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Martha Nussbaum
Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at The University of Chicago; she currently holds appointments there in the Law School and in the Departments of Philosophy, Classics and Political Science. Her many prize-winning books and hundreds of published essays cover topics from cosmopolitanism to cloning, from Aristotle's Movement of Animals to Orwell's 1984. She has contributed greatly to our understanding of the ideal of liberal education with her book, Cultivating Humanity (Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), winner in 2002 of the Grawemeyer Award in Education. In Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton Univ. Press, 2004) she examines how disgust and shame themselves can reflect and distort our moral judgment. Theories of justice based on the idea of a social contract imagine bargaining agents who design basic political principles as "free, equal, and independent," "fully cooperating members of society over a complete life." It may be questioned whether such approaches can handle severe cases of physical disability. Severe mental disabilities must, in such theories, be handled as an afterthought, after the basic institutions of society are already designed. Thus the mentally disabled are not among those for whom society's basic institutions are structured. I argue that this is not acceptable. A satisfactory account of human justice requires recognizing the many varieties of disability, need, and dependency that "normal" human beings experience, and thus the very great continuity between "normal" lives and those of people with lifelong mental disabilities. I argue that my "capabilities approach," starting from a conception of the person as a social animal, whose dignity does not derive entirely from an idealized rationality, can help us to design an adequate conception of the full and equal citizenship of people with mental disabilities.
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