Dependency and Justice
Lennard J. Davis [1]
I was reading Martha Nussbaum’s book, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, while riding a New York City subway train that was speeding toward downtown. A destitute and disheveled man who seemed to be cognitively impaired entered the car and said, “Help me! I have Parkinson’s disease.” He did not immediately arouse much sympathy or a will to help on the part of his observers. He spoke in a high-pitched, slurring manner that was difficult to understand. I began to go up and down the roller coaster of thoughts and feelings to which we have all become accustomed. He has figured out a scam. How would I actually know if he had a chronic disease? He has fallen through the cracks of the social network—or has he? Is he collecting a check from a social agency? What if he has a chronic illness—does that mean that I have to support him? Should I give him money? What would cause me to reach into my pocket?
In effect, I was mentally rehashing some of the moral and ethical issues concerning dependency that Nussbaum ponders in her book. What theory, if any, of justice might inform my relationship to the man on the subway? Is he dependent on me? Could I be in another situation dependent on him?
Is any theory of justice or dependency itself one that posits a social contract fashioned between equals, or is it based on some inherent capacities and capabilities each human must be said to have? To clarify this point, we have to follow two trends in the history of philosophy, both of which concern the idea of justice.
Social contractarians such as Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and Rousseau assume that in some semi-mythical past, humans met on a cognitive battle field and, after slugging it out for a long time, decided to give up their rights to steal each other’s property and kill each other because they recognized that it would be to their mutual advantage to establish a quid pro quo. Thus the state was born. While each philosopher had different ideas about how this happened, the basis of the argument is that a social contract for mutual advantage emerged, and this guaranteed some rough-hewn idea of justice.
On the other side of the debate are those who believe that humans have a set of inherent rights—rights that exist simply because one is born. No negotiations on any field are necessary to arrive at these; instead, reason and notions of fairness, dignity, and so on will make such rights apparent. The Declaration of Independence, for example, stated the belief that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” No meeting on the field took place to make this arrangement; rather, a Creator gave all people the right to remain alive, to be free, and to scamper after happiness (and, like the pursuit of a suitable mate, not necessarily to succeed in the attainment).
The problem with the man on the subway and me is that if my thoughts tend toward a social contractarian model, that way of thinking is founded on an idea that the original negotiators are equal, so their trade—security instead of lawlessness—is logical. Thus, each individual has the same things to lose and gain. But it is only logical if viewed as a trade between equals. What happens in situations where there is great inequality or where one person is dependent on another for the necessities of life? Nussbaum sees the case of the man on the subway— and of people with disabilities in general—as the example that tests the whole notion behind contractarianism. A contractarian would be stymied here because there is no mutual benefit derived; instead, the severely disabled person receives care and resources, is dependent, and may not give back equal resources or contributions to the other folks who signed the contract for mutual advantage. I work, contribute to the general welfare, and pay taxes that provide social services that may or may not take care of the man on the subway. We are not equals at all—and according to the contractarian model, I am on the losing end of the negotiation.
This has been a problem in general for the idea of social justice based on contract. What do you do about the poor, those who are dependent, or about the underclass that does not work? While everyone in the contract ship is pulling on the oars, the unequal or dependent member of society is getting a free ride. Nussbaum’s favorite philosopher (and the philosopher of first choice for most liberals) is John Rawls. His name tends to be mentioned with a hushed breath of respect by any decent, card-carrying liberal, and Nussbaum counts herself as one. However, her card has been altered by her own hand. She takes Rawls—particularly his books A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism—to respectful task by questioning how his system can leave out three major groups: people with severe disabilities, poor nations and their citizens, and animals. All of these groups are in effect dependent as well. Yes, animals—but more on the furry and feathered kind later. As Nussbaum points out, it is not that Rawls does not consider the issue of equality, but that his system is based on measuring levels of justice by totaling up wealth, property, goods, and services. So for him it’s easy to measure inequality by comparing checkbooks or pay stubs.
