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Alison McQueen

Response to Martha Nussbaums Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice

DRAFT (July 2, 2014)

Martha Nussbaums Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice is a rich and

engaging work that brings together her theory of emotions (2001) with her own strand of

capabilities-inflected political liberalism (1999, 2000, 2006). The result is an empirically-

informed, deeply cross-disciplinary, and engaging argument for the centrality of emotional work

to the liberal democratic project. In what follows, I offer an account of the books theoretical

context and its central argument before engaging along more evaluative and critical lines with its

treatment of compassion and tragedy.

The overarching theoretical argument of the book is that ensuring the stability of political

principles and motivating citizens to make the sacrifices necessary for a common life require

emotional work. This is as true in liberal societies as it is in monarchical or totalitarian ones,

though the kind of emotional work required will differ in each case. Political liberals who accept

this premise are faced with two challenges. The first is a theoretical one. The liberal tradition

has historically had very little to say about the role of emotions in politics. As Nussbaum notes,

this silence may well reflect principled worries. Requiring states to cultivate particular emotions

not only seems to endanger liberal commitments to freedom, autonomy, and equality, but also

appears to demand that the state grossly overstep the legitimate limits on its power. Historical

liberals like Locke and Kant would have found ample grounds for these worries in the familiar

excesses of monarchical and aristocratic politics. But disturbing confirmations could also be

found closer to home. One of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus solutions to the problems of political

stability and citizen motivation is a coercively imposed civil religion whose sentiments of

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sociability are to be accepted on pain of banishment or death. Wanting to avoid this coercive

extreme, Nussbaum suggests, historical liberals were too quick to tie the states hands when it

comes to taking the psychological steps to ensure its own stability and efficacy (5).1 While she

thinks many contemporary liberals have inherited this tendency toward overcorrection,

Nussbaum notes that one significant exception is John Rawls, whose analysis of the connection

between moral psychology and political stability in Theory of Justice she seeks to take up and

extend in the direction of her own strand of political liberalism. Her theoretical challenge is to

explain how a decent society aspiring to justice can perform the emotional work necessary for

motivation and stability without abandoning political liberalisms core commitments. The

second challenge is a practical one. On Nussbaums view, emotions like love and compassion

are essential supports to the principles and institutions of a decent society. Yet these emotions

are beset by obstacles and enemies. Self-interest and narcissism incline us to be narrow and

greedy in our sympathies (314). Projective disgust denies subordinate groups love and

compassion by casting their members as less than human.2 Fear, envy, and shame may also block

the extension of love and compassion in various complex ways. Nussbaums practical challenge,

then, is to explain not only how we can elicit the good emotions required for stability and

motivation, but also how we can inhibit those emotions that endanger these ends.

Her response to these challenges is wide-ranging and therefore resists easy summary.

However, it ultimately seems to center on at least four argumentative moves. First, Nussbaum

makes the case for the political value of a certain kind of love. Those contemporary political

1 All quotations from Political Emotions will be given simply with parenthetical page references.

2 On Nussbaums understanding, projective disgust is disgust for a group of other humans who are segmented from

the dominant group and classified as lower because of being (allegedly) more animal. Members of this group are

thought to have the properties of disgusts primary objects: they are found dirty, smelly, slimy (184). For a critical

response to this theory from a psychologist who is otherwise sympathetic to Nussbaums work on emotions, see

Bloom (2013, 149-50).

