Abstract for Martha Nussbaum conference to be presented on 7th May at Notts University

The Family, Dependency and Common Goods

Abstract

Nussbaum is critical of the priority Rawls gives to the conventional family as part of the basic structure of society.  By envisioning heads of households in the Original Position, Rawls assumes that the family has a prepolitical form and is therefore somehow ‘natural’.  Contemporary liberal theory generally agrees that the state should not interfere in this private sphere unless individual rights are being violated.  Liberal theory, Nussbaum argues, does not recognise that the modern nuclear family is defined and constructed by the state and therefore fails to examine the family’s internal functioning permitting the state to only place external limits on its function.  Nussbaum argues that this approach only gives legal recognition and protection to one type of affiliative grouping.  In contrast her approach does not give priority to any one grouping but begins instead by focussing on the capabilities and liberties of the individual and then examines how successful different affiliative groupings are in promoting these individual capabilities.  Conventional families, she argues, actually do less well in providing love, friendship and other capabilities than do, for example, women’s collectives.  We may also look to MacIntyre for an alternative treatment of the family, though he has not explicitly provided it himself. I will argue MacIntyre’s emphasis on the vulnerability and dependency of humans informs the basis of an Aristotelian common good. The common good of any society should be to actualise human potential and enable citizens to achieve eudaimonia. Care is necessary to actualise the potentials of those who cannot achieve this independently.  In fact, most citizens rely on some level of interdependency to achieve their good and many are completely dependent.  I will argue that the family can be a site of this care which helps to actualise the potentials of the very young, as well as those others who are to different degrees dependent; but it can also be a site of exploitation.  The family should therefore be judged on if it provides care in just ways and fosters the virtues required not only for the good internal to the family but also for the good of the wider community and for the individual members of that community or affiliative group.

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