Like Bill Clinton, Martha Nussbaum wants you to know that she feels your pain. She wants us all to feel each other’s pain and thinks that this will lead to better social policy, better laws, and better legal judgments. That is the burden of argument, such as it is, in Poetic Justice, a reworking of lectures Nussbaum has given at various law schools, including the University of Chicago Law School, where she is now a professor of law and ethics. The ostensible subject is how our appreciation for literary art —particularly our attentive reading of novels—can enrich legal reasoning. It sounds on the face of it innocuous enough. But the underlying agenda proves to be a standard liberal argument for social redistribution; this is said to be a moral imperative, our adoption of which, she tells us, will naturally arise out of our learning to be better literary critics. The supporting arguments are, in fact, astoundingly slipshod for a thinker who has been so routinely lionized. The book is, finally, another telling instance of the sad decline of academic disciplines: Nussbaum and her university sponsors traduce at once philosophy, literary criticism, and law in the unending effort to enforce political correctness.

Both a classicist and philosopher by training, Nussbaum, who is described by a fellow professor on the book’s dust jacket as “one of our nation’s most important public intellectuals,” began her illustrious career with a well-regarded translation of a difficult text by Aristotle. She has continued to claim Aristotle as her prime philosophical mentor, particularly in offering a corrective to Platonic idealism and absolutism. If Plato appeals to an ultimate sphere of judgment in a transcendental realm of pure universals, for Nussbaum, Aristotle’s more nominalistic world view accommodates itself much better to the slippery, muddier world of the merely human, and is for this reason more attractive.

Eventually, Nussbaum became disenchanted with studying only the “official” philosophical corpus, and turned her attention to the even more openly human realm of literature. She became interested in what lessons Greek tragedy had for the philosophers, feeling that there were aspects of the tragic vision—especially the lesson of human limitations and the exigency of human circumstances—that were not sufficiently respected or considered among the Socratic circle and its epigones. Plato threw poets (most of them, anyway) out of his republic; Nussbaum became their advocate, insisting that they should be brought back into the public debate on what kinds of lives we should live.

Exemplifying an unwelcome academic trend—which makes all too vulgarly literal the notion of a marketplace of ideas--Nussbaum has moved on from her mere professorship in classics and philosophy at Brown University to become a professor of law at one of America’s top law schools— though she has never studied law. Her fellow academic superstar, Stanley Fish, who provides a blurb for the dust jacket (“Martha Nussbaum’s new book should be required reading for every member of Congress”), also without benefit of any legal training, preceded her by becoming a professor of law and literature at Duke. “Interdisciplinary” studies are all the rage, and somehow law schools have convinced themselves that it is worth paying doubtless large salaries to these academic trailblazers, who can bring budding lawyers up to date with the latest humanistic “learning.” And what, precisely, is the learning she has to impart?

Nussbaum’s thesis can be summed up fairly easily. Learning to read novels with some attention involves learning to appreciate the way novels particularize human circumstances, allowing us empathetic access to individual experience, with its richly concrete specificity, as opposed to the bland generalities we all too easily summon up when thinking about humanity in the mass. When we think about individual persons in this way, with their tangled roots in the world and their complicated histories, we will be less likely to find appealing any model of human conduct, as a guide for social policy or legal judgment, that is abstract and one-dimensional, and that ignores the power of circumstances in conditioning behavior.

These latter, bad characteristics are typical of the bête noire Nussbaum sees gobbling up the legal and policy scene: the law-and-economics movement, which tries to translate all legal issues into a rational calculus of benefit and risk. This economic model is grounded in a utilitarian model of justice— construing justice as maximizing societal welfare—and a rationalist account of human motivation. According to Nussbaum, no one who reads novels in the right way would be tempted to accept the economist’s premise that human beings are essentially profit-maximizing creatures who try, so far as they are aware, to act in rational self-interest. For Nussbaum, this is a perniciously reductionist account of the human condition which leads to bad policies and judgments.

To illustrate the ethical and legal importance of reading novels, Nussbaum picks three of the most tendentious novels in English, novels expressly written in a rhetorical mode to prove underlying political points: Dickens’s attack on utilitarian social thought in Hard Times, Richard Wright’s indictment of a racist America in Native Son, and E. M. Forster’s posthumously exhumed paean to the gay life, Maurice. Nussbaum’s idea of “critical” reading is to follow in lock step the agenda set forth in these books; the only time she asks us to back away is with regard to Dickens’s surely wrong-headed view that working people are not always miserable and the equally obtuse view that labor unions do not always serve workers well. But Nussbaum charitably regards these reactionary tics as negligible distractions from Dickens’s otherwise perfectly credible caricatures of both utilitarianism and capitalism. So, too, Wright’s insistence that we see Bigger Thomas’s act of killing as the inevitable by-product of his victimization by a racist society, and Forster’s punishing of his closeted character for playing “straight” and failing to embrace a liberated life go completely without challenge. What is important to Nussbaum is, rather, the way these novelists compel us to enter into the experience of their characters, who are stuck in various situations that have impoverished their lives.

