Examined Life2008

Martha Nussbaum:
Now [Social Contract/State of Nature] was fine when you're thinking about adult men with no disabilities. But as some of them already began to notice, it doesn't do so well when you think about women because women's oppression has always been partly occasioned by their physical weakness compared to men. And so if you leave out that physical asymmetry, you may be leaving out a problem that a theory of justice will need to fix. But it certainly does not do well when we think about people with serious physical and mental disabilities. And in fact, some of the theorists who noticed that said, well, this is a problem, but we'll just have to solve it later. We'll get the theory first and work on this problem as some other point. Well, my thought is, that this is not a small problem. There are a lot of people with serious mental and physical disabilities but, it's not only that, it's all of us, when we're little children and as we age. How do you think about justice when you're dealing with bodies that are very unequal in their ability and their power and perhaps even harder, how do you think about it when you're dealing with mental powers that are very, very unequal in their potential.