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psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud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.
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