Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions
about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper
stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful
and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential
philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust
play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the
law. Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions
because they are associated in troubling ways with a desire to hide
from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological
wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of
disgust embodies "magical ideas of contamination, and impossible
aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we
know it." She argues that disgust should never be the basis for
criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating
role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be
similarly suspicious of what she calls "primitive shame," a shame "at
the very fact of human imperfection," and she is harshly critical of
the role that such shame plays in certain punishments. Drawing on an
extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and
historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about
purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde
and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of
legal and moral philosophy.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400825943
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter