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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Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case,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.

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.

Reviews:

"[A] lucid and carefully argued new book."--Brigitte Frase, Ruminator Review

"A remarkably wide ranging and nuanced treatise on the interplay between emotions and law. . . . A short book review cannot do justice to Nussbaum's exceptionally thorough evaluation of shame, disgust and the law."--Stefanie A. Lindquist, Law and Politics Book Review

"Disgust and shame are problematic emotions that often appear to want to repudiate our basic, body-based humanity, Martha Nussbaum claims in this ambitious and timely book. . . . Nussbaum is by no means in favor of purging the law of all reference to emotion: she in fact makes an eloquent case for why this cannot and should not be done. . . . But there are some emotion Nussbaum mentions jealousy as well as shame and disgust--that appear to offer an unreliable guide to human behavior, to risk calling up mere prejudice and social stigma instead of valid distinctions." Peter Brooks, Green Bag

"Nussbaum is America's most prominent philosopher of public life, and a new book by her is always a force to be reckoned with. The argument of Hiding from Humanity, characteristically lucid, is carried on at two levels. First, she wants to put disgust on trial. . . . At a deeper level, however, Nussbaum's argument is not simply about the law, but about a whole conception of human society and what it means to be human." John Wilson, The Boston Globe

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
I. Shame and Disgust: Confusion in Practice and Theory 1
II. Law without the Emotions? 5
III. Two Problematic Emotions 13
Chapter 1. Emotions and Law 19
I. Appeals to Emotion 20
II. Emotion and Belief, Emotion and Value 24
III. Emotions, Appraisal, and Moral Education 31
IV. Emotion and the "Reasonable Man": Manslaughter, Self-Defense 37
V. Emotions and Changing Social Norms 46
VI. Reasonable Sympathy: Compassion in Criminal Sentencing 48
VII. Emotions and Political Liberalism 56
VIII. How to Appraise Emotions 67
Chapter 2. Disgust and Our Animal Bodies 71
I. Disgust and Law 72
II. Pro-Disgust Arguments: Devlin, Kass, Miller, Kahan 75
III. The Cognitive Content of Disgust 87
IV. Disgust and Indignation 99
V. Projective Disgust and Group Subordination 107
VI. Disgust, Exclusion, Civilization 115
Chapter 3. Disgust and the Law 124
I. Disgust as Offense, Disgust as Criterion 125
II. Disgust and the Offender: The "Homosexual-Provocation" Defense 126
III. Disgust and the "Average Man": Obscenity 134
IV. Disgust as a Reason for Illegality: Sodomy, Necrophilia 147
V. Disgust and Nuisance Law 158
VI. Disgust and the Jury: "Horrible and Inhuman" Homicides 163
Chapter 4. Inscribing the Face: Shame and Stigma 172
I. The Blushing Face 173
II. Primitive Shame, Narcissism, and the "Golden Age" 177
III. The Refusal of Imperfection: The Case of B 189
IV. Shame and Its Relatives: Humiliation, Embarrassment 203
V. Shame and Its Relatives: Disgust, Guilt, Depression, Rage 206
VI. Constructive Shame? 211
VII. Stigma and Brand: Shame in Social Life 217
Chapter 5. Shaming Citizens? 222
I. Shame and the "Facilitating Environment" 223
II. Shame Penalties: Dignity and Narcissistic Rage 227
III. Shame and "Moral Panics": Gay Sex and "Animus" 250
IV. Moral Panics and Crime: The Gang Loitering Law 271
V. Mill's Conclusion by Another Route 278
Chapter 6. Protecting Citizens from Shame 280
I. Creating a Facilitating Environment 282
II. Shame and a Decent Living-Standard 282
III. Antidiscrimination, Hate Crimes 287
IV. Shame and Personal Privacy 296
V. Shame and People with Disabilities 305
Chapter 7. Liberalism without Hiding? 320
I. Political Liberalism, Disgust, and Shame 321
II. Mill's Defense of Liberty Reconsidered 322
III. The Case against Disgust and Shame 335
IV. Emotions and Forms of Liberalism 340
Notes 351
List of References 389
General Index 401
Index of Case Names 412

Paperback
432 pages