the confidence that we can learn something new too. When poor women see other poor women as health workers on the video, they say, ‘‘I can also learn about health and help solve these problems in my neighborhood.’’ When other self-employed women see me, a vegetable vendor, making these films, they also have the confidence that they can do things which at first seem impossible. (Lila Datania, SEWA, Ahmedabad, 1992)

126a. Again, consider the women of SEWA in my second epigraph [chpt 2], who see videos of women doing daring new things and thereby gain confidence that they can do these things too. Now clearly it is Lila Datania’s point that the experience of watching the videos helps these women make adequate choices for the future – not only by giving them new information but by enhancing their sense of their own possibilities and worth. But we wouldn’t think of this as progress, or a correction of malformed preferences in the direction of ‘‘true’’ preferences, if the women were taught by the videos to hide away in the house all day, or to believe that they were made for physical abuse....It is because we have an implicit theory of value that holds self-respect and economic agency to be important goods that we think the preferences constructed by the videos are good...

126b. Datania’s point is very similar to one made by economist Gary Becker in his 1992 Nobel address, when he observed that women and

minorities frequently underinvest in their own human capital, where education and training are concerned, making bad decisions because they have been brought up to believe that they can’t do certain things that other people can do. Becker argued that social prejudices of various sorts, especially ‘‘the beliefs of employers, teachers, and other influential groups that minority members are less productive can be self-fulfilling,’’ causing the members of the disadvantaged group to ‘‘underinvest in education, training, and work skills’’ – and this underinvestment does subsequently make them less productive. In short, disadvantaged groups – among whom Becker includes ‘‘blacks, women, religious groups, immigrants, and others’’ – internalize their secondclass status in ways that cause them to make choices that perpetuate that second-class status. {Nussbaum note, p. 126: It is not made clear here whether the preferences are deformed or whether the women are led to make choices that are contrary to what they really prefer (since Becker, unlike Paul Samuelson and other advocates of the ‘‘revealed-preference’’ view of choice, makes a conceptual distinction between preference and choice). Probably one should distinguish two levels of generality: at a more general level, the woman’s preference for a flourishing life is not distorted, but is frustrated by the counterproductive choice she makes; at a more concrete level, however, her preference for not getting very much education – which may seem to her the best route available to a flourishing life – can be held to be distorted by the false beliefs she holds.}

True Preferences 129. ...since [philosopher, Richard] Brandt recognizes that errors are frequently deeply implanted in people and cannot always be driven out by a simple disclosure of the relevant facts, he concludes that we can get to the person’s true preferences only by a prolonged process of ‘‘cognitive psychotherapy.’’ The desires that result from this process are used to define rationality for persons. The basic principles of society are then defined in terms of what a fully rational person would support. Thus the account of cognitive psychotherapy forms the core of Brandt’s view of how to choose basic political principles.

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