In the later stages of the relationship, it was the feminists who were more concerned to keep liberalism at arm’s length. The reasons for this are partly conjunctural. Feminism re-emerged in the 1960s and 70s in a period when liberalism was shorthand for everything stodgy, unambitious, and dishonest: a glorification of rights and freedoms that paid scant attention to the inequalities of income and power; a discourse of complacency designed to keep things as they are. In that moment in history, to be radical was almost by definition not to be liberal: witness the familiar taxonomy from the 1970s that divided feminisms into their liberal, socialist, and radical varieties, and rather patronized the liberal sort.

Beyond that historical moment, what is it that feminists have so disliked about liberalism? A key objection is one that has always been leveled at liberalism: that in promoting a merely formal equality between the sexes, it fails to deliver substantive equality of power. Liberalism might promise women legal equality with men, might even develop this into equality of opportunity; but its association with a market economy ultimately paralyzes its best efforts in this direction, and offers no plausible solution to the organization of child-care or domestic labor. In this criticism, political and economic liberalism are seen as two sides of the same coin, promoting a freedom of choice for the individual that generates gross inequalities between groups, and then appealing to the freedom of this individual to resist the collectivist measures that would redress the resulting inequalities. More recently, however, we have become more willing to see political and economic liberalism as separate (so that you might favor one without being committed to the other). We have also become less able to envisage complete alternatives to the market system (so while there are more or less egalitarian versions, it is hard now to credit abolition of the market per se). In this changed context, feminist opposition to liberalism threatens to become something of a mantra: a comforting repetition whose originating arguments have been lost in history and have less and less purchase on our other beliefs.

This is where Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice comes in. Nussbaum has been particularly exercised by what she sees as the turn against normative politics, and the “moral passivity” she associates with this. Her larger target, in much of her recent writing, is those who retreat behind a (usually post structuralist) cultural relativism, who become so obsessed with the dangers of a “do-gooder colonialism” that they find it impossible to differentiate between just and unjust practices, or so philosophically disturbed by invocations of human nature that they can no longer think of people as having an equal moral worth. Nussbaum counters this with a theory of human justice that is liberal, humanist, and feminist. In doing so, she tackles head on the supposed conflict between liberalism and feminism, arguing that “liberal individualism, consistently carried through, entails a radical feminist program.”

Though the targets she has been pursuing in recent arguments – romantic supporters of emotion against reason, irresponsible poststructuralists who can’t recognize the urgency of women’s needs – are sometimes oversimplified or misrepresented, I share Nussbaum’s perception that the conflict between liberalism and feminism has been exaggerated and is due for re-assessment. I agree with the general point she reiterates through her argument, to the effect that liberalisms are various, and that criticisms appropriate to one kind of liberal miss their mark when aimed at others within the tradition. I also agree with her that feminism is impoverished if it finds itself unable to make evaluative and normative claims. But her endorsement of a liberal understanding of autonomy begs too many questions; and in combining a classically liberal emphasis on choice with a feminist understanding of unjust social power, she is driven into a curiously illiberal liberalism. I argue for a different understanding of the relationship between equality and autonomy that reinstates equality as the central feminist concern.

I. Individualism

In a key essay on “The Feminist Critique of Liberalism,” Nussbaum identifies three charges feminists have commonly leveled against the liberal tradition: that it is too ‘individualistic’; that its ideal of equality is too abstract and formal; and that the emphasis it places on reason underplays the significance of care and emotion in moral and political life. (The choice of topics is significant in itself, for while she correctly identifies the major themes in recent feminist discourse, none of these quite captures that earlier objection about liberalism failing to address the substantive conditions for sexual equality. The critique of abstraction comes closest, but recent writing has tended to focus on the abstraction from gender difference, and resulting identification of equality with sameness, rather than the relationship between formal and substantive equality.)

The burden of the first objection, as Nussbaum understands it, is that liberalism envisages individuals as islands unto themselves, as solitary, egoistic, self-sufficient, and not only sees them as such but actively promotes this egoism and self-sufficiency as a normative ideal. Nussbaum agrees that this would be an ethically impoverished position – with a caveat about whether self-sufficiency is such a bad thing for women to pursue – but argues that the characterization does not capture the tradition as represented by key figures such as Kant or Mill or Rawls. She goes on to make a strong claim about the centrality of individualism to the liberal position, but understood now as a recognition of the separateness of individuals “who always continue to have their separate brains and voices and stomachs, however much they love one another.” This recognition, she argues, is crucial for women, whose needs and personae have too often been subsumed under the ‘greater good’ of the family or community or state. Women desperately need to be recognized as separate beings, whose well-being is distinct from that of a husband’s. They need more rather than less liberal individualism. They need the flourishing of individual human beings to be made prior to the flourishing of the state or nation or religious group.

The defense of individualism comes as a breath of fresh air, reminding me of the defiantly titled journal, The Egoist, which was briefly published in Britain in the 1910s with feminists like Rebecca West among its contributors. There has been a good deal of unnecessary anxiety about individualism implying a ruthless self-centeredness, and in the worrying over this, it has been easy to forget the crucial importance to women of being recognized as individuals in their own right. Insisting on the importance of each separate individual does not commit one to a view of human beings as rational calculating machines, self-interested egoists, or misanthropic hermits. Failing, however, to insist on the importance of the individual can mean capitulation to the worst forms of female oppression. As Nussbaum reminds us, there are many women around the world whose individuality is so little recognized that they are systematically passed over in the distribution of food or health care, or required to sublimate their own needs and desires in the perpetuation of family honor. The results are not just unpleasant but all too often deadly. In the famous calculation by Drèze and Sen (based on comparison of male to female ratios around the world), one hundred million women are missing – missing, one can only assume, because girls and women have been systematically ignored and denied in the allocation of foodstuffs and medical supplies. Against this background, it is hard to disagree with Nussbaum on the radical implications of liberal individualism – hard, indeed, to see why any feminist would want to disagree.

But liberalism is not just about recognizing the equal importance of each individual, nor is it the only tradition that stresses this point. Rousseau’s condemnation of the condition of dependency (dependency between men, that is, for he never seemed so bothered by relations of dependency between women and men) can also be read as asserting the importance of each separate individual; while Marx’s critique of alienation and commodification highlights the denial of individuality under the domination of capitalist power. Moreover, while liberalism puts the individual at the center of its analysis, it took an embarrassingly long time to turn its individualism to the service of women. Nussbaum acknowledges this last point, noting that as recently as the 1970s, John Rawls was still imagining a social contract in which the actors were (male) heads of households, looking after the interests of other family members. She attributes this failing in liberalism to its concern with freedom of choice, a concern that made liberals particularly resistant to interference in the family, and encouraged them to regard the family as an untroubling, harmonious whole.

It seems more plausible to me to take it as evidence that liberalism is primarily driven by its commitment to free choice rather than its recognition of individuals as equal and separate. Historically, the references to equality were more descriptive than normative – as when Hobbes noted that the weakest could always employ cunning to overcome the strongest, and that there was no reliable consensus about ‘natural hierarchy.’ Even those who talked of equal rights as derived from God were hardly committing themselves to strong positions on the equal worth of each human being; while the utilitarians were often quite explicitly pragmatic, merely noting that there was no secure basis for saying one person counted for more than another or that one kind of activity had greater intrinsic value. If the tradition were as centrally concerned with the equality and distinctness of individuals as Nussbaum’s account suggests, it really is difficult to make sense of its tardy appreciation of women’s claims. The conundrum becomes less puzzling if we recognize that liberalism is driven by its critique of authoritarian and (later) interventionist government rather than any grand thesis about each individual being of equal worth. Liberal individualism has been primarily about choice, and it was only after a long process of internal and external criticism that it took more seriously its own statements about the equality of individuals.

The radicalism Nussbaum reads into the tradition is still more implicit than overt, and she barely engages with the additional elements attached to its understanding of individualism that have been the object of much feminist critique. What, for example, of the arguments Carole Pateman develops against liberal contractarianism in The Sexual Contract or The Disorder of Women? Pateman makes two large charges against the liberal contractarian tradition. The first is that liberalism for men was based on subordination for women, so that the social contract concluded between separate and autonomous men was premised on a prior sexual contract that delivered them control of the women. Fair enough, Nussbaum might say, but that was in the bad old days of early liberalism, and not something intrinsic to the liberal tradition. The object of Pateman’s second critique is less easily located in liberalism’s pre-history. She also argues that liberalism generated an understanding of individuals as the owners of their own bodies and capacities, not therefore beholden to anyone else for the disposition of these (this is where the anti-authoritarianism comes in), but entitled to enter into contracts with the other (separate) individuals for the use of their talents or capacities.

The resulting model of human interaction is, in Pateman’s view, profoundly unsatisfactory; and one of her illustrations is the Baby M case in the USA where a woman who entered into a contract to become a surrogate mother changed her mind in the course of the pregnancy, but was ordered by the court to surrender the child. Pateman draws on Marx’s critique of the wage contract to pinpoint the fiction involved in this: the fiction that there is a ‘commodity’ provided by the surrogate mother – the service of her body – that can be treated as separable from herself. “To extend to women the masculine conception of the individual as owner, and the conception of freedom as the capacity to do what you will with your own, is to sweep away any intrinsic relation between the female owner, her body and reproductive capacities.” The model was not dreamt up to deal with women as autonomous beings, and the moral impoverishment of its understanding of freedom becomes transparent when it is later extended in this way.

What is at issue here is not whether “taking money for bodily services” (to quote another essay in Sex and Social Justice) is intrinsically wrong, for while Nussbaum adopts a more robust position than Pateman on prostitution and surrogacy, the question is not whether prostitution should be banned or surrogacy contracts legally upheld. Pateman’s deeper point is that liberalism has drawn on notions of self-ownership for its understanding of freedom and choice, and that in doing so, it reflects a misleadingly masculine model of human interaction. When freedom was first figured as the capacity to do what you will with your own, the things that were ‘your own’ included not just property but people: your servants, your children, your wife who had no right to withhold sexual services and could still be beaten at will. The subsequent extension of this freedom to women (rather like the extension of male models of employment, which in the man’s case had depended on a wife) means it begins to crack at the seams.

When freedom is given more general application, it becomes more thoroughly individuated. It also becomes more turned in on itself. For the majority of the population, the property one can freely dispose of basically comes down to one’s bodily and mental capacities, for what other property do most people own? It may indeed be better to have this kind of freedom than to be disposed of by somebody else: better to be in a position where one can charge for the use of one’s body, for example, than to be handed over as the spoils of victory or married off at one’s father’s will. But as Pateman and others have suggested, the equation of freedom with the freedom to dispose of oneself is still a pretty impoverished understanding – and not one feminists should too readily endorse.

In a related critique of liberal conceptions of autonomy, Jennifer Nedelsky observes that women are more likely than men to recognize the centrality of relationships in constituting the self, to know that we do not spring up like Hobbes’ mushrooms, but take our being at least in part from our relations to others. The irony, as she notes, is that women know this centrality of relationships through oppressive experience, through a long history of being defined by reference to men. The individuality Nussbaum celebrates plays a key role in challenging this oppression, but we will not get very far if we think of individuality “in isolation from the social context in which that individuality came into being.” Nedelsky’s point here (which, in other contexts, Nussbaum seems happy to endorse) is that certain social relations will enable autonomy while other make it far more difficult, and that simply stressing our individuality or separation is not enough of a guide. The separateness of individuals is more complicated than is suggested by the reminder that we have different brains and voices and stomachs; and a separateness that implies ownership or mastery – disposing of oneself as one chooses, or living a life that is finally one’s own – has been regarded by many feminists as neither a possible nor desirable ideal.

A rather different worry is the ethnocentrism implicit in autonomy: that autonomy may be being interpreted in a very culture-specific way; or that the high value liberals attach to autonomy takes what has become a central preoccupation of western cultures and turns it into a universal norm. Nussbaum recognizes that individuals will make different choices in their pursuit of their life’s goals, that some may choose to identify personal fulfillment with the furtherance of their group or community, while others adopt more individually defined objectives. In her conception of the good life, however, such decisions should always emerge as the individual’s own choice. If the alternative is that decisions are imposed on the individual by others, I presume no feminist would want to disagree, but Nussbaum’s approach raises difficult questions about how we are to view the ‘choices’ people make in cultures that attach less value to autonomy, and most importantly, how we are to view the ‘choices’ of women in such cultures. I shall return to this later.

The third way to approach these issues is through poststructuralist critiques of the subject – not Nussbaum’s favorite intellectual resource. Poststructuralist critics have accused liberalism of an absurdly over-blown conception of the individual, as rational, autonomous, expressing (or to the economist, revealing) his or her ‘true’ self through the choices he/she makes, and delving into this self as the source of universally valid moral laws. Western liberals know, of course, that some individuals act more autonomously than others. The difference with post-structuralism is not empirical; it is not that one side sees people as go-getting choosers and the others as trapped in webs of power. When Nussbaum, for example, calls on us to understand women “first and foremost, as human centers of choice and freedom,” this has to be read as a claim about how women can or should be rather than a statement of how they are; otherwise one could make no sense of her point about too many women being treated as means rather than as ends. Liberals see autonomy as a struggle, something to be achieved against both external and internal constraints. The issue with poststructuralism – and from a different direction, also with psychoanalytic theory – is about whether this is the right struggle to join. Once you start to see the self as in some sense a fiction, or the compulsion to be in control of your life as indeed a compulsion, then the idea of autonomy as the goal of politics begins to seem less convincing.

There are two aspects to this. The first is that autonomy becomes a more slippery notion once we muddy the sense of self as either origin or goal; the second is that the pursuit of autonomy might itself be viewed as constraint. Feminists have usually seen identity as in some sense socially constructed, and have often worked with a notion of an authentic human identity waiting behind the masks of male and female, the person we will turn out to be once we throw off all those stereotypes and expectations and roles. If one assumes a true self behind all the rubbish, it makes sense to talk of ‘freeing’ the individual from the artifices of social convention; it makes sense to treat the autonomy of that individual as the central feminist goal. But what if there is no ‘doer behind the deed,’ what if who and what we are is always fragmented, shifting, incomplete, what if there is a circularity about the self such that we call ourselves into being through the very activities we might have thought of as expressions of the self? Nussbaum dislikes this kind of argument, but in her critique of Judith Butler (one of those responsible for promoting these doubts), she does not engage with the question-marks poststructuralism puts around autonomy, focusing rather on what she sees as the moral passivity and refusal to articulate moral norms. I am close enough to Nussbaum on this last issue, and share her impatience with those who use the ‘death of the subject’ to justify a retreat from normative politics. (I just don’t think there are as many people doing this as she does.) I also share what I would assume to be Nussbaum’s position: that ditching the implausible belief in a pre-formed subject does not mean abandoning all notions of human agency and identity. The post-structuralist account does not provide the definitive riposte to liberalism, but it still raises questions about the self, identity, and autonomy that hamper a politics defined so crucially around the individual’s capacity for choice – and I don’t think Nussbaum addresses these.

Her own understanding of choice is about exploration and creation rather than any simpler notion of ‘discovering’ an original self, but she operates with distinctions between a human core and disposable contingencies that continue to suggest a relatively unproblematic notion of human identity and human freedom. Consider this statement:

Liberalism does think that the core of rational and moral personhood is something all human beings share, shaped though it may be in different ways by their differing social circumstances. And it does give this core a special salience in political thought, defining the public realm in terms of it, purposefully refusing the same salience in the public political conception to differences of gender and rank and class and religion. This, of course, does not mean that people may not choose to identify themselves with their religion or ethnicity or gender and to make that identification absolutely central in their lives. But for the liberal, choice is the essential issue; politics can take these features into account only in ways that respect it. This is at one level unexceptional. People clearly vary in the strength of their identification with their gender or ethnicity or religion, and people clearly choose – to change or give up their religions, to leave brutal partners, to bring up their children very differently from the way they were brought up themselves. But the formulation suggests a highly contingent understanding of gender (as something we can ‘choose’ to identify with). This contrasts with widely shared feminist views on embodiment, and the impossibility of conceiving of individuals as distinct from the bodies through which they live their lives.

The body is not something we can readily ‘transcend’: we cannot distance ourselves from our supposedly contingent bodies in ways that will generate a non-sexed, non-gendered individuality. Nor can we seriously conceive of ‘stripping off’ the accidents of height, weight, skin color, body shape, genitalia, so as to approach some deeper human core. When Nussbaum distinguishes between ‘core’ and other, she does so to assert the moral irrelevance of gender when it comes to claims about human equality: I have no quarrel with this. When the distinction is carried over, however, into our political or psychological existence, it becomes much less plausible. Gender is hardly a contingent characteristic in political life, and when democracies refuse to recognize this (as when people grandly proclaim that voters should be more interested in the candidates’ ideas than whether they are female or male), they reproduce and reinforce existing inequalities. Gender is also pretty inseparable from who we are in a more everyday sense – it is not just a detachable contingency. One implication is that the choices we face are more constrained than Nussbaum would allow. This is partly because we are dealing with how others see as well as how we see ourselves (I may decide not to identify with my gender, but cannot stop others from viewing me in this way); it is also because the choosing individuals are already constituted by the elements they are supposedly rummaging through and deciding to pick up or drop.

The other reservation about autonomy is that the compulsion to be in control of one’s life can itself be viewed as a trap. One of the lessons I have drawn (rightly or wrongly) from Foucault is that processes previously conceived of as liberation – working to get clearer about who and what you are, working to ensure that choices made really are your own choices and not just subservience to external pressures – might themselves operate as regimes of power. I don’t mean by this just that choice can be a burden as well as a liberation – though it is worth pondering the agonizing dilemmas women go through in this age of more reliable contraception over whether or not to have a child, and the surprising frequency of the wish that it could all be left to chance. No one said freedom was going to be a picnic, but when we set autonomy at the center of our moral or political lives, we are forced to assume more responsibility than many of us can cope with for the forces that structure our lives, and we come to regard anything that is not a result of autonomous choice as thereby a failure. Nussbaum simplifies the issue when she asks us to consider whether we want a world where women live their own lives, or live lives as dictated by others: put like this, there is clearly no contest. But there is still a lot at issue in what is meant by ‘separate individual’; whether autonomy means being able to do what one chooses with one’s own; what counts as ‘one’s own’; and whether thinking of freedom in this way concedes too much to a masculine model. Autonomy is a complex and slippery notion. To anticipate my later argument, feminism is on surer ground when it focuses on equality rather than autonomy per se.

