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schomj's review against another edition
3.0
Read through to the end of the disability section (which is what I picked this up for). More social contract studies than disability studies, which I hadn't been expecting but that's fine. Some interesting ideas marred by the author's all-or-nothing approach to being disabled.
trsr's review
4.0
We live in a world of a growing tide of democracy with open and public reasoning, a tide that brings great promise for human development. And yet various kinds of deep injustice prevail. Is this because our institutions set up to bring justice have failed to deliver, or is it something more deep-rooted, some flaw in foundational aspects of justice? This book goes deep and thorough into the theories of justice as applied to three frontier areas that remain the serious examples of failures of justice in the public sphere: justice for mentally and physically disabled people, global justice transcending national boundaries, and the justice for animals (and nature) crossing species boundaries. Martha Nussbaum, writing cogently and with clarity, has done a wonderful job in bringing a thoughtful and informed discussion on these issues to the fore.
The prevailing theory and approach to justice, one most frequently attributed to John Rawls, is the 'social contract' tradition. This derives principles of justice as emerging from a social contract for mutual advantage among normal people who are nominally equal, independent, and rational, and who evolve these principles in an idealised impartial manner. Nussbaum argues that this approach, although with some strengths of its own, fails or is insufficient in important ways in all three frontier areas of justice. The alternative she proposes, based on the 'capabilities approach' that she and Amartya Sen have applied to human development issues, shows greater promise. This book provides a much better written and argued account of the contrast between these two approaches to justice than Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (my review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/226550984). The book is additionally illuminating by its careful explanation of the underlying philosophy and its attention to well-chosen examples from the real world.
(... to be continued...)
The prevailing theory and approach to justice, one most frequently attributed to John Rawls, is the 'social contract' tradition. This derives principles of justice as emerging from a social contract for mutual advantage among normal people who are nominally equal, independent, and rational, and who evolve these principles in an idealised impartial manner. Nussbaum argues that this approach, although with some strengths of its own, fails or is insufficient in important ways in all three frontier areas of justice. The alternative she proposes, based on the 'capabilities approach' that she and Amartya Sen have applied to human development issues, shows greater promise. This book provides a much better written and argued account of the contrast between these two approaches to justice than Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (my review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/226550984). The book is additionally illuminating by its careful explanation of the underlying philosophy and its attention to well-chosen examples from the real world.
(... to be continued...)
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