Martha Nussbaum, Hipparchia & Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism means not belonging to a particular polis, i.e. City State, but thinking of oneself as a 'citizen of the world'- though the world referred to would be that in which others speak your tongue. The opposite of Cosmopolitanism is Tribalism. We are all cosmopolitans because we don't think we need to band together to go kill people from across the river if they steal a couple of our sheep or make off with one or two of our nubile women.

Instead if we believe a crime has occurred or will occur, we call the Police no matter where we might be. It is because of the existence of the Rule of Law across the Nation and, by International Agreements, across Nations, that we are in any sense 'Cosmopolitan'.

Of course, there are some who may claim that they are not bound by the laws and conventions of their place of domicile. They belong to a superior order of men and are answerable to the Cosmos alone. But, this doctrine has always been in bad odor. Diogenes, the Cynic, who originated it, had been exiled from his native City for debasing the currency. Thus, from its earliest appearance, the word 'cosmopolitan' has been associated with a type of financial fraud or unjust enrichment which crosses borders and confutes jurisdictions so as to secure for itself an amoral immunity.

In reality, no doubt, most of the 'Cosmopolitan' metics or sophists who settled in Athens, would make common cause with the Athenians against an invader. But then, most household slaves fought with their masters to defend their homesteads. However it was the educated metics who had increasing economic importance. On the one hand, they did conform to the laws and customary usages of their place of domicile. But they would not be jealously obsessed with Athens's relative standing with respect to Sparta or Syracuse. Their 'thymos' would be unaffected by such considerations.

Kingdoms and Empires and then Nation States and their systems of alliances and reciprocal treaties destroyed the need for a fierce sense of belonging to a particular patch of land within a day or two's walk from the domain of a rival sept or polis. No doubt, there might be some small areas- like Ulster- where tribalism prevailed and a savant might wistfully urge the case for 'Cosmopolitanism' or 'Ecumenism' or 'Humanism' or whatever. But such places were increasingly the exception.

On the other hand, there have been periods when plutocrats moved their money around so as to escape tax in the country or countries where it ought to have been paid. The result is that they unjustly enriched themselves while being 'freeriders' on public goods provided by patriotic tax payers. This type of appropriation- oikeioisis is the technical term in Stoic philosophy- could be compared to that of the proverbial cuckoo in the nest. However, something equally 'unnatural' arises where a creature of a different type is reared within one's walls. Aristophanes has Aeschylus say of Alcibiades 'you should not rear a lion cub in your city'. The lion may, in its way, be loyal- show oikeiosis- to the place it has made its own, but it may also eat those who caused this to be. One has to learn to, either accommodate, or guard oneself against oikeoisis of this sort. In one sense, Alcibiades is cosmopolitan, in a praiseworthy manner- he could be a great diplomat- but the fact is he became a threat to his native city.

In ancient times, there was a notion that 'birds of a feather' naturally 'flock together'. Jainism has an elaborate notion of how and why this comes about through reincarnation. Oikeoisis of a soteriological sort is built in to our 'birth determining' karma- 'Just as a lion cub, by sheep, solely reared/ But scenting a lion, separates from the herd/ Even so obeisance to the Arhat reveals our true stature/ The true Self we possess being of the Arhat's own nature'.

Stoicism developed a theory of citizenship of the cosmic city, which is a shadow of the Jain notion of all sentient beings attaining equal felicity reveling in the 'kevalya' of pure Gnosis. Thus both pure individuality- there is no participation mystique, or operation of Grace- and pure univocity are achieved simultaneously. However, because this relies on Reincarnation, it does not give rise to a political philosophy of the Greek type. No 'homonoia' or universal law is required. The common sense view obtains that Law is merely customary, local, and protocol bound in an autonomous manner. Thus, though Jainism's rise is equally associated with that of a 'Universal Empire', the Religion itself could survive under conditions of medieval fragmentation. Gandhi could be said to be cosmopolitan. But, thanks to the Jain tradition, he sets little store by the Law- though it was the only academic subject he had studied.

