Women and Human Development (The Seeley Lectures, Series Number 3) First Edition

My hat off to Professor Marcha Nussbaum.In this utterly amazing philosophically reflective book on the “modern” denigration of women (modern since about six thousand years ago—in out-of-the-way places like Ladakh, all this happened with great rapidity in the past half-century), Nussbaum offers us is a clear statement of the capabilities approach as a theoretically sound but eminently practical way to value to a woman's life and in fact, a man's too. . [From my perspective, we can extrapolate this approach imaginatively and analogously, to nonhuman lives—no more single goldfish tanks filled with loneliness, and vague memories of other goldfish leading only to grief.) Her account is not a personalized version of the gross domestic product—to have a life of minimal value you need at least the minimum amount of money or at least food, shelter, clothing, medicines--but it is a “universal” approach that works in any situation, any nation.The account is truly broad yet deeply grounded in the messy changing mud and spittle of life, where babies are born and cry, where adolescents fall out of trees and break bones, where women need to have the men in their lives change or one of them leaves, where in some countries baby girls are seen as a curse, where divorced or widowed women might lose all social standing, where violence against women has been an epidemic throughout written history, where songs (“My friend was a noble cow-puncher”) demonize women (she loved, she left, tough fella, whaddha expect), where women are often expected to work two jobs—their own “work” after they’ve cooked and cleaned house and parented the children--- where women not only don’t get equal pay, oftentimes they don’t even get equal jobs or any job--- and ad infinitum.Thank the gods that Nussbaum spent time in India, which I love[but the heat is making the plains leading to the Himalayas prohibitive, e.g., (New Delhi]., Nussbaum argues that we need to change international political and economic thought, thoughts about “rights,” and reassess the value of a life--- including how we can improve that value. Her focus is women, as it should be, but the approach would work as well for men--- that would be an interesting exercise to work out and then let Nussbaum assess the product of running all this through another mind and with another gender.This is not an account of women that focuses on the few wealthy women breaking though some imaginary glass ceiling. The focus is more on access for food (wealthy women often don’t eat well and eat old food), the liberty to go on a long walk, the availability of any job, the freedom to build a house—or burn it down. The value of a life is to be found in the liberty of the “holder” of that life, and has nothing to do with having food, or eating a lot. Think: whose life is better, the wealthy women whose servants cook for her three times a day but she is NOT ALLOWED to fast or to choose not to eat delicate meats and corn scraped off the cob, or pastry bread three times a day OR/VS/OR the woman who isn’t eating anything at all but instead fasting for twenty days before she returns to her own garden and fruit tree and eats food that is alive. (If you know the joke: “after you have steak for a long long time; beans, beans taste fine.”)This is a book of inspiration and genius. Nussbaum’s a master of this new way of valuing one life and groups of lives. GDP? Total hogwash that only feeds the game players who are exploiting women (first) and minorities (also first) and poor whites (men and women, also first).Since even a patient half-brain can look over these reviews and discover who I am, I ‘ll save everyone the time. If you are interested, I’m Dr. Bart Gruzalski, Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University, Boston Massachusetts and... AKA HAPPY POET. ,

I recommend everyone read this book! Nussbaum, indebted to Aristotle, provides a solution to the problems of globalization that allows an individual to flourish, but do so in her own way--that is, she walks a very fine line between universalism (human flourishing) and relativism (respecting one's autonomy to pursue a particular way of life). Her theory has even been adopted by the United Nations Development Programme.

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Nussbaum's book is excellent reading for those with little background in philosophy or economics. She explains her important ideas about the goals of development very clearly. The point of development is to permit people to achieve a fully human functioning. What she writes might strike many readers as, well, just common sense.But this is far from the case. Nussbaum's claim that the point of development is to help people achieve a fully human functioning is actually very foreign to most standard theories of economics and economic development.Readers with a good background in economics and/or philosophy will find her book quite impressive. In fact the more you know about the relevant subjects the more you can see how good, original, and important her ideas are. She adroitly deals with many of the flaws of standard economics to present a thoughtful alternative vision of what it means to be developed.She also addresses long-standing debates involving those for--and against--postmodernist thought. She sneaks this in so that it is easy for many readers to miss that she is doing this. Although she accepts many of the charges made by postmodernists against modernist thinking, she explicitly rejects the pure egoistic subjectivity offered by postmodernism. Stated crudely, what Nussbaum offers is a dignified vision of what humans should be without invoking God or "objective reality."Really good stuff. I've used this book for college undergraduates and many have praised this book highly and many had said they had their eyes opened to important issues they didn't think about before.