Martha C. Nussbaum And The Sweatshop Sublime, By Bruce Thomas
Ezra Schwarcz
Rethinking Ethics
In the pre-historical era, or in survivalist cultures, one only needed to be aware and responsible for one’s own needs. Eventually humans began to see that by banding together, they were not only able to survive, but also to live with meaning. Even so, as the world has evolved into the fast paced global context in which we live today, public thinkers have felt compelled to question our new ethical responsibilities as global citizens. In Globalization and its Discontents by Richard Locke, Compassion and Terror by Martha C. Nussbaum and The Sweatshop Sublime by Bruce Robbins the authors challenge us to rethink what it means to be ethical in a global order. I agree with these readings that make the claim …show more content…
But there are dangers in any act of imagining, and we should not let these particular dangers cause us to admit defeat prematurely, surrendering before an allegedly insuperable barrier of otherness” (Nussbaum, 26).
In other words, there is no real way for a stripper to fully appreciate the subject positionality of an astronaut, and vice versa, especially when those differences need to surmount the barriers of race, ethnicity, gender and class. Complicating this is “one’s inner world” to use Nussbaum’s phrase that often defies how one identifies in the world. That said, I agree with Nussbaum that the argument of human dignity is lesser than one of compassion. I also agree with Nussbaum when she claims
Now it must be admitted that human dignity is not an altogether clear notion. In what does it consist? Why should we think that all human life has it? The minute the Stoic tradition tries to answer such questions, problems arise. In particular, the answer almost always takes form of saying, Look at how far we are above the beasts. Reason, language, moral capacity – all these are seen as worth of respect and awe at least in part because the beasts, so-called, don’t have them, because they make us better than others (Nussbaum, …show more content…
In this way insight is “strangely powerless” (Robbins, 85). Robbins highlights a paradoxical component of the issue: that despite your access to the global scale, it is not access to an equal power of action on the global scale. Discussing action, Robbins argues that all too often, words like “action” and “activism” are inappropriately matched with words like “culture”, “intellectual” and “art”, each of which is afforded the privilege of “transcending the division of labor” (Robbins, 89). This stands to suggest that action has come to imply elevated powers that magically resolve social contradictions, cure cultural and political fragmentation and resolve impossible, global predicaments. The problem with this reasoning is that it, in a way, justifies us doing nothing, because action is just too out of
Rethinking Ethics
In the pre-historical era, or in survivalist cultures, one only needed to be aware and responsible for one’s own needs. Eventually humans began to see that by banding together, they were not only able to survive, but also to live with meaning. Even so, as the world has evolved into the fast paced global context in which we live today, public thinkers have felt compelled to question our new ethical responsibilities as global citizens. In Globalization and its Discontents by Richard Locke, Compassion and Terror by Martha C. Nussbaum and The Sweatshop Sublime by Bruce Robbins the authors challenge us to rethink what it means to be ethical in a global order. I agree with these readings that make the claim …show more content…
But there are dangers in any act of imagining, and we should not let these particular dangers cause us to admit defeat prematurely, surrendering before an allegedly insuperable barrier of otherness” (Nussbaum, 26).
In other words, there is no real way for a stripper to fully appreciate the subject positionality of an astronaut, and vice versa, especially when those differences need to surmount the barriers of race, ethnicity, gender and class. Complicating this is “one’s inner world” to use Nussbaum’s phrase that often defies how one identifies in the world. That said, I agree with Nussbaum that the argument of human dignity is lesser than one of compassion. I also agree with Nussbaum when she claims
Now it must be admitted that human dignity is not an altogether clear notion. In what does it consist? Why should we think that all human life has it? The minute the Stoic tradition tries to answer such questions, problems arise. In particular, the answer almost always takes form of saying, Look at how far we are above the beasts. Reason, language, moral capacity – all these are seen as worth of respect and awe at least in part because the beasts, so-called, don’t have them, because they make us better than others (Nussbaum, …show more content…
In this way insight is “strangely powerless” (Robbins, 85). Robbins highlights a paradoxical component of the issue: that despite your access to the global scale, it is not access to an equal power of action on the global scale. Discussing action, Robbins argues that all too often, words like “action” and “activism” are inappropriately matched with words like “culture”, “intellectual” and “art”, each of which is afforded the privilege of “transcending the division of labor” (Robbins, 89). This stands to suggest that action has come to imply elevated powers that magically resolve social contradictions, cure cultural and political fragmentation and resolve impossible, global predicaments. The problem with this reasoning is that it, in a way, justifies us doing nothing, because action is just too out of