The truth is, there have been long periods when International Law was, in economic terms, merely an inequitable type of property arrangement such that a few with no loyalty to any patch of ground exploited the many across borders and with no regard to what they owed their own people.

Thus, in practice, 'Cosmopolitanism', in its philosophical sense means little more than reliance upon the Law rather than the Tribe, whereas in its political sense it either refers to the Rule of 'Natural' Law, or else smacks of chrematistic deceit or financial wrongdoing which crosses borders to gain immunity.

Consider the following from 'The Nation'-

Last year, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri stirred up controversy during a speech at the National Conservatism Conference that claimed the American middle class had been betrayed by an out-of-touch “cosmopolitan elite” that catered to the needs of multinational companies while forgetting “the heartland.”

Hawley is very bright as some of his ex-pupils at St.Pauls will attest. He knows exactly what he is doing when he uses the term 'cosmopolitan elite'. He is pointing the finger not at humble stoics or horny handed lovers of humanity. He is impeaching an elite- a Credentialized one with no higher loyalty than to its own aggrandizement- whose Cosmopolitanism arises from a type of financial wrongdoing or chrematistic fraud. These 'nowhere people' were free-riders on the public goods provided by 'somewhere people'. In Britain, access to the Courts by local people was, it was feared, being crowded out by cosmopolitan plutocrats and tax-exiles choosing it as the most favorable jurisdiction for their press-gagging libel suits which, it may be, threw a veil over their wrong-doing. At the very least, the scandal of high end property being left empty- thus escaping a goodly portion of local authority taxes- while actual resident citizens faced homelessness- pointed to the dangers of a 'cosmopolitanism' of a chrematistic type ruinous to local economies.

Good faith 'oikeoisis' may have good results. Bad faith 'appropriation' needs to have a check in 'mechanism design'. A cult of 'cosmopolitanism' may remove or neglect to adapt necessary mechanisms guarding against bad faith or sociopathic motivations.

Given Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and a global turn to nationalism more generally, Hawley’s comments were anything but exceptional. What made them unique was that he directed his ire at particular academics for promulgating the beliefs of what he called the “cosmopolitan consensus.” Perhaps the best-known of these was the famed University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum, whom Hawley attacked for teaching her students that “world citizenship” trumps being the citizen of a nation-state.

So, instead of saying 'Soros', he said 'Nussbaum'- who has herself admitted she was wrong to take a dim view of patriotism. That's smart. The fact of the matter is that people who don't like Soros nevertheless admit that he is highly intelligent. He took a gamble in the Nineties which did not pay off. But so did most of us. We assumed physical Capital was more mobile than Labour. We didn't take into account Network and Knowledge effects. We were naive about Uncertainty and Volatility as being manageable by 'Arrow Debreu'  markets. We should have predicted 'Agency Capture' and things like sub-prime. But, Obama's election was supposed to make up for all that. He was 'the nigger in the White House who would scare Wall Street straight.' There has been a big bull market but it was supposed to have done much more for Obama's own voters. The result is that the Republican Party has been taken over by Trump. Some suggest that a big Biden win would clear the way for a Presidential bid by Hawley in 2024.

It may be urged that Hawley is going after a soft target. Nussbaum has a marshmallow where her brain should be. But, in America, Nussbaum is still respected. Americans are stupid that way.

Those wondering how Nussbaum might respond to Hawley’s criticism didn’t have long to wait. By coincidence, a little over a month later, Harvard University Press published her most recent book, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal. In it, Nussbaum spends most of her time discussing the limits of cosmopolitanism while developing her own positive account of the nation-state and its responsibilities.

This is a sheer waste of time. Cosmopolitanism is the alternative to a militarily unviable Tribalism. 'Universal' Empires made the thing normative. But Empires collapse as endogenous growth takes off. Nation-States may be more stable for the same reason that endogamous marriage is more robust. Yet, through Treaties, they constantly seek to simulate that vanished Imperial oikumene and slot ethnicity into a global hierarchy. One common feature of both is a Rule of Law which varies geographically but which is interlinked in one manner or another over wide areas. But this also means 'cosmopolitanism' collapses back into a fuzzy affirmation of 'the comity of nations'. It means little on its own. 

