Can there be mercy without the merciful? A meditation on Martha Nussbaum’s questions

Abstract

Martha Nussbaum raised profound concerns about aid as being conceived out of the self-directed charity of donors and not the expressed concerns of those being aided. Even when the recipients of aid seek to express their concerns, their capabilities may not recognise their own conditions and desirable remedies. This paper agrees that Nussbaum’s questions are profound, but argues that even they do not go far enough.

Notes

1. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness.

2. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 510.

3. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development. I take this to be her key pioneering work on the subject, insofar as it blends philosophical discussion with actual fieldwork in India. However, she was earlier thinking seriously about capabilities, but in a more philosophical manner. See Nussbaum, Nature, Function, and Capability. Her most recent work on the subject is Creating Capabilities.

4. Unger, Living High and Letting Die.

5. Nussbaum, “If Oxfam ran the World.” This review essay first appeared in the London Review of Books, September 4, 1997.

6. Which Nussbaum gracefully includes in her Philosophical Interventions, 194–195. She also includes Peter Singer’s criticism of her review, pp 195–196. Unger had been inspired by Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” My own present essay seeks, modestly, to reinvigorate the debate these three inaugurated.

7. In the sections that follow, Nussbaum’s own words, used as preface to each section, are given in italics and are taken from her review of Unger’s book.

8. Sen, Poverty and Famines. Sen has also worked extensively on capabilities, not as philosophically as Nussbaum and, although the two are often paired as working in the same field, there are key differences at least of emphasis between the two. For a succinct rendition, see Sen, “Development as Capability Expansion”; and, for his celebrated rendition as to what capabilities bring, Sen, Development as Freedom.

9. Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-being and Destitution.

10. A huge number of Kothari’s works were published under Indian imprints and, in the contemporary production and propagation of knowledge, are simply hard to get in the West. See, however, Kothari, Poverty.

11. de Waal, Famine that Kills.

12. See Chan, The Morality of China in Africa. The best and most balanced book, amid many alarums and sensationalistic ‘scholarship’ on China and Africa, remains Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift.

13. Iliffe, The African Aids Epidemic.

14. Jolly, “The World Employment Conference.”

15. The best and most succinct account of the Millennium Development Goals was a special issue of the Financial Times supplement, “This is Africa”, September 2010, entitled Millenium Development Goals 2010.

16. The clarion call for a New International Order was made by the Brandt Commission, North–South.

17. Sebald, A Place in the Country, writes one of his lovely literary accounts of the Swiss exile of Rousseau, ‘J’aurais voulu que ce lac êut eté l’Ocean’.

18. Nor how we crushed their uprisings. See James, The Black Jacobins.

19. See Williams, Shame and Necessity.

20. And represented this thought, ‘the thought of Alexander’, in debate with Islamic illumination. See the famous book-length poem by the 13th century author, Faridu’d-Din ‘Attar, The Speech of the Birds.

21. Dicklitch et al., “Building a Barometer of Gay Rights.” 

22. On the role of the Santo Egidio Monastery in Mozambique, see Chartroux, “Interview with Matteo Zuppi,” 30–33.

23. Levy never developed his throwaway remark, but see Moyo, Dead Aid.

24. For my early thoughts on this, and on aid in general, particularly for social developmental reasons, see Chan, Social Development in Africa Today.

25. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 166–167.