II. Abstract Equality

The second objection addressed by Nussbaum is that liberalism promotes a formal equality of treatment and in the process abstracts from a real asymmetry of power. Nussbaum’s response here is to accept the criticism but point out that many liberals have already anticipated it. Many now recognize the weakness of a classically ‘sex-blind’ approach to equality that insisted on identical treatment for women and men, regardless of their different location in the social hierarchy; and some leading liberals (Ronald Dworkin springs to mind) support programs of affirmative action. Though I think Nussbaum underplays the power of liberalism in resisting these developments, she is surely right to contest the notion that all liberals are committed to a merely formal understanding of equality. Equality of opportunity – never to be confused with its horrific other, equality of outcome – has become established as one of the key principles of contemporary liberalism, and most of those who take equal opportunities seriously recognize that it implies some attention to background inequalities. Some also believe it requires a temporary suspension of formal equality in order to balance background inequalities, as when political parties adopt gender quotas to raise the proportion of women selected as political representatives, or universities adopt affirmative action programs so as to increase the enrolment of students from minority groups. You can be a liberal and still accept all this. To that extent, the feminist opposition is misplaced.

Nussbaum’s own version of liberalism is particularly sensitive to the material conditions necessary for the flourishing of human autonomy, and much less open to the standard complaint about liberalism giving us the right but not the real opportunity to choose. The position she adopts relates to a larger project she has worked on with Amartya Sen, what has come to be known as the “capabilities approach” to human development. From the capabilities perspective, the key question is not what rights individuals have, nor what resources they enjoy (though both of these will be relevant), but what individuals are able to do and to be. What capabilities have they been able to develop? What capabilities have they been denied? And underpinning this: “What activities characteristically performed by human beings are so central that they seem definitive of a life that is truly human?” What are the functions without which a life is barely worth living, hardly a human life at all?

The questions direct Nussbaum to an ambitious list of conditions for human flourishing – far indeed from ‘merely’ formal notions of equality. To illustrate with just a few examples from her list, the central human capabilities would include being able to live one’s life through to a normal length (when we consider the horrifying variations in mortality rates across the globe, this would be an astonishing achievement), being adequately nourished and sheltered, being secure against rape, violence, and sexual assault, having one’s capacities for thought and reason developed by an adequate education, and being able “to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s own life.” The conditions are set pretty high: no one could object that this was a minimal program, and achieving it would clearly involve a significant redistribution of resources both within and between countries. The key premise, however, is choice rather than equality; and it is sufficiency rather than equality that is the goal.

What matters is not what resources we have – “the capabilities approach maintains that resources have no value in themselves, apart from their role in human functioning” – and certainly not whether our bundle is the same size as everyone else’s. What matters is that all human beings, wherever they are, should be able to develop their capabilities for choosing. Now in one sense, this shift of emphasis from resources to capabilities is pretty uncontroversial, for part of what is at issue is simply that individuals need different resources in order to achieve the same capabilities. If your leg is paralyzed, for example, you need a wheelchair to achieve the kind of mobility others enjoy at no cost; if you migrate to a country where people speak a different language, your children may need extra language tuition in order to have the same educational capabilities as their peers. The point is also to establish a humane minimum that all governments should be required to provide – and focusing on a minimum is good practical politics, even when the minimum is set so high.

This may well be the most effective way to proceed with eliminating global poverty (I do not take issue with it on that score), but it is important to recognize how far it moves from a discourse of equality. Equality is relational: you may have all you need to live a decent human existence, but we are still unequal if I have ten times more. The capabilities approach speaks to a perception that equality in that sense is no longer on the agenda, and glosses over what might otherwise be seen as a retreat by making freedom of choice the central concern. This retreat has been replicated across the literature on economic inequality, which is now far more concerned with distinguishing ‘deserved’ from ‘undeserved’ inequalities than tackling structural inequalities that cannot be understood in such individualist terms. It also meshes with an almost universal shift in social-democratic politics, where the problem of poverty has supplanted the problem of inequality, and ensuring a humane minimum has taken over from worries about the overall income gap.