Cosmopolitanism—the idea that we are, first and foremost, citizens of the world rather than of a particular nation or region—is predicated on a universal respect for human dignity and a demand for justice regardless of race, sex, or creed.

Does Cosmopolitanism say- 'I don't exist coz there's a guy in Paraguay who doesn't respect Pakistani women. Till he changes his views, nobody can claim to embody me.'? No. Of course not. Nussbaum may claim that Cosmopolitanism, like Democratic Nationalism, and Rationalistic Humanism, and Virtuous Niceness, is predicated on everybody giving homeless dudes a blow job while holding up a sign saying 'Boo to Donald Trump!' .  But this is a foolish claim. As I have repeatedly pointed out in my forthcoming books, the sign should read 'Goo to Trupn'. This is because we need to raise awareness of systemic discrimination against dyslexics in the signage industry.

Nussbaum argues, however, that to arrive at this conception of human dignity, the cosmopolitans of earlier ages came to exclude worldly success or material wealth from their notions of the dignified life.

This is silly. Nobody had much 'material wealth' back then. As for 'worldly success'- this meant not dying of cholera or getting a spear through your gut when fighting the guys across the river.

The fact is success in 'philosophy' was unconnected with gaining wealth and power and a position of high dignity. Thus philosophy was obliged to pretend that poverty, or even slavery, was nobler. The Stoics, taking inspiration from Socrates, reshaped the Cynic doctrine of Cosmopolitanism such that, paradoxically, only the Wise were Wealthy, Dignified, or Powerful though their outward condition might be that of a slave or a cobbler. Stoicism made you a citizen of the 'Cosmic City' obeying the Right, the Natural, the Divine Laws in a manner not expedient or strategic but directly linked to the Supreme Good.

Nussbaum is pretending that the Stoics missed out on something important which she and her ex boy friend discovered- viz. 'the Capabilities approach', which consists of virtue signalling concern for the poor, the disabled, refugees etc. without actually doing anything for them.

“In order to treat people as having a dignity that life’s accidents cannot erode,” Nussbaum explains, the founders of cosmopolitanism “[scoffed] at money, rank, and power, saying that they are unnecessary for human flourishing. The dignity of moral capacity is complete in itself.”

What else could they say? There just wasn't much money, or stuff to buy with money, around at that time. Rank and Power were all very well but they couldn't save you from dying because a wound turned gangrenous.

Nussbaum and Sen pretended Governments have plenty of money and could easily raise up every poverty stricken cripple to a level equal to themselves. But credentialized cretins don't set up a Free University to provide every starving retard with a PhD in whatever shite it is they teach. I recall reading about a Canadian University which started giving out Doctorates to gang-raped Pakistani women. But those Doctorates were Honorary. Give them to Sen by all means. They are little use to anybody else.

For Nussbaum, the crux of the problem with cosmopolitanism is to be found here: It imposes no duties of material aid, since a dignified life can be achieved without goods or fortune.

This is nonsense. The cosmopolitan was still subject to the laws and 'customary morality' of his place of domicile. Back then 'Good Samaritan' laws were the rule not the exception. You had a duty of material aid to those around you. You had to fight off bandits or put out fires or lend provisions without usury to those made destitute by a flood. If you were well off, you might be chosen to discharge liturgical duties which would cost you a pretty penny.

It is not the case that anyone today can say- 'I'm a Cosmopolitan'. I don't have to pay Federal or State Tax or conform to Good Samaritan laws.'

This also suggests that the pursuit of justice doesn’t require material expenditure, which Nussbaum views as clearly false.

Who has suggested that Police Forces and Judiciaries don't cost money?

Hence the tradition’s major flaw: It holds that material possessions make no difference to the exercise of our capacities for choice and other aspects of our dignity.

