During the past four decades, Martha Nussbaum has established herself as one of the preëminent philosophers in America, owing to her groundbreaking studies on subjects ranging from the ancient Greeks to modern feminism. In a Profile of Nussbaum published in 2016, Rachel Aviv wrote, “Her work, which draws on her training in classics but also on anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and a number of other fields, searches for the conditions for eudaimonia, a Greek word that describes a complete and flourishing life. At a time of insecurity for the humanities, Nussbaum’s work champions—and embodies—the reach of the humanistic endeavor.”
Nussbaum’s latest book, “Citadels of Pride: Sexual Abuse, Accountability, and Reconciliation,” focusses on many of the themes she has written about before, from gender relations to the role of anger in human behavior. In it, she examines three fields—the federal judiciary, the performing arts, and college sports—and explains the distinct reasons that each one is particularly vulnerable to predatory men. But her book is also a plea to prevent the anger channelled by the #MeToo movement from overwhelming a commitment to due process. “Some women not only ask for equal respect but seem to take pleasure in retribution,” she writes. “Instead of a prophetic vision of justice and reconciliation, these women prefer an apocalyptic vision in which the former oppressor is brought low, and this vision parades as justice.”
I recently spoke by phone with Nussbaum, who is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the shortcomings of sexual-harassment laws, why pride is partially to blame for sexual abuse, and how to deal with transgressors who have not been convicted in a court of law.
Why did you think those three areas—the federal courts, the arts, and college sports—were so important to focus on?
In most workplaces, we’re all on notice of what the rules are. Every year, I have to go through sexual-harassment training like everyone else. But, in these areas, for different reasons in each case, there is no stable structure of rules, and there’s a great asymmetry of power.
In the federal courts, the reason for the instability is the clerk-judge relationship. The clerk is sort of at the mercy of the judge all the way through his or her career. So there is that very intimate relationship, together with, until extremely recently, the lack of clear rules about whistle-blowing. That’s just a bad structure. So I favor changing the whole clerkship structure, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
In the arts, the problem is that, unlike my job, where I have a contract, everyone goes from short gig to short gig, and so, therefore, one person who’s very powerful in an industry—like a Harvey Weinstein or a James Levine—can have great influence, even if that person isn’t your supervisor. The other problem is there were just really no rules. The unions in the performing arts have notoriously been very weak. That means that management doesn’t have to put in clear rules, because there’s no demand from the side of the unions. Now that is starting to change.
Professional sports are going the way of a normal workplace, with a contract between the players union and management that specifies conditions under which you will be penalized for bad sexual behavior, whether it’s domestic violence or sexual harassment. But college sports are different, and the reason is there’s this huge collective-action problem. There are so many Division I schools in both basketball and football, and the number of really big talents each year is very limited. So all of them are competing for this very small talent pool, and that means they’re under great pressure to lower standards to recruit the best talents, even some of the schools that, for a long time, held out and had high academic standards for student athletes and high sexual-assault standards. And I see no way of changing that. The N.C.A.A. has tried for years to police the bad behavior, but they really haven’t done very much. So I conclude, reluctantly, that with basketball, there is a fix, namely giving up the college altogether and going over to a minor-league system, alongside international professional teams, which the N.B.A. can draw talents from. But football, it’s different, because there is very limited American football in Europe, and there is no minor league emerging. So I think the only solution, if there is one, is ending college football. What seems to be happening through litigation is a system where athletes will be paid a large salary, but then it’s no longer reasonable to call them students.
Your work often consists of taking philosophical concepts and applying them to real-world situations. Here, you talk about the causes of sexual harassment and abuse and write, “The vice of pride is at work in the still all-too-common tendency to treat women as mere objects, denying them equal respect and full autonomy.” Why pride?
I don’t mean the pride that somebody who’s part of a gay-pride march has. That’s different. That’s self-affirmation, and I don’t even think it should be called pride. What I wanted to do was get behind this idea of objectification, treating a person like a thing, which feminists have talked about for decades, and say, “Why? What is it about people that produces this?” It’s a kind of extreme narcissism, but I didn’t want to use psychiatric jargon. I wanted a more ordinary word.
What Dante says is that it’s a kind of master vice. He depicts the proud in Purgatory as bent over like hoops so that they can’t see the outside world at all. They can only see parts of their own bodies, so it’s like you’re the whole world. Now, of course, it comes in segments. You can have race pride and not gender pride. You can have class pride and not race pride, and so forth. Dante realized in the process that he had career pride, poetry pride, and maybe he didn’t have some of the other kinds. But insofar as he has it, it cuts off your eyes and view—you’re not seeing the other person. That’s how you can treat a person like a thing. Denying autonomy, denying subjectivity—and you’re not listening to the person’s voice. So his anti-type is the Emperor Trajan, who is very, very powerful, but who listens to a poor woman when she comes to him and wants justice for her son. Dante depicts his openness as the virtue that’s opposed to pride, so that’s really what I’m talking about, a kind of narcissism that closes the eyes and the ears.
In the book, you separate out pride as a character trait from pride as a human emotion.
Right, you can have the momentary emotion of being proud of your children, or whatever, without having this global kind of narcissism—although it’s already risky. It tends in that direction. But what I’m thinking of is the character trait that persists through situations of many kinds, and I think it’s fair to say that, for a long time, most if not all men in our society have been brought up basically to have that vice with respect to women. Women are there for them. They’re there as helpmates or sexual objects, not as persons in their own right.