This is still as far as the best liberal goes. In Sex and Social Justice, Martha Nussbaum redefines the liberal tradition so as to make it more thoroughly ‘materialist,’ more centered on substantive conditions for individuality and choice. The emphasis, however, is still on freedom of choice, and while this can generate strong positions on equalizing either opportunities or capabilities, it does not provide for further criticism of the inequalities that may then ensue. There is no space here for worrying about the overall distribution of resources: worrying about the after-the-event inequalities as well as those that limit our point of departure; worrying about what happens when the gap between rich and poor reaches previously unimaginable proportions; worrying about the emptiness of proclaiming people political equals when the disparity of their incomes and life-styles means they inhabit almost separate worlds. As applied to the relationship between the sexes, this points in a rather troubling direction, suggesting we would have to swallow objections about ultimate inequalities between women and men so long as the original capabilities were firmly in place. Personally, I want more than the capabilities that allow me to flourish; mean-minded as it may seem, I will still feel aggrieved if the men beside me end up with more time or more money or more power. And there is a good reason for this, for there is no real gap between equality of capabilities and equality of outcome when it come to sexual (and also racial) equality. If the outcome is not equal – if women, for example, end up with the primary responsibility for child-care while men run the affairs of state – then the opportunities were clearly not equal.

Liberalism has come a long way in recent years. It has redefined itself so as to make an initially rather descriptive egalitarianism more central; it has lent an ear to the opposition and incorporated some of its best ideas. In the process, it has given the lie to some of the older feminist complaints against liberalism. We cannot so easily say that liberalism treats equality always as a matter of sameness, that it offers identical treatment to all individuals regardless of the asymmetries of power. Nor can we so easily say it ignores the substantive conditions under which choice becomes a meaningful concept, that it fails to recognize the constraints imposed by women’s lack of education or employment, and sails on regardless with its hymn to autonomy and choice. But the equality now incorporated into liberalism still falls a long way short of equality of outcome. For feminists (and not only feminists!), this has to remain a cause for concern.

III. Reason, Emotion, and Choice

The third part of Nussbaum’s argument addresses the reason/emotion dichotomy, and the role this has played in recent feminist thought. Feminists have frequently noted that dichotomies between mind/body, reason/emotion, justice/care get transposed onto the division between men and women. They have challenged this in a variety of ways, including reversing the hierarchy – so that body and emotion come out on top instead of mind and reason – and, perhaps more commonly, querying the division itself. Nussbaum reads this as a worry that “liberalism is far too rationalistic: that by placing all emphasis on reason as a mark of humanity, it has emphasized a trait that males traditionally prize and denigrated traits, such as emotion and imagination, that females traditionally prize.” I don’t think this quite captures it: I thought the argument was that men and women alike prized reason over emotion, while conniving in the view that men are rational and women emotional; and the critiques have not necessarily attributed to women a greater capacity for imagination or emotion. But the reason/emotion dichotomy has certainly emerged as one of the feminist objections, and part of Nussbaum’s response is that it misses its mark. Some liberals have treated reason as the master, viewing the emotions as an unintelligent source of disorder, but this is not characteristic of the tradition as a whole.

Beyond her (surely correct) point about the varieties of liberalism, Nussbaum’s position draws on two key sources. She has long rejected the supposed association of men with reason, women with emotion: she thinks there is little empirical evidence for a gendered distribution of reason and emotion; and that what there is testifies to a social conditioning that has encouraged women (but not men) to cultivate their emotional range. Nussbaum is relentlessly social constructionist, and has no time for the idea that there are essential differences between the sexes in the exercise of either reason or passion. This places her a long distance from anyone who has felt called upon to defend the superior powers of emotion because of some belief that these are intrinsically female.

The second point draws on her work on Aristotle and the Stoic tradition, and her analysis of the emotions as themselves forms of evaluative judgement. Fear, for example, arises when we perceive certain individuals or situations as threatening, and the emotion will dissipate if we later discover that our beliefs were misplaced; jealousy is based on a particular interpretation of what others are doing; resentment can be transformed into affection if we come to see it as an expression of our own insecurity rather than a legitimate response to another’s qualities or actions. Emotions cannot be treated as a pre-conceptual given: “subrational stirrings,” as she puts it in another essay, that can only be given in to or stamped on, fed or starved. One part of this argument (the one she dwells on most in her discussion of the relationship between feminism and liberalism) is that emotions and preferences are formed under unjust social conditions, and that we cannot then take the preferences people express, the emotions they feel, or indeed the way they experience sexual desire, as the last word in what individuals want or need. Emotions are shaped and deformed by social norms or expectations, and not therefore to be trusted. “The liberal tradition holds that emotions should not be trusted as guides to life without being subject to some sort of critical scrutiny.”