But they also make no difference to our capacity not to choose or be concerned with dignity. In other words, if there is indeed a tradition of the type Nussbaum describes, then the major flaw she finds in it applies equally to her own shite. I may own a lot of stuff- indeed, compared to an ancient Greek Philosopher, I actually do own a shit load of stuff of a sort that Midas would trade his treasury for. But I don't make choices most of the time. My behavior is habitual. Indeed, I scarcely change my grocery order or portfolio choice from month to month. As for dignity- fuck I need that shite for? I've actually lost a couple of pounds since I decided to take up twerking with the aim of winning an Amateur Beyonce impersonation contest. That would be cool, but it won't be dignified.

Nussbaum offers instead her “capabilities approach”—“a template for constitution-making” that secures citizens the freedoms and opportunities necessary for human flourishing—as a way of providing political solutions to these problems.

But this Sen-ile shite is completely useless! Nobody knows anybody's capabilities. The thing is just pi-jaw. No 'Constitution' has been made on its basis. The fact is Governments which create 'universal' Rights to various material goods and services can and do renege on providing remedies when there is a fiscal crunch. Even otherwise, something like 'Ricardian Equivalence' obtains. There is crowding out of a perhaps more efficient allocative mechanism. This is what Adam Smith kept banging on about it. If the State can do it, it mustn't because the Parish can do it better.

She thus sees the nation-state as offering the most feasible means for ending the bifurcation between dignity and material aid by guaranteeing some reasonable level of economic and social rights.

Sadly, just being a Nation-State does not guarantee shit. The country may be attacked or it may become ungovernable or it may just not want or be able to do anything for the great mass of the people.

But what does that mean for cosmopolitanism?

Nothing. The thing doesn't exist. A passport from the Cosmos saying you are a citizen of the Milky Way won't get you across a border to anywhere not an utter shithole.

What obligations do nation-states have to one another, according to her perspective, for enforcing agreements on shared standards of justice?

Those enshrined in International Treaties- if it is convenient to do so.

And might not such enforced standards all too easily be used as a “weapon to dragoon recalcitrant nations into obedience,” as Nussbaum puts it?

The dragooning is the enforcement. If there is no enforcement, there is no dragooning. Recalcitrance can do its own thing.

Nussbaum spoke with The Nation

She repeated her stupid lies to some silly man who didn't call her on either her stupidity or her mendacity

about these questions, how her thinking about the cosmopolitan tradition has evolved over the years, and how the capabilities approach should be understood in the light of a younger generation’s interest in socialism as well as the political right’s growing hostility to cosmopolitanism.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: In a nutshell, what defines the cosmopolitan tradition?
Martha Nussbaum: It is defined by the belief that we are, first and foremost, citizens of the entire world, kosmou politai, not citizens of a particular nation or region, and that our first duty should be to the whole world rather than to our co-nationals or our families or other groups.

Nussbaum knows very well that the ancient Greeks thought citizenship a Greek thing. So this just means all of Greece for all Greeks. Persians and Ethiops and Celts and so forth need not apply.
Lord Buddha did not want to be loyal to the Saka Sangha- which would have meant dying in a futile battle to preserve the tribe's rights to a particular river. But this did not meant he let just anybody into his own Aryan Sangha.

DSJ: You haven’t always thought of this tradition as flawed. What changed your mind?
MN: Actually, I always thought that cosmopolitanism had one large flaw, namely its focus on “duties of justice” instead of duties of material aid.

Nussbaum is lying. The Stoic Sage discharged a duty of material aid. Those who imitated him in particulars, but without the same motivation, merely performed 'duties of justice'. Cicero clearly distinguishes between the two in his letters to his son. But Cicero was a patriot and successful politician. He was not claiming to be a Sage. He was offering, so to speak, a suave Gradus ad Parnassum.


The fact is, duties of material aid would extinguish resources almost immediately within a very narrow span of its own neighborhood. Charity, beginning at home, becomes homeless or else stays transfixed.

Duties of Justice means that Tribalism can be replaced by the Rule of Law so that there is relatively safe entry and exit. This is tied up to the reign of property- which is what Cicero emphasizes. This means factor mobility can produce the growth which permits redistribution to the non-working population- i.e. babies- so that demographic growth can follow.

Exponents of cosmopolitanism have argued that duties of justice are strict and exceptionless,

but defeasibility is the essence of the law. A strict duty is nonetheless defeasible. That's all that matters.

while duties of material aid only need to apply to the near and dear.