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liberals who have glimpsed a productive role for political emotions have tended to focus on

mutual respect, which they suggest is necessary to sustain distributive arrangements and

democratic reciprocity in both aspiring and fully just societies. However, Nussbaum argues that

respect alone is simply too weak to temper self-interest or to overpower the obsessions with

hierarchy and status that threaten to disrupt the public culture of equality (43). These are tasks

for love (and the associated emotions of sympathy and compassion), which Nussbaum argues

must be directed through affectionate ties to ones fellow citizens and through patriotic

attachment to ones nation and its principles. The argument here seems to be that love affects us

more deeply and therefore serves as a more effective bridge between an individuals particular

experiential and imaginative world, on the one hand, and the impartial principles of a decent

society, on the other. Nussbaum finds in the character of Cherubino from Mozart and Da Pontes

Marriage of Figaro a model for a kind of political love that is not dominating or hierarchical and

that invites and delights in mutually responsive conversation, by turns playful and aspiring

(112). She sees this Cherubinic thread picked up in John Stuart Mill and Rabindrinath

Tagores educational proposals and defenses of a religion of humanity, both of which offer

valuable alternatives to Rousseaus coercive excesses.

Second, Nussbaum considers how, given what we know of the psychology and emotional

development of humans and other animals, we might go about cultivating this kind of love in a

liberal society. Drawing on examples from America and India, she considers how political

speeches, literature, and poetry have been used to elicit a humane patriotism that not only

attaches to the abstract political principles of the nation, but also to its more particular histories,

landscapes, and collective longings. It is a patriotism that is inherently proleptic, offering an

aspirational vision of the nation as it could be. Turning back to ancient Greece, Nussbaum

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attempts to show how classical tragedies and comedies provided an emotional education that

helped spectators recognize shared vulnerabilities and extend the reach of their compassion.

Perhaps fortunately, encouraging tragic and comic spectatorship today does not require a

nostalgic return to classical theater. Rather, Nussbaum invites us to consider contemporary

American and Indian analoguesranging from political speeches and public memorials to book

clubs and Bollywood moviesthat might accomplish similar emotional work. The project of

tragic and comic spectatorship today, concludes Nussbaum, requires public support for civic art,

alongside effective protections of artistic freedom and the active cultivation of a critical and

deliberative public culture.

Third, Nussbaum argues that many of the strategies for eliciting and extending love and

compassion also conveniently inhibit dangerous emotions like disgust, fear, envy, and shame.

For instance, classical comedies like Aristophanes Acharnians and Jaume Plensas Crown

Fountain in Chicagos Millennium Park elicit a shared sense of bodily joy that inhibits disgust

and shame. Fourth, within a politically liberal society, we must ensure that the cultivation of

emotions results in neither the establishment nor the governments enthusiastic and exclusive

endorsement of a particular vision of the good life. Thus, for Nussbaum, as for Mill and Tagore,

the cultivation of political emotions must be accompanied by robust protections for liberal

freedoms and by an effective commitment to a critical public culture, the teaching of history in

a critical mode, and the teaching of critical thinking and ethical reasoning in schools (213).

Nussbaum is not defending a form of emotional foundationalismthe idea that emotions

can serve as an uncriticized foundation for public choice (157). On her account, emotions

have cognitive and evaluative content that should be in continuous dialogue with the impartial

principles of a decent society. Emotions are therefore rightly subject to assessment and

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challenge on the basis of the coherence of their fit with and the effectiveness of their support for

these impartial principles. The danger that Nussbaum insists political liberals avoid is that of

letting principled worries about emotional foundationalism cause them to cede the territory of

emotion-shaping to anti-liberal forces, thereby giving these forces a huge advantage in

peoples hearts and risking making people think of liberal values as tepid and boring (2).

Political emotions were, Nussbaum notes, as important to the defeat of Hitler as they were to his

rise.

I will focus my evaluative remarks on Nussbaums rich discussion of compassion and

tragic spectatorship, which are topics that are not only central to Political Emotions but also to

several strands of her earlier work (1986, 1996, 2001). Building on and revising Aristotles

conception of eleos (often translated as pity), Nussbaum understands compassion as a painful

emotion directed at the serious suffering of another creature or creatures that includes three

thoughts (142). The first is the thought that the suffering is serious. It is important and

nontrivial (143). The second is the thought of nonfault. The predicament of the suffering being

is neither chosen nor self-inflicted (though Nussbaum notes that we can sometimes have

compassion without any judgment about responsibility). The third thought is more complex

because it involves a substantial revision to standard philosophical conceptions of compassion.

Nussbaum suggests these conceptions tend to include a third thought of similar possibilities

the person who has compassion often [thinks] that the suffering person is similar to him- or

herself and has possibilities in life that are similar (144). Echoing the refinements she made to

her conception of compassion in earlier work (2001), Nussbaum argues that the thought of

similar possibilities is not in fact conceptually necessary. However, it is often epistemologically

helpful in forming what Nussbaum takes to be the genuine third element of compassionthe

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eudaimonistic thought. This is a judgment that the suffering being matters and is important to

the compassionate persons own scheme of ends (Nussbaum 2001, 55). The thought of similar

possibilities and the attendant acknowledgement of shared vulnerability expands the

eudaimonistic imagination by acting as a bridge between ones existing concerns and the

suffering of others.

To the extent that this enlargement of compassion supports the stability of political

principles and motivates citizens to make necessary sacrifices, Nussbaum thinks decent aspiring

societies have strong reasons to cultivate this emotion and to think seriously about the difficult

question of how this might be done. One of the most important tools for cultivating compassion

is tragic spectatorship, which at times Nussbaum seems to invest with virtually boundless

powers. On her account, classical tragedy and its contemporary analogues powerfully dramatize

psychological and bodily suffering, reversals of fortune, and tragic choices, thereby allowing the

spectator to imaginatively enter into the world of others. If all goes well, this imaginative

engagement prompts an acknowledgement of shared vulnerability and a recognition of the

sufferers importance for ones scheme of ends, which in turn prompts the spectator to support

political principles and institutions that minimize undeserved suffering and tragic choices. On

my reading, this argument about the political emotional effects of tragedy is, at best, suggestive.

While Nussbaum gestures to evidence that compassion is more reliably cultivated when the

imagination has been activated (Batson 2011), the best case she is able to make (perhaps the best

case that can be made) for tragic spectatorship is that it could plausibly achieve these social and

political effects, not that it does in fact reliably do so.

Nussbaum readily acknowledges that the extension of compassion may encounter serious

difficulties, but expresses confidence that tragic spectatorship, particularly when it is embedded

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in a critical and deliberative public culture, can effectively diminish these difficulties.3 First, she

acknowledges that compassion may lead to dangerous forms of particularism. Personalized

stories of suffering are more effective at activating and extending compassion than non-

personalized ones. However, this very particularism can undermine the impartial principles and

policies of a decent and aspiring society. Nussbaum cites an experiment by Batson, Klein et al

(1995) in which two groups of subjects were presented with the story of a terminally-ill child

awaiting an organ transplant. When given the chance to move the child up the transplant list,

those instructed to imagine the childs feelings were more than twice as likely to express unjust

partiality than those instructed to remain objective and detached (Batson, Klein, et al. 1995,

1048). Tragic spectatorship, Nussbaum argues, responds to this impartiality-endangering effect

by presenting human suffering in a somewhat generalized and abstract form, so that peoples

minds are led naturally to the choice of general and fair policies, not to the relief of sporadic

individuals (317). Second, particularly in stratified and deeply divided societies, pervasive

exclusion and projective disgust make compassion difficult to cultivate at all. In her earlier

work, Nussbaum had acknowledged the difficulty of cultivating empathy and compassion across,

for example, the deep racial divisions in American society. She had suggested that tragedy

might need to be supplemented by works of social realism like Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man,

which connect the reader to highly concrete circumstances other than her own, making her an

inhabitant of both privileged and oppressed groups in these circumstances (2001, 431). In

Political Emotions, this problem is dealt with instead by an expanded conception of tragic

spectatorship that includes book clubs in which works of social realism might be read and

3 The difficulties I discuss here to do not represent an exhaustive list of what Nussbaum sees as the challenges to

effective compassion, but merely those (beyond the problem of narrowness, addressed above) that she thinks tragic

spectatorship is particularly well-suited to address.

