Summary of Nussbaum & Its Tie To Sexual Ethics
One of the recurring themes in this course is a basic tension between two facts. First, we have a very strong commitment to the idea that everyone should get to form their own conception of what good sex looks like and, as long as it's consensual, that's okay. Second, social structures can distort people's conception of the good such that they either desire or consent to things that are bad for them. Amia Srinivasan's piece (discussed earlier on this blog) puts this tension front and center. But it's also structurally similar to a tension that Martha Nussbaum was dealing with 20 years prior: the problem of adaptive preferences.
Adaptive preferences are preference for sub-optimal goods and, in particular, we typically acquire them due to structural oppression. Cases of adaptive preferences are easy to find in development and sexual ethics.
Suppose there is a women in a deeply unfulfilling marriage. Her spouse is manipulative and the sex is unpleasant for her. But she lives in a strongly religious, conservative community where divorce is considered taboo. So she develops the view that sex is not supposed to be pleasant for women. In fact, she comes to believe that she prefers bad sex because if she took pleasure in it, it would be sinful.
Chapter two of Nussbaum's Women and Human Development starts with this problem and deploys it against a wide range of theories in social choice. Imagine social choice theories come on a spectrum. On one side, we have pure subjective welfarist views - what is good is identical to what people desire. The job of the government is to aggregate those preferences in various ways and fulfill them. On the other side, we have Platonism - what is good is wholly independent of what people desire.
Nussbaum's goal in this chapter is to show that something closer to the Platonist side of the spectrum must be right. Her strategy is to show that a whole series of subjective welfarist views either (1) cannot produce justice in the face of adaptive preferences or (2) are implicitly relying on an account of the good that is at least a somewhat objective and not wholly desire based.
If subjective welfarists just make all political and social choice based on people's expressed preferences, we should have little reason to change oppressive structures when those structures successfully get the oppressed to adapt their preferences. If it seems that most women prefer to stay home and raise children, then we need not change labor market policies to be more inclusive to women. There is no need to ask the question of why women prefer to have less economic power nor do pure subjective welfarist have a mechanism to correct for the malformed preferences. So, on Nussbaum's view, pure subjective welfarism won't do.
A number of theorists on the subjective welfarist side of the spectrum have introduced corrective tools to discover what people's real preferences are. These theories give various descriptions of counterfactual scenarios in which we can imagine that somebody is in more ideal reasoning conditions and then ask what their true preferences would be. We might imagine that they have a lot of time to deliberate, they are consistent, they have access to all the factual information, they have been appropriately socialized, they don't have anti-social preferences or some other options. Nussbaum argues that, no matter how we try to specify the counterfactual circumstances, the reason why we think those circumstances more accurately captures their true preferences depends upon some objective notion of the good, lurking beneath the surface in a supposedly subjective theory of the good.
She concludes by putting forward her capacities account as a solution. The capacities account is a whole thing I won't get into here but the basic idea is that we have a political and social obligation to ensure that everyone is entitled to a basic set to capacities. These capacities have to be actual, not just possible. In order words, if economic exploitation makes it impractically difficult to be healthy, I do not have the capacity to be healthy, even if technically, I could still be health and exploited at the same time. But with the capacities approach in hand, we can say that people cannot will away their capacities through malformed preferences, preferences formed under the conditions that allow capacities are the ones that really matter for social decision making and we should engage in political interventions to restore capacities whenever they have been lost. In concrete terms, that looks like giving women in abusive marriages viable escape options. If they want to leave their marriage but feel it is unsafe, the government can and should intervene to give them a safe way to divorce.
I think Nussbaum's work presents interesting parallels with sexual ethics. The similarity was already explained. A big difference is that she is talking about how social groups, political institutions, societies should make decisions. Sexual ethics is (usually) about how two people should make a very private, intimate decision. But consent is sometimes a public, political thing. For example, commercial transactions involve consent but are also often very public.
At the very least, the literature on the problem of adaptive preferences provides an instructive parallel for thinking about problems in sexual ethics.
Adaptive preferences are preference for sub-optimal goods and, in particular, we typically acquire them due to structural oppression. Cases of adaptive preferences are easy to find in development and sexual ethics.
Suppose there is a women in a deeply unfulfilling marriage. Her spouse is manipulative and the sex is unpleasant for her. But she lives in a strongly religious, conservative community where divorce is considered taboo. So she develops the view that sex is not supposed to be pleasant for women. In fact, she comes to believe that she prefers bad sex because if she took pleasure in it, it would be sinful.
Chapter two of Nussbaum's Women and Human Development starts with this problem and deploys it against a wide range of theories in social choice. Imagine social choice theories come on a spectrum. On one side, we have pure subjective welfarist views - what is good is identical to what people desire. The job of the government is to aggregate those preferences in various ways and fulfill them. On the other side, we have Platonism - what is good is wholly independent of what people desire.
Nussbaum's goal in this chapter is to show that something closer to the Platonist side of the spectrum must be right. Her strategy is to show that a whole series of subjective welfarist views either (1) cannot produce justice in the face of adaptive preferences or (2) are implicitly relying on an account of the good that is at least a somewhat objective and not wholly desire based.
If subjective welfarists just make all political and social choice based on people's expressed preferences, we should have little reason to change oppressive structures when those structures successfully get the oppressed to adapt their preferences. If it seems that most women prefer to stay home and raise children, then we need not change labor market policies to be more inclusive to women. There is no need to ask the question of why women prefer to have less economic power nor do pure subjective welfarist have a mechanism to correct for the malformed preferences. So, on Nussbaum's view, pure subjective welfarism won't do.
A number of theorists on the subjective welfarist side of the spectrum have introduced corrective tools to discover what people's real preferences are. These theories give various descriptions of counterfactual scenarios in which we can imagine that somebody is in more ideal reasoning conditions and then ask what their true preferences would be. We might imagine that they have a lot of time to deliberate, they are consistent, they have access to all the factual information, they have been appropriately socialized, they don't have anti-social preferences or some other options. Nussbaum argues that, no matter how we try to specify the counterfactual circumstances, the reason why we think those circumstances more accurately captures their true preferences depends upon some objective notion of the good, lurking beneath the surface in a supposedly subjective theory of the good.
She concludes by putting forward her capacities account as a solution. The capacities account is a whole thing I won't get into here but the basic idea is that we have a political and social obligation to ensure that everyone is entitled to a basic set to capacities. These capacities have to be actual, not just possible. In order words, if economic exploitation makes it impractically difficult to be healthy, I do not have the capacity to be healthy, even if technically, I could still be health and exploited at the same time. But with the capacities approach in hand, we can say that people cannot will away their capacities through malformed preferences, preferences formed under the conditions that allow capacities are the ones that really matter for social decision making and we should engage in political interventions to restore capacities whenever they have been lost. In concrete terms, that looks like giving women in abusive marriages viable escape options. If they want to leave their marriage but feel it is unsafe, the government can and should intervene to give them a safe way to divorce.
I think Nussbaum's work presents interesting parallels with sexual ethics. The similarity was already explained. A big difference is that she is talking about how social groups, political institutions, societies should make decisions. Sexual ethics is (usually) about how two people should make a very private, intimate decision. But consent is sometimes a public, political thing. For example, commercial transactions involve consent but are also often very public.
At the very least, the literature on the problem of adaptive preferences provides an instructive parallel for thinking about problems in sexual ethics.
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