This can't possibly be the case. There is a duty of material aid to those defending a person's area of domicile. This may be dischargeable through a monetary payment. But, physical conscription too is a possibility. Legally mandated redistribution- taxes and doles- were familiar to every 'Cosmopolitan' Nussbaum could claim to have existed.

Cicero advises his son to help both poor people and those in moderate circumstances seeking to better themselves on grounds of both virtue and policy.

Since the best cosmopolitan account of the duties of justice—Cicero’s—argues that they are not simply negative but that they require us also to prevent aggression against our allies, these duties of justice are very demanding, and fulfilling them costs a lot of money—more, very likely, than feeding all the world’s hungry.

If Cicero is a Cosmopolitan, so is Genghis Khan. It is ludicrous to read the De Oficiis in this manner. Cheaper than helping allies, is treating them as Protectorates and expanding outward to the enemy forcing them to pay tribute. The world's hungry are welcome to labour in one's latifundia.

So that is one problem with the bifurcation of duties, an internal inconsistency that is found in the cosmopolitan tradition.

This is sheer fantasy. Nussbaum is pretending that Cicero was telling his son to go join the Peace Corps and then set about liquidating the family's assets to feed starving savages in remote jungles.

Another problem is that hunger and poverty disfigure and insult human dignity just as surely as war does.

Cicero, of course, was so concerned with insults to human dignity, that he wanted to ban slavery- thinks nobody at all. Why is Nussbaum pretending that the guy was a bleeding heart?

DSJ: And how does this fit into your book’s argument?
MN: Initially, the narrative of my book traced the gradual realization within the tradition of the importance of material aid, a history in which Hugo Grotius and Adam Smith make major steps forward.

This is sheer nonsense. Grotius thought it was cool that Tamils be enslaved and shipped to Ceylon to be worked to death within a few months. After all, one could always conduct another raid on the Coromandel Coast and get a new bunch of darkies. Smith's cosmopolitanism was premised on conflict avoidance by a sharing of 'the gains from trade'. But, as he was aware, Colonialism can affect the 'terms of trade' such that one party has no gains. Instead there may be a mercantilist specie flow of an adverse nature.

But over the years, I have come to see other flaws in the tradition. First, it is a comprehensive ethical doctrine, telling us what to prefer in every situation.

This is utterly false. Cicero made no such claim nor did anyone who followed him. Stoicism as it evolved into a mystical Religion of a universal type may certainly be called a comprehensive ethical doctrine. But this survived the Dark Ages as nothing but Catholicism- Greek Paideia turned to Soteriological, not Sociological, ends. The Greek Orthodox church went in a different direction because Cicero had less salience. This meant Economia was in tension with Akribeia- discretionary management was considered superior to legalistic literalism- whereas the Latin Church considered them reconcilable by 'harmonious construction' of a type itself 'mysterious'.

Like John Rawls, I believe that in a pluralistic society, we are not entitled to base our political principles on any comprehensive doctrine,

Nussbaum is garbling Rawls. He spoke of political conceptions, not principles. The Stanford Encyclopaedia article on his says- ' A political conception is not derived from any particular comprehensive doctrine, nor is it a compromise among the worldviews that happen to exist in society at the moment. Rather a political conception is freestanding: its content is set out independently of the comprehensive doctrines that citizens affirm.' Rawls himself had political principles and a comprehensive doctrine which was linked in some way to those principles. But, what he was trying to do was say 'there is a political conception independent of my principles regarding which there could be 'overlapping consensus', regardless of conflicting principles people might hold, such that some more worthless shite could be talked by stupid pedants teaching shite subjects'.

only on a partial doctrine that we expect that holders of major religious and secular doctrines can, over time, come to accept.

To use something is not to accept it. We may use a political conception of Justice while denying that Justice exists or is desirable. No great hypocrisy is involved if a Communist buys things in the Market. He may believe Markets are fundamentally unfair. He may think that 'Open Markets' are a myth. This does not bar him from them.

So any cosmopolitan ethics must be narrow—not covering all domains of human life—and metaphysically thin.