The second part (more fully developed in her writings on ethics) is that working on our emotions so as to make them more rational, less framed by false beliefs or mistaken judgements, is a crucial part of moral life. Nussbaum looks to the “ordering of the passions through the critical work of reason” as a major element in the battle against racism or sexism. Unruly passions are not just a fact of life, to be harnessed or regulated or subdued; they always involve both beliefs and judgments, and we should be cultivating these passions and emotions so as to make them more rational and sustain our moral existence. The point to note about this is that while Nussbaum challenges the dichotomy between reason and emotion, she does so in a way that seems to reinforce the centrality of reason. She takes issue with the dichotomy between reason and emotion, but has been more concerned to insist on the rational component of emotions than the emotional component of reason. She queries the dichotomy but leaves the hierarchy still in place.

Apart from this last point, I find myself in broad agreement with Nussbaum. Like her, I am pretty much of an unreconstructed social constructionist; like her, I tend to the view that we will discover no significant differences between the sexes once (if) we get away from the effects of unjust social power. Like her, I see preferences as shaped and constrained by the surrounding social conditions, and not to be taken as the final word on what people either want or need. We know that people living in unjust or impoverished conditions adjust their expectations downwards in order to survive and remain sane; we know that women can live their lives by images of femininity that do immense damage to their self-esteem; we know that people living in relations of domination often find it hard to imagine themselves living under anything else. Much of the critique of ballot-box democracy depends on a similar understanding of preferences as open to transformation: not just the givens of the political process but available for revision and expansion and reform.

The question that concerns me is that when the social analysis of preference formation is coupled with a classically liberal emphasis on choice, it can generate disturbingly authoritarian distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ preferences, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ choice. Nussbaum quotes approvingly from John Harsanyi: “Any sensible ethical theory must make a distinction between rational wants and irrational wants, or between rational preferences and irrational preferences. It would be absurd to say we have the same moral obligation to help other people in satisfying their utterly unreasonable wants as we have to help them in satisfying their very reasonable desires.” So it’s not what people say they want that matters; it is only those wants we can recognize as rational. At this point, Nussbaum’s understanding of autonomy makes it difficult for her to regard certain choices as authentic – and the ones she finds least convincing are those where people seem to be choosing to align themselves with cultures that minimize their individual autonomy.

Note that for some critics, this would be an illiberal position. Generations of liberals have fulminated against the totalitarian impulse that refuses to accept people’s declared wishes as their real interests, that claims some higher knowledge of what will really make people happy, and ends up with troubling formulations about forcing us to be free. Nussbaum’s philosophy is in one sense entirely choice-centered – the primary source of human worth is “a power of moral choice within humans”; women must be seen “first and foremost, as human centers of choice and freedom” – and yet when it comes to it, she does not set enough store by the actual choices individuals make. I too think it reasonable to be skeptical of people’s choices: Nussbaum is right to point out that choices are socially constrained and constructed, and fully justified in reminding us that this is a long-held feminist belief. But to weld this onto a philosophy that makes the capacity for choice the defining human characteristic is more peculiar.

Nussbaum finds herself in a position where she is simultaneously hooked on the idea of choice and critical of most people’s choices. She is very conscious of the way perceptions of what is desirable get constrained by perceptions of what is possible, and refuses (rightly, in my view) to take the easy option of saying all we can go on is what people say they want. The fact that most women may tolerate an unequal division of labor in the household does not tell us much about what women ‘really’ want. The fact that a woman living in a society where girls are considered unmarriageable if they freely enjoy their sexuality will insist on the genital mutilation of her own daughters does not require us to regard the practice as what women ‘choose.’ I share Nussbaum’s position on these matters, though I am uncomfortably conscious of the difficulties of saying what does then count as an ‘authentic’ choice or preference, and who would ever be in a position to know. Nussbaum acknowledges a problem about ethnocentricity – that we might unwittingly include certain prejudices of our own culture in what we think to be universalistic claims – but she does not otherwise address the power relations between cultural groups. She tends to presume that it is men – the most powerful voices in traditional communities – who invoke cultural tradition; and she is generally scathing about the claims of religious or ethnic groups on the broad grounds of methodological individualism. I find it difficult to square this skepticism about actual choices with an understanding of humanity so centered on the capacity for choice.

In my view, it is philosophically easier – if politically more testing – to formulate the critique of social injustice in terms of equality rather than choice. In Sex and Social Justice, we are presented with the following either/or option. Either we take the preferences people express at their face value: this is admirably liberal in one sense, non-interventionist, non-dictatorial, but fails to engage with the known effects of unjust social power. Or we set out a schedule of the capabilities we have identified as necessary to human flourishing: this is much more challenging to the status quo, but it requires a more confident conception of the human good than many contemporary liberals would be willing to endorse – and it is not, as I have argued, about equality.