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discussed. However, she also relies once again on the salutary distancing effect of tragic

spectatorship to combat this problem. In real life, the encounter with serious suffering in a

stratified and deeply divided society might easily elicit fear and disgust, rather than compassion.

However, because it addresses similar scenarios without the sensory qualities that elicit disgust

and without the real-life involvement that could arouse fear, tragedy undermines exclusion

(264-5). Once again, Nussbaums response to both scenarios of compassion failure suggests that

tragic spectatorship could plausibly mitigate particularism and exclusion, but in my view avoids

the more difficult task of demonstrating that it reliably does in fact have these effects.

This is a serious and suggestive attempt to grapple with the limits of compassion and the

possibilities of tragic spectatorship. Nevertheless, I am left wondering whether Nussbaum has

captured the full range of obstacles to politically-productive compassion in deeply divided

societies and whether she has overestimated the capacity of tragic spectatorship to remedy these

problems. Three concerns strike me as especially troubling. First, compassion may have

paradoxical effects. If, as Nussbaum has argued elsewhere (2001), empathy is an important

(though not strictly necessary) aid to compassion, then the ability to identify with the otherto

enter into their world and imaginatively share in their sufferingis especially desirable in a

stratified and deeply divided society. Nussbaum is confident that tragic spectatorship, either

alone or in conjunction with the narratives of social realism, can elicit empathy in such

situations. In earlier work, she reminds us that the male spectators of Euripides Trojan Women

were asked to extend their empathy in a way that would have been difficult in the hierarchical

and male-dominated society of classical Athens. Yet the play makes this empathetic extension

possible by exposing the spectator to the points of view of women raped and subjugated in war

(2001). But this identification with the other has a paradoxical effect with which Nussbaum has

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not yet fully grappled. The worry is perhaps best captured with another example. In the

nineteenth-century American movement for female suffrage, white women repeatedly compared

their situation to that of slaves. As Elizabeth Spelman suggests, this identification undermined

pervasive racist ideologies that were premised on the idea that skin color is a marker of deep and

unbridgeable difference. However, it also reified and perhaps even deepened existing racial

inequalities by obscuring the real difference that race made to the situations of the two groups

of women. In particular, it obscured the role of white women themselves in maintaining the

institutions of white supremacy, in helping, through their everyday interactions with Black

slaves, to add to the suffering. Similarly, the problem with a tragic spectatorship that invites

one to become an imaginative co-sufferer is that it may conceal whatever role one plays as a

perpetrator of the misery (Spelman 1997, 127). As with many of the other unfortunate

consequences of cultivating political emotions, counteracting the paradoxical effects of

compassion in stratified societies becomes yet another difficult job for a critical and deliberative

public culture.

Second, compassion may produce unambiguously perverse effects, beyond unjust

partiality. For Nussbaum, if all goes well, compassion prompts social action aimed at creating

and supporting political arrangements that reduce vulnerability to undeserved suffering and

minimize tragic choices. However, the connection between compassion and social action does

not strike me as a necessary one and I worry that Nussbaums optimism here might be

unwarranted. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which an emotional encounter with the

serious and undeserved suffering of another triggers an acknowledgement of similar possibilities

and shared vulnerability that leads to fear, and particularly fear of loss. Instead of directing that

fear into social action, the empathetic agent might well make a panicked bid to increase her

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security and protect against future losses. She might increase her retirement contributions, enroll

her children in private school, participate in residential segregation, and buy a home security

system. This is because in stratified and deeply divided societies, the disadvantaged are not only

the targets of[her] compassion but also the figures in [her] nightmares (Tessman 2005, 103).

