Martha Nussbaum, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, has devoted considerable attention in the last few years to the role that disgust and shame play in our individual and collective lives, particularly in the law.
The book that got it all started was Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, 2004). Here’s a description from the publisher:
Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America’s most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law.
Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated in troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies “magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it.” She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls “primitive shame,” a shame “at the very fact of human imperfection,” and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments.
Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references—from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity—and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy.
This year Nussbaum released another book that applies her theory to homosexuality, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Oxford). Here’s a description from the publisher:
Nussbaum argues that disgust has long been among the fundamental motivations of those who are fighting for legal discrimination against lesbian and gay citizens. When confronted with same-sex acts and relationships, she writes, they experience “a deep aversion akin to that inspired by bodily wastes, slimy insects, and spoiled food—and then cite that very reaction to justify a range of legal restrictions, from sodomy laws to bans on same-sex marriage.” Leon Kass, former head of President Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, even argues that this repugnance has an inherent “wisdom,” steering us away from destructive choices. Nussbaum believes that the politics of disgust must be confronted directly, for it contradicts the basic principle of the equality of all citizens under the law. “It says that the mere fact that you happen to make me want to vomit is reason enough for me to treat you as a social pariah, denying you some of your most basic entitlements as a citizen.”
In its place she offers a “politics of humanity,” based not merely on respect, but something akin to love, an uplifting imaginative engagement with others, an active effort to see the world from their perspectives, as fellow human beings. Combining rigorous analysis of the leading constitutional cases with philosophical reflection about underlying concepts of privacy, respect, discrimination, and liberty, Nussbaum discusses issues ranging from non-discrimination and same-sex marriage to “public sex.” Recent landmark decisions suggest that the views of state and federal courts are shifting toward a humanity-centered vision, and Nussbaum’s powerful arguments will undoubtedly advance that cause.
I exhort the Evangel audience to hear a short interview with Nussbaum on Chicago Public Radio, where she discusses her latest book.
My question for us to tackle is this:
How much of the traditional Christian opposition to same-sex marriage is based on disgust of homosexual persons and behavior?
To make it more personal:
Is your opposition to same-sex marriage based on disgust or “a deep anxiety about the body”? If so, what does your disgust center on?
Do you find it difficult “to imagine with sympathy” the life and the choices of a gay and lesbian person? If so, why?
