Nussbaum on Shame, Disgust, and Disability Discrimination

In 2004 Martha Nussbaum discussed the idea of shame as an instrument of public policy. Shaming those who willfully degrade and disregard the public good, it was argued, would advance civil society. She said:

Shame has been a prominent topic in recent discussions of punishment. Theorists and practitioners have favored bringing back the blush on the face, so to speak, punishing people by some form of public humiliation instead of a fine or community service. Shame punishments have a long history: Consider the "scarlet letter" and the pillory. The recent revival of interest in such punishments is closely connected with a sense (on the part of communitarians) that we have lost our public sense of shame, the collective social boundaries that shame once policed.

Nussbaum put this in the context of disability discrimination:

On the other side, our society also has been thinking a lot about how to protect citizens from shame. One can see this in particular in recent public debates about citizens with disabilities, where much attention is given to how both employment and education can be non-stigmatizing. ... An interest in shame in punishment is ultimately inconsistent with respect for the equal dignity of all citizens.

A characteristic of disability stigma is the tendency to dehumanize disabled people, denying them respect and dignity. Scapegoating—the tendency to project fear of one's own faults on a targeted group—underlies the “disgust” which precedes shame:

As psychological research shows, people tend to project disgust properties onto groups of people in their own society, who come to figure as surrogates for people's anxieties about their own animality. By branding members of these groups as disgusting, foul, smelly, slimy, the dominant group is able to distance itself even further from its own animality.

Emotions such as anger can produce corrective action. Nussbaum observes, “Some emotions are essential to law and to public principles of justice: anger at wrongdoing, fear for our safety, compassion for the pain of others, all these are good reasons to make laws that protect people in their rights.”

But shame and disgust are nonpolitical in a liberal society:

I think that even the moralized form of disgust is problematic, for two reasons. First of all, it is frequently a screen for the more primitive kind of disgust. When people express disgust about a group whom they take to be a source of social decay, citing moral grounds, there is often something much uglier going on. ... Second, even when the moralized disgust is not a screen for something else, it is ultimately an unproductive social attitude, since its direction is anti-social. Anger is constructive: Its content is, "This harm should not have occurred, and the imbalance should be righted." Most philosophical definitions of anger include the thought that the wrong should be punished or somehow made good. Disgust, by contrast, expresses a wish to separate oneself from a source of pollution; its social reflex is to run away. (Emphasis added)

In "Spoiled Identity": When the Disabled are Not in "A State of Society" this weblog noted:

What is significant here is that the basic human rights—normal human rights—are not guaranteed simply because a person is human, but only if society accepts the person. The "spoiled identity" which sociologists recognize in such stigmatized people as the disabled, and especially those with birth defects, often means a specific lifetime exclusion from society.

Martha Nussbaum notes the collectivist impulse motivating many shamers:

The prominent defenders of the appeal to disgust and shame in law have all been communitarians of one or another stripe ([Lord] Devlin, [Amitai] Etzioni, [Leon] Kass), and this, I claim, is no accident. What their thought shares is the idea that society ought to have at its core a homogeneous group of people whose ways of living, of having sex, of looking and being, are defined as "normal." People who deviate from that norm may then be stigmatized, and penalized by law, even if their conduct causes no harm.

Such surrender to conformism is contrary to the liberalism underlying the founding of the United States:

My study of disgust and shame shows that these emotions threaten key values of a liberal society, especially equal respect for people and for their liberty. Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct. For both of these reasons, I believe, anyone who cherishes the key democratic values of equality and liberty should be deeply suspicious of the appeal to those emotions in the context of law and public policy.

Further reading in Martha Nussbaum's thought on human dignity:

Let’s start with an assumption that is widely shared: that all human beings are equal bearers of human dignity.  It is widely agreed that government must treat that dignity with equal respect.   But what is it to treat people with equal respect in areas touching on religious belief and observance? ...
On the whole, the accommodationist position has been dominant in U. S. law and public culture - ever since George Washington wrote a famous letter to the Quakers explaining that he would not require them to serve in the military because the “conscientious scruples of all men” deserve the greatest “delicacy and tenderness.” - Veiled Threats [NYT], 2010