Hiding from Humanity

The arresting title of this clearly written book encapsulates one of its central theses -- that the emotions of disgust and shame are ways in which we hide from our humanity. More specifically, these emotions help us hide from the animalistic features of our humanity -- our vulnerability and mortality.

Professor Nussbaum suggests that notwithstanding the value that disgust may have, "its thought-content is typically unreasonable, embodying magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality and non-animality" (p. 14). We distance ourselves, through disgust, from reminders of our mortal animality.

The author argues that disgust should never be a criterion for criminalizing activity. Nor does she think that it should be an aggravating or mitigating factor in criminal trials. This is not because she thinks that all emotions, which she distinguishes from bodily appetites and objectless moods (p. 23), should play no role in the law. Instead, emotions should be evaluated to determine their reasonableness. Disgust, however, is an unreliable emotion, and particularly for the purposes of the law. This does not mean, though, that humans should seek to eliminate all their feelings of disgust (p. 121).

The author considers and rejects various arguments that support disgust's having a role in the law. In doing so, she trounces the views of Patrick Devlin and Leon Kass who, although influential, must surely be among the easier targets. She also rejects William Miller's and Dan Kahan's more sophisticated pro-disgust arguments. Drawing on the work of psychologist Paul Rozin (and others), the author argues that although disgust may have an evolutionary basis, it is to be distinguished from both distaste and (real or perceived) danger (pp. 87-8). Instead disgust is a policing of the borders of body, preventing "contamination" by substances that we connect, sometimes merely psychologically, "with our vulnerability to decay and to becoming waste products ourselves" (pp. 89-90). Professor Nussbaum then argues that disgust "has throughout history been used as a powerful weapon in social efforts to exclude certain groups and persons" (p. 107). She shows how this is true of the Jew in much anti-Semitic propaganda and of male homosexuals in today's United States. She also argues that it is true of misogynistic disgust with the female body. When disgust functions to exclude such groups it is, she argues, particularly troubling.

In arguing that disgust ought not to be used as a legal criterion, the author considers a number of cases. She argues that disgust for the victim of a violent crime should never "fulfill the legal requirements for a provocation defense" (p. 127). Here she discusses attacks on homosexuals that are allegedly provoked by the aggressor's disgust for the victim. Nor should disgust for a crime, she argues, be used as a criterion for finding some homicides to be especially heinous. She also argues against a disgust criterion for obscenity. A prohibition on necrophilia, she says, is not best justified by a disgust criterion, and nuisance law may only protect people from disgust when the disgust is itself the harm and not when it is criterion of wrongfulness.

Shame, Professor Nussbaum says, is a less problematic emotion than is disgust, given the positive role shame plays in human life. Nevertheless, what she calls "primitive shame" is a painful emotion that arises from a sense of some exposed inadequacy in oneself -- an inadequacy that one seeks to hide. Since being human involves inadequacies of various kinds, shame is another way in which we seek to hide from our humanity. It is rooted, she argues, in an infantile desire for omnipotence. Because of this origin in a desire to be in control it can lead to the denigration of others. Those who are stigmatized and shamed are "non-normals". However, Professor Nussbaum argues, nobody is a (permanent) normal. Everybody is abnormal in some respect, at least at some time. But this fact has to be hidden. One way to do this is to focus on the abnormality of others, typically the most vulnerable. The temptation is to distance oneself from one's own animality by distinguising oneself from non-normals whose animality is found to be disgusting.

The author argues that the law should not be used to shame people. Thus she makes a compelling case against those punishments (such as convicted drunken drivers being forced to drive with a "DUI" sign on their car) that consist in shaming. She also argues against the shaming elements of those punishments, such as imprisonment, that are not in themselves intended to shame. But the state should not simply desist from inflicting shame, argues Professor Nussbaum. Drawing on Avishai Margalit's notion of the "decent society", she argues that the state should also actively protect people from shame and stigma. Accordingly, it should, for example, ensure a decent standard of living because those who do not enjoy this are shamed through the stigma of poverty. Similarly, anti-discrimination should be legislated, and hate crimes forbidden.

In the final chapter, the author makes explicit how her arguments generate liberal conclusions. Given that both disgust and shame are prone to stigmatizing those who are not part of the dominant group, these emotions "provide bad guidance for law in a society committed to equal respect among persons" (p. 337). And it is equal respect that Professor Nussbaum takes to be the heart of liberalism in its most plausible form. She says that her arguments support something close to John Stuart Mill's famous harm principle (according to which acts may only be prohibited when they cause harm to non-consenting parties). However, she suggests that her arguments provide better support for this principle than do JS Mill's own arguments.

It should be clear, not only from the book's title but also from some of its arguments (not all of which have been recounted here), that the author takes her understanding of the psychology of disgust and shame to be crucial to her argument. But one of two objections could be raised. First, it might be asked whether disgust and shame really do need to be viewed as ways in which we hide from our humanity. The psychologists to whom Professor Nussbaum refers do indeed think that the objects of true disgust are always either animals or animal products. But does it follow that disgust is a way of hiding from humanity? It may instead be a way of acknowledging our humanity and expressing our repugnance at its inherent animality. On this view, it is not disgust itself but rather its bounds -- the absence of disgust, or greater disgust, about more of ourselves -- that constitutes the hiding.

Shame might be viewed as a hiding of rather than from humanity. The latter amounts to hiding one's vulnerabilities from oneself and others, whereas the former amounts to hiding of one's vulnerabilities from others but not also from oneself. Accordingly, hiding of one's humanity is compatible with a vivid self-acknowledgement of one's humanity. None of this is to say that humans do not hide from unpleasant features of humanity. It is only to question whether disgust and shame are (always, in all people) part of this hiding. Much more work would be needed in order to demonstrate that disgust and shame are ways of hiding rather than acknowledging our animal nature and attendant weaknesses.

This brings us to the second possible objection. It might be asked what difference it makes to the argument whether disgust and shame are or are not ways of hiding from humanity. Disgust is easily shown to be an unreliable barometer of a practice's moral status, irrespective of how one answers the first question. (One does not need to see disgust as a way of hiding from humanity in order to recognize that earlier widespread disgust at miscegenation, for example, does not show that so-called inter-racial breeding is or was wrong.) And the arguments against shaming, such as the claim that it is incompatible with dignity or that it marks people as deviants, need not presuppose that shame is a way of hiding from humanity. Professor Nussbaum believes that her understanding of shame shores up the dignity argument by showing that shaming "typically expresses -- a denigration of the very humanity of the people being shamed". But shaming would be as bad if it dehumanized those who are shamed rather than denigrated their humanity. (And if dehumanization and denigration of humanity are viewed as being synonymous, then it is far from clear that one needs to see shame as a way of hiding from humanity in order to see shaming penalties having this effect.)

If disgust and shame are not best understood as ways of hiding from humanity, then this potent image is not as helpful as Professor Nussbaum suggests. However, because so many of her conclusions can be defended without recourse to this image, they may well not need the extra help. Her wide-ranging discussion of disgust and shame in the law is methodical and engaging.

© 2004 David Benatar

David Benatar is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.