A third alternative is to make equality the driving concern. This provides the indictment Nussbaum also wants of those systems of domination and oppression that order individuals according to their race, ethnicity, or sex. It directs us just as effectively as the capabilities approach to the urgent problems of material deprivation – but does so without the philosophically contentious underpinning about what constitutes a ‘good’ human existence or what human beings most need. And because it treats each person as of equal worth, it will be as insistent as Nussbaum is that individuals should be able to make their own lives and not be dictated to by others. Focusing on equality also, however, means we have to recognize that there are issues of domination between cultures – between majority and minority cultures within a nation-state, between winning and losing cultures on a global stage.

When people feel that their cultural practices or religious beliefs are being disparaged by the wider society – and as the term ‘denigration’ reminds us, this disparagement is often bound up with racism – they are taking issue with one of the inequalities in contemporary societies: the inequality between majority and minority cultures, or between cultures that are politically dominant and those denied social voice or political power. Since the disparaged practices – ranging through the horrors of genital mutilation to the seclusion of women, arranged marriages, and the segregation of the sexes in education and worship – often involve stark inequalities between women and men, it is not open to egalitarians simply to support claims made on behalf of ‘cultures.’ But shifting the balance from autonomy to equality makes it easier to spot parallels between assuming a hierarchy of cultures and assuming a hierarchy between women and men; and perhaps less likely that people will impose their own hierarchy of ‘modern’ versus ‘traditional’ cultures.

One of the themes running through recent debates on the tension between sexual and cultural equality is that feminist critics of multiculturalism have too readily adopted a view of non-western or immigrant cultures as defined by patriarchal interests, and too readily presumed that western liberal cultures are untouched by patriarchal power. As far as Nussbaum is concerned, the latter criticism is clearly mistaken, and one of the essays in Sex and Social Justice is explicitly devoted to what is wrong with American society. Her individualism does, however, make her profoundly skeptical of claims generated of behalf of cultures, tending to see these as representing the self-serving interests of men in patriarchal communities, or the self-denying support of women so depressed by their conditions of subordination that they are as yet unable to articulate their needs and concerns. As regards religion, Nussbaum defends a political liberalism that respects different religious conceptions, even when these entail metaphysical positions about the superiority of men over women, or individuals choosing to live non-autonomous lives. But this respect for the choices people may make in a liberal society only highlights the tension in her thinking (perhaps, in the end, it is the tension in trying to marry Aristotle to Rawls) when it comes to less liberal contexts. Her analysis of preference formation still leads her to a position from which she can view women in illiberal cultures only as active critics or passive dupes.

In her re-assessment of the feminist critique of liberalism, Martha Nussbaum lays some but not all of the ghosts to rest. She encourages us to stop treating individualism as a dirty word; to recognize the varieties of liberalism, rather than focusing on its worst excesses; and give up on uncritical endorsement of the emotions as if what we feel is always going to be right. What she leaves us with, however, is a curiously illiberal liberalism that presumes the fundamental separateness of human beings and sees them as charged with making choices and pursuing their autonomy – but has to reject many of those choices as products of unjust social power.

A feminism driven primarily by equality would face some parallel problems: there would still be tensions, for example, between claims for sexual and cultural equality, and these are not always so neatly resolved by saying it is the men who make the cultural claims. But because equality is relational, it directs us more urgently to differential powers and capabilities – not just whether individuals have the minimum necessary for choice, but whether their positioning in social hierarchies shapes their choices in unequal ways. The old complaint against liberalism is that it sets up individual freedom as more important than social equality. This would be an unfair complaint against Nussbaum, whose understanding of the basic capabilities necessary to human flourishing involves a clear perception of the material conditions implied in this. The move, however, is from equal to basic, and this mirrors a wider retreat from egalitarianism that has been characteristic of the last twenty years. It sets Nussbaum what may be unnecessary philosophical conundrums about determining the minimum capabilities for a human existence, and leaves her on the rather shaky ground where she has to criticize choices in the very name of choice. We have become accustomed to think of equality as a more ambitious demand than autonomy, and so far as the distribution of resources is concerned, this undoubtedly remains the case. But if we want to address the problem to which Nussbaum directs us – the social formation of preferences and the danger of presuming that what people put up with is what they want or need – it is better to focus directly on equality, not slip this in via autonomy and choice. Even when extended in the way Nussbaum suggests (to address material conditions for ‘genuinely’ free choice) we cannot get what we need simply from ideals of autonomy and choice. We have to combine these with strong notions of equality. In my view, this means addressing end-state inequalities as well as those that limit our point of departure.