Injustice, then, is based on a notion that property has not been fairly exchanged in the social contract. Societies with large gaps in income and property are more unjust than societies that attempt to reduce the gap and provide a fair level of income and wealth to all. So the man on the subway is obviously a living example of injustice because he is so much poorer than the other riders. Nussbaum does not like Rawls’s double-entry bookkeeping system because it does not measure intangibles. Another way of putting this is that money is not everything. For her, Rawls’s system is a procedural one; therefore, “it does not go directly to outcomes and examine these for hallmarks of moral adequacy.” Instead, she favors the other thread of inalienable-rights thinkers. In her case, these are not rights conferred by a Creator but, rather, are arrived at by a reasoning process that “starts from the outcome: with an intuitive grasp of a particular content, as having a necessary connection to a life worthy of human dignity.”
To illustrate her point, she gives us the homey example of a cook with a fancy pasta maker who assures her guests that any pasta that comes out of the device will have to be good. But the guests will only be able to decide if the pasta is good by tasting it. Rawls is the one who built the pasta maker; Nussbaum is the one who tastes the spaghetti. And she is not convinced that the machine alone will make the gourmands happy.
Her solution is to present a tasting menu of rights—what she calls capabilities. She has taken this idea (with a lot of credit) from Indian economist Amartya Sen. So the human-rights meal contains selections from the basic ethical groups: life; health; liberty; freedom of imagination, thought, and belief; love; dignity; social interaction; play; connections with nature; political and material independence; and property rights. This is the list of important capabilities (in tremendous reduction here), and Nussbaum supplies some nuance to these categories. But in the end, the list is “intuitive,” as she acknowledges.
She recognizes that Rawls would be disappointed because her list lacks the hard edge of accountability built into his system—that is, the bottom line of financial indexing. But Nussbaum feels that her model makes up for the deficiencies of Rawls’s approach because it includes more important ineffables that cannot be easily measured.
What do you do when inequality or dependency is not based on purely financial considerations? What if the man on the subway had great wealth, but also had a debilitating physical or mental disability?
Would he have access to justice? Would great wealth also include an idea of being dependent? And would that dependency mitigate the dominance that great wealth might bring? According to Rawls, the man on the subway would not be either dependent or without justice. We would just have to add up his bank accounts to arrive at a knowable tally. Nussbaum disagrees. According to her, the man would not have access to justice because he would still be discriminated against for being disabled and dependent.
And if, for example, he used a wheelchair, all his money would not help him ascend the stairs in an inaccessible building. Likewise, he might lack in the areas of social connection—love, access to nature, and so on. In other words, argues Nussbaum, you cannot measure a lot of the kinds of discriminations and oppressions that occur in the world with a simple financial yardstick. It is not that Rawls forgot to deal with these issues, but as Nussbaum points out, he decides to postpone them, expecting them to be worked out afer a just state is established, by the use of charity, insurance, or whatever means are necessary. Nussbaum puts the central problem clearly: “What have theories of justice in the social contract tradition said about these problems [of disability, poor nations, and animals]? Virtually nothing.” Given that silence, Nussbaum has ample room to theorize. And Nussbaum’s theory of capabilities allows her to provide a rationale for a society that considers itself just to view the care of severely disabled people as part of its basic functioning.
In a global setting, contractarians run into problems because they assume that the basic unit in which the state of nature became the political state is the nation. And if justice arises within the state among equals, the assumption is that nations arrive at a similar egalitarian contract among themselves. But obviously, in a world like ours today, it would be folly to assume that all nations are equals. So, as with her list for citizens, Nussbaum has a list of capabilities for nations. Her list includes richer nations and multinational corporations’ responsibility for poorer nations; respect for national sovereignty; and each nation’s own responsibility to its poor, disabled, elderly, uneducated, and so on.
Nussbaum spells out these responsibilities at some length and with considerable specificity.
It is laudable, and a sign of the times, that a philosopher of Nussbaum’s reputation has written a book on disability. Disability activism and scholarship not only has brought the issue of disability to the table, but has placed it centrally as a necessary subject for the understanding of basic ideas like justice. Indeed, the Supreme Court of the United States has decided a raft of disability-related cases in the past few years that have also been crucial in defining the very relationship between federal law and states’ rights. So it seems logical that Nussbaum, who has written on the issue of women’s rights and human rights, has come to the issue of disability. She mentions throughout the book that her sister’s son is autistic, as she also references the work of philosopher Eva Kittay and author and critic Michael Bérubé—both of whom have children with major cognitive and other impairments. So there is more than a simple academic interest that drives this book.