Nussbaums argument points to at least two lines of defence against such a worry. The first

would be to accept the force of the concern and to suggest that its remedy lies beyond the scope

of tragic spectatorship. The undemocratic and inegalitarian effects of fear are, after all, one of

the reasons why a decent and aspiring society cannot rely solely on compassion but must also

work to manage and temper fear, along with other potentially destructive emotions.4 The

second line of response might be to appeal once again to the salutary distancing effect of tragic

spectatorship, which on Nussbaums account, does not arouse exclusionary fear. Once again,

this effect is at best theoretically plausible but empirically undermotivated. In addition, if

Nussbaum accepts Aristotles suggestion that fear is central to the tragic acknowledgment of

shared vulnerability, it is not clear why this activating fear might not often overwhelm tragedys

salutary distancing effects within deeply divided societies.

Finally, even if we do manage to cultivate the kind of compassion that motivates social

action, we may still have cause to worry about the emotions effects on the compassionate agent.

What I have in mind here is not the familiar worry about compassion burnout or fatigue (Batson

2011), though these are concerns that also deserve a thorough hearing. Compassion requires

inviting the pain of others into our own lives, being pained by their pain. When faced with

4 Nussbaums most compelling example of how tragic spectatorship can strike this balance between eliciting

compassion and tempering fear is President Franklin Delano Roosevelts use of public photography to elicit

compassion from a skeptical public during the Depression. Images showed people in line for unemployment checks

and bread, but Roosevelts agents consciously forbade photographers to show images of strikessince this would

scare viewers and make them think of the poor as troublemakers who brought their misery on themselves (283). I

leave the question of whether or not this state control over public imagery is equally possible or even desirable today

for others to judge.

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suffering, ones felt pain is part of the response to the other that constitutes the morally

recommended responsive action (Tessman 2005, 93). Yet it is an action that is painful for the

compassionate agent and may therefore impede her flourishing. For this reason, Lisa Tessman

calls compassion a burdened virtue. If, as Tessman reasons, the sufferings to which one is

attentive were to be experienced firsthand, they would clearly qualify as the sorts of external

conditions that could ruin an otherwise potentially flourishing life; the person who takes on these

sufferings in a secondary wayand feels painbecomes burdened too (96). Tessmans worry

is an especially salient one in stratified and deeply divided societies, where there is always great

suffering. In these circumstances, compassion is an emotion and a virtue that, as Nussbaum

suggests, is much in demand. And, for this very reason, the pain it prompts compassionate

agents to take on is great. We are therefore confronted with a moral problem because

Nussbaum's account seems to demand the cultivation of an emotion that, if experienced

thoroughly and consistently, is agonizing. It strikes me that Nussbaum has at least a partial

answer to this concern in her treatment of comic spectatorship. The joy elicited by comedy is, if

not an antidote, then at least a palliative to the frequently dark burdens of compassion. However,

if Nussbaums argument commits us to cultivating compassion in spite of these moral worries,

we will still need to think more about how a decent and aspiring society cares for and protects

those who are asked to take on the pain of others.

The questions I have raised here are not, of course, about the motivations or goals of

Nussbaums project. Instead, they reflect concerns about how effective her proposed emotional

tools might be for supporting good principles and motivating citizens in a decent and aspiring

society. In this regard, these concerns are an acknowledgement of the deep value of Nussbaums

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project: by taking seriously the question of liberal political emotions, her book defines an area in

which much more empirical, artistic, and philosophical work urgently remains to be done.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Burke Hendrix for comments an earlier draft of this essay.

References

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induced altruism: When compassion and justice conflict. Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 68(6), 1042-1054.

Batson, D.C. (2011). Altruism in Humans. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bloom, P. (2013). Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown.

Nussbaum, M.C. (1986). The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Philosophy and

Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nussbaum, M.C. (1996). Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion. Social Philosophy and

Policy, 13(1), 27-58.

Nussbaum, M.C. (1999). Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum, M.C. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach.

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Nussbaum, M.C. (2006). Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Spelman, E.V. (1997). Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering. Boston: Beacon

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Tessman, L. (2005). Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles. New York:

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