Generalizing about the vicarious experience of the novel-reader, and borrowing an expression from Adam Smith, Nussbaum sees the good reader as a “judicious spectator”: someone who is not disengaged or unemotional but who combines critical distance with empathetic understanding so as to imagine most fully characters’ situations. In this way, Nussbaum claims, the judicious reader of realist novels comes to appreciate what it means to be disadvantaged:  

The reader participates vicariously in numerous different lives, some more advantaged and some less. In realist social novels … these lives are self-consciously drawn from different social strata, and the extent to which these varied circumstances allow for flourishing is made part of the reader’s experience. The reader enters each of these lives not knowing, so to speak, which one of them is hers … living each of those lives in turn and becoming aware that her actual place is in many respects an accident of fortune… . This means … that she will notice especially vividly the disadvantages faced by the least well off.

As an empirical description of readers’ experiences, this generalization strikes me as being entirely without foundation. More significant here, however, is Nussbaum’s attempt to stage-manage the transformation of this descriptive model into a normative model of justice. In effect, the reading experience is turned into a vicarious enactment of the thought experiment that John Rawls employed in his book A Theory of Justice, a work whose world view is at the base of Nussbaum’s kind of liberalism.

Rawls asks us to imagine strangers in a strange land thrown together, ignorant both of each other’s capacities and of the potential riches of their brave new world. Thus, these individuals are shorn of the historical donnée with which we normally imagine lives; they are, as Nussbaum would put it, free of the accidental and contingent nature of our circumstances in life. Rawls asks, what rule would these strangers choose for distributing most fairly whatever goods they come upon; and his answer is this: no one is to be allowed to be better off unless the least well off are also improved in their circumstances.

Rawls reasons that once we are stripped of our own advantages we would opt for a rule that we would want to have applied if we were to find ourselves on the bottom rung, and that is to ensure that the lowest be lifted up with every expenditure of social resources. This is what Nussbaum is getting at when she emphasizes at the end of the passage quoted above that the reader will “notice especially vividly the disadvantages faced by the least well off.” The judicious spectator would always, she argues in effect, put in place the Rawlsian rule of distributive (actually, redistributive) justice.

This works out conveniently, of course, with the novels she chooses, since they all actively direct our attention to the “victims” of life’s unfairness. She seems, nonetheless, generally confident that her audience will draw the same conclusions without either her or an author’s active prodding.

Is it too much to suppose that such confidence stems from the high-minded prejudices of a Martha Craven Nussbaum, of Brown and Chicago, award-winning academic, panelist on international committees for various sorts of do-good projects, a one-time Bill Moyers “profile-in-ideas” subject—in short, someone not far from the top of the heap? It is sometimes a difficult and bitter lesson for such persons that tolerance is a luxury that few can so easily afford as they.

It doesn’t take many alternative thought experiments to realize how blinkered is Nussbaum’s frame of reference; not everyone will be disposed to see her own favorite kinds of victim in the same way. For instance, let us take Nussbaum’s assumption that her model of the “judicious spectator” is that of the ideal juror, who will empathetically—though, to be sure, with calm deliberation—consider the circumstances of the downtrodden before passing judgment. We may wonder, then, what she would say about the Simi Valley jurors who acquitted of serious charges the police officers who beat Rodney King. Was their failure to feel sufficiently the victim’s pain an example of poor “reading,” or moral obtuseness, or perhaps of lessons drawn from life experiences with which a Martha Nussbaum might find it difficult herself to empathize?

Nussbaum is terribly concerned to ensure that criminal defendants be afforded every last consideration; she seems to agree with Richard Wright that to judge why Bigger kills would require an explanation of his whole life. From the tenor of her comments, one may suspect that she might be rather less enthusiastic about such devices of eliciting empathy as “victim impact statements,” which try to bring home to jurors or judges the pain and suffering caused by loss of loved ones. If she has faith in her procedural model of judicious spectatorship, she would be better off untethering its examples from her own substantive political commitments.

But one senses that that would be beside the point. Nussbaum engages in a form of theoretical obscurantism, disguising behind a description of methods a political agenda, to ensure our embrace of the ideal of social redistribution. To be sure, the disguise is thin, which may only go to show that political correctness is so broadly accepted as a normative ideal in the academy that Nussbaum need hardly pretend otherwise; the political nature of her arguments is simply assumed.

One can readily agree with her that the quantitative measure of human values indulged in by economic rationalists may be pernicious, without accepting her unwarranted leap to her own forms of social engineering. And while we all would like to think that the humane intelligence embodied in the best novels can provide useful moral knowledge in the world, it is not easy to make these translations. The best thing to be said about Nussbaum is that unlike her peer, Stanley Fish, who is a professional cynic, she is morally serious. But she shares a problem with many liberals, which it is not unfair to describe as a kind of arrogance, in failing to understand the motivations of those who aren’t as right-thinking. Would that she, as a “public intellectual,” began to think harder about who the public is she means to serve.

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