One has to appreciate the work that Nussbaum has done here, but certain problems become apparent to anyone who has worked in the field of disability. While Nussbaum engages with the work of some disability scholars—notably Kittay, Anita Silvers, and Susan Wendell, all philosophers—she seems not to have taken the time or effort to read through the rather extensive body of scholarly writing on disability in general. Or if she has, her reading list, citations, and discussions do little to reveal this fact. The book is notably lacking in references to many of the major thinkers and activists who have concerned themselves with disability. Since Nussbaum is a philosopher, one could argue, she understandably confines herself to the writings of philosophers on the subject, but the work as a whole suffers from a somewhat parochial vision of the general issue. The book’s obsession is, in fact, more with Rawls than with disability. As such, the conclusions reached, while valuable, lack a certain resonance that a wider acquaintance with the field could have brought.
Also, there is an obvious distinction between people with disabilities and animals that Nussbaum tends to blur. The former are, after all, humans with moral consciousness (Nussbaum does not deal with liminal lives such as that of Terri Schiavo) who can contribute to the contractarian exchange in various financial and non financial ways. But animals do not have a moral consciousness, even if they do have agency. Nussbaum also makes the distinction between a moral position that we might take not to cause suffering to animals, and a right an animal has simply because it is an animal. She faults contractarianism for lacking a way to attribute such rights to animals, and she partially appreciates utilitarians like John Stuart Mill and contemporary philosopher Peter Singer.
Singer has been most influential in the animal-rights movement, stating essentially that because animals exhibit choice and the ability to suffer, we must act in ways that maximize their abilities to make choices and avoid suffering. Nussbaum acknowledges the value of this approach, but she ends up faulting it for not having enough of a sense that animals, too, have rights beyond a pleasure/pain calculus.
The problematic part of this formulation is that Nussbaum gets close to equating animals with severely disabled people. She is smart enough to avoid a straightforward equation; nevertheless, some people with disabilities have found this line of reasoning offensive.
Perhaps it is in this attempt to link the rights of animals with the rights of people with disabilities that the issue of dependency is most apparent. Animals are dependent on humans for a certain quality of life, although they obviously can live in the available environment without any help from humans. Their quality of life might suffer, or improve, but in the end the dependency is one that is not inherent in the relationship. But in the case of people with severe disabilities, the dependency is part of the relationship. In a human rights sense, then, we acknowledge that all humans have a right to live in dignity and have basic and even higher needs met. This is not a contractual arrangement as much as it is a rights assumption. Dependency, then, is not a state of inequality but rather it is a state of exchange or exception. The exchange is inherent in the notion that any human has been and will be in a state of dependency, that we can exchange states of being and still retain humanity. It is a state of exception in one sense of being a state outside the norm. But in another sense, it is a state well within the norm. As I have said elsewhere, if we redefine our notions of independence to include the vast networks of assistance and provision that make modern life possible—no one can live without being dependent on these—then the seeming state of exception of disability turns out to be the unexceptional state of existence.
In the end, a final problem is that when the smoke clears, and all is said and done, the conclusion of the book is that we should respect and honor people with disabilities because they are people with rights and sensibilities. That is not a controversial position, although it took a long time to get there. And the problem remains that how we determine the list of capabilities is largely intuitive. Nussbaum likes that, but Rawls and others might find the list arbitrary, a bit touchy-feely, and ultimately not subject to any accountability other than a notion of human compassion, fairness, and, of course, justice. Nothing to sneer at in those ideas, but we might not need a philosopher to get us to them.
Her own language highlights this issue: “the capabilities approach uses sympathetic imagining . . . [and is a] . . . complex holistic method.” Who could be against “sympathetic imaginings” or holistic methods? Where the book might have gotten more interesting would have been to expand and explore the notion of dependency in addition to an idea of justice. Justice is a philosophical and legal concept while dependency is a social, political and cultural one. A full analysis requires the inclusion of those biocultural elements missing in the narrower analysis.
Notes
[1] Dr. Lennard J. Davis, Professor of English, Disability and Human Development, and Medical Education, University of Illinois, Chicago.
Works Cited
Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
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