Except it mustn't at all if it is considered a comprehensive doctrine. On the other hand, if it is considered a partial doctrine, not covering all domains of human life, then it represents a defeasible deontic logic which is not itself ethical because it does not cover the whole ethos of a person or community.

As a matter of fact, a Cosmopolitan ethics could be broad and thick, Nussbaum's beliefs notwithstanding. She herself can't stipulate even a thin and narrow cosmopolitan ethics because she has disallowed herself any prescriptive view of what cosmopolitanism might mean or what ethics might mean. Why? She feels she has to respect pluralism. But antagonomia is plural. Moreover, since gassing on about Cosmopolitan ethics appears to be a waste of time, the antagonomic prescription is the default which actually obtains.

Cosmopolitanism also neglects powerful arguments on behalf of the moral importance of the nation.

There is no concrete example of this in the 'tradition' Nussbaum speaks of, but only because her view of it is too narrow. There were Anarcho-Syndicalists and Internationalist Socialists and proponents of World Government of a technocratic sort who deprecated the moral importance of the nation. All could lay equal claim to 'the tradition'.

The nation is the largest political unit we know that is a vehicle for its citizens’ autonomy, meaning literally their right to give themselves laws of their own choosing.

Nonsense! Has Nussbaum never heard of the European Union?

It is where we dwell, in terms of our most fundamental legal rights, and it is accountable to all of us in a way that larger units (so far, at least) are not.

Which is how come there are no M.E.Ps in Brussels.

I think for this reason Cicero gets it right: Our duties to the whole world allow us a good deal of room to prefer our own nation.

But those duties are themselves defeasible. They are merely conventional 'kathekon' performed from any sort of motive. There is a superior imperative- viz. doing Right- katorthōmata- which involves having the motivation of the Sage. Cicero is confines himself to kathekonta. His non nobis solum is Platonic. Man is not born for himself alone. Friends, Family, Fatherland have a share in us- but this share is 'participation'- methexis- and Stoic oikeiosis, belonging as the beginning of Justice, can develop into Porphyry's rich and strange meditations on the Cosmopolitan becoming like, or indeed, appropriating, the Creator of the Cosmos. It is this reading of Cicero which triumphs in St. Augustine and secures him his place in Catholic Cosmopolitanism.

My point is that there could be an 'overlapping consensus' re. Cosmopolitan ethics such that the point of becoming such a citizen is that one can come to belong to or participate in or even become the creator of the Cosmos. We must reject Rawls's 'political conception of Justice' because it is based on an obsolete, and provably fallacious, Econ 101. But we may affirm a soteriological conception of Justice such that 'Sarvodaya' lexically preferences the material needs of the most vulnerable as our own most urgent spiritual needs. This too yields a noisome pi-jaw. But at least it isn't based on obsolete Economic theories.

Nussbaum is aware that her reading of 'the tradition' is thin and bleak-

Finally, cosmopolitanism is a form of humanist rationalism. Our duties are to other humans only, and their ground is the claim that all humans partake in rationality. I reject both the rationalism and the humanism found in this tradition.

Then why not switch to the tradition of Iamblichus and Porphyry and St. Augustine and their peers among the Sages of India and China and elsewhere? Ecumenism is a Cosmopolitanism.

Even within our species, we should treat as full equals people with severe cognitive disabilities that rationalism does not include. But we also have stringent duties to other animals and the world of nature. I’ll go further: All forms of rationalist humanism typically cast aspersions on our animality and teach us to have disdain and disgust for ourselves insofar as we are animals. This is a pernicious idea that has done untold damage.

Yet, there are plenty of 'rationalist humanisms' which consider Vegetarianism and care of animals and plants and so forth as necessary to foster both rationality and humane feelings and ways of interaction.
Indeed, the penalty for dining with such pure and benevolent atheists is the Lenten fare they provide by way of good cheer.

DSJ: There is a way of reading your book that suggests the cosmopolitan tradition has become less flawed as it has evolved. Cicero and the Stoics, for the most part, believed that the dignified life involved our capacity to live a moral life regardless of material inequality.

So do we all. It is undignified to envy or seek to keep up with the Joneses. On the other hand, my out twerking Beyonce on Tik Tok, though motivated by envy of her wealth, is highly dignified.

But as we move through the centuries to the early modern period, Adam Smith and Hugo Grotius begin to recognize, in varying degrees, that human dignity must involve certain levels of material aid.

Religion- including memories of Catholic diakonia- was too strong a force at that time for Malthusian arguments of the sort Butler caricatured when he proposed taxing the poor and subsidising the rich. Grotius thought a starving man who steals a loaf might be let off the harshest punishment. Smith was more sanguine about the capacity of the emaciated to bear chastisement.

Do you think this is primarily due to the egregious violence of an emerging global capitalist system and the colonial domination to which it gave rise? What exactly led to this significant change?

In Philosophy, there was a change from a universal, if hypocritical, acceptance of the Christian duty to the poor, to justifying any thing which made lots of money.

MN: Adam Smith certainly saw some of the depredations of materialism, and he was a vehement critic both of colonial conquest and of the slave trade.

Because he thought Britain would be better off if the Government did nothing and left all to free trade.

But he did not think capitalism, properly regulated, had to have such flaws. He believed that law should rein in the excesses of capitalist greed. But he also believed that the free movement of capital and labor would be a great leveler, bringing a decent life within the reach of many. This could not happen, however, if the monopoly power of companies such as the British East India Company was not restrained by law, and he favored measures to limit monopoly power and companies’ influence on the political process. So that’s one way in which his reflections about capitalism, pro and con, are connected to his new emphasis on material aid.

Smith thought it wrong for the Government to use tax revenue to help poor people in any manner whatsoever. Why? The people could do it for themselves cheaper and better- if that is what they wished. After all, the Government's money comes from the people. Why not cut out the middleman?

Another source for Smith’s thinking about material aid lay closer to home. A Scotsman who lived for long stretches in England, Smith observed the difference between working-class children in Scotland, who were given a free compulsory public education,

This is nonsense. Lowland Scotland may have been a little ahead in literacy- but the majority of children remained functionally illiterate. School masters were paid by pupils though sometimes better off people might give money for very poor children to receive instruction. Compulsory free education came to Scotland in 1872.

and those in England, who were shunted directly into factories with no education.

 Nussbaum is lying. Smith says ' In Scotland the establishment of such parish schools (i.e. ones where pupils pay the teacher) has taught almost the whole common people to read (historians now dispute this) , and a very great proportion of them to write and account. In England the establishment of charity schools has had an effect of the same kind, though not so universally, because the establishment is not so universal.' By establishment, Smith means the Anglican Church which he is hinting was less broadly based than Scottish Presbyterianism. 

Smith had earlier said that the reason the parish schools were successful was because the kids were too small to earn so they might as well learn. If England had factories swallowing up little kiddies, Smith, as a patriot, would have wanted those factories to swallow up wee Scottish bairns so they could earn some money and then pay a teacher.

And he concluded that the “human capabilities” of the latter were being “mutilated and deformed.”

Nussbaum should stick to telling lies about Panaetius or some other such ancient Greek we haven't read. What Smith said was 'a coward, a man incapable either of defending or of revenging himself, evidently wants one of the most essential parts of the character of a man. He is as much mutilated and deformed in his mind as another is in his body'
Regarding education, he says- 'A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, if possible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part of the character of human nature. Though the state was to derive no advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of people, it would still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether uninstructed.'
The problem, obviously, was that literacy might be subversive of Church and State. Thus Britain was slow to follow the lead given by Maria Theresa and others on the Continent. But Britain became far richer.  In the end, that's all that mattered.

The state, he concludes, has a duty to provide all its citizens with some especially essential human opportunities.

Smith says the State can encourage education and martial spirit by offering token rewards or honors for such accomplishments and by insisting that entry into a trade be conditional on educational or other attainment. But it shouldn't spend tax revenue on education. That would be very very naughty and would be bound to increase illiteracy.

Later thinkers such as T. H. Green developed this idea into comprehensive political support for free compulsory primary and secondary education.

The idea had been mooted before he was born. The stumbling block was that the Anglicans wanted to monopolize State education much to the chagrin of Dissenters and Catholics. Even in the 1900's there were 'passive resisters' refusing to pay their rates because the local Anglican school got to spread an evil Religion. God alone knows why Nussbaum has dragged Green into this. She is utterly ignorant of English history.

As for Grotius, he wrote before the rise of capitalism,

Nonsense! He came of age at exactly the same time that the Amsterdam Stock Exchange was opened. Grotius was the lawyer of the Dutch East India Company. Sadly political difficulties prevented Grotius from dying a wealthy Capitalist with a lot of stocks and shares and so forth.

and his thinking about material duties was inspired by debates about the freedom of the seas, in which he played an active role. The whole earth is the common possession of us all, and this common ownership limits private domination and also gives all people limited rights over not only the seas but also agricultural produce if they need it to survive.

Grotius is still indebted to Catholic jurisprudence which itself harks back to the Stoic 'cosmic city' regulated by 'orthos logos'- which would become 'Natural Law'. But Might remained Righter . Anyway, Grotius failed to assert the freedom of the Seas against England. Far from getting 'people limited rights to agricultural produce', the poor fellow was thrown in jail from which, however, he was able to escape.

DSJ: What is the connection between the cosmopolitan tradition and your notion of the capabilities approach? How does the latter avoid the flaws of the cosmopolitan tradition?
MN: The capabilities approach, or what I call “CA,” is a template for constitution-making that specifies some extremely important, substantial opportunities that a just nation should guarantee to all its citizens up to some reasonable threshold level, the level to be set by the nation itself.

But who will guarantee that the Government will actually do so? Look at Venezuela or Lebanon. Constitutions don't matter. The Bench does. But even the Bench can do nothing if the Government is broke. CA turns out to be about setting the world to rights using other people's money- which quickly runs out.

I also think that beyond our borders we ought to help other nations attain such capabilities thresholds. (In the book I note that this is very hard, since I am convinced by Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton that most foreign aid is counterproductive.) My view, however, is a partial political doctrine. Like Rawls’s, it thus respects what he called “political liberalism.” It has a big place for nations to choose their own versions of the capabilities. and nothing is implemented from without, only from within. It is not based on rationalism, and in Frontiers of Justice I show how it does justice to the full equality of people with both physical and cognitive disabilities.

It is not based on rationalism- that is true enough. What is it based on? A homework assignment from a ten year old child.

Finally, it makes room for nonhuman animals

where? Please don't say in your bed. That's kinda gross.

and the world of nature, as I say in Frontiers but will develop more fully in a book currently in progress.

Nussbaum just shits these things out.

DSJ: Do you think the global human rights movement today advances your capabilities vision? And if not, what are the consequences for us when it does not use such a standard?
MN: In some ways it does, but for me the implementation of human rights norms ought to be at the national level, as today it mostly is anyway. Treaties mobilize people and are useful in that way, but the real site of change is and should be where people have a voice.

This is silly. Nations will provide remedies to their own Nationals. The point about the Human Rights bandwagon was to extend them to non-citizens thus making them 'universal'. It is common to speak of the 'right to have rights' at this juncture and mention one's Granny who escaped Auschwitz.

Sadly, the vinculum juris between rights and remedies must be incentive compatible. This is purely a matter of mechanism design. Pi-Jaw can fool a few vulnerable people for a short time. Then the thing crashes.

I also think the human rights movement has dealt badly with women’s human rights, segregating them in a separate document that omits some of the most important things (artificial contraception, domestic violence, the assignment of a monetary value to women’s domestic work).

This is mere virtue signalling. I may say 'I feel Universal Basic Income proposals don't go far enough. Apart from everybody getting a ton of gold a day, everybody should also get blowjobs and backrubs and free teleportation services to a habitable planet of their choice'.

And in other ways, the human rights movement just avoids the “material duties” issue.

Just as it avoids the free teleportation issue.

Finally, such movements focus on human rights, avoiding any commitment to the rights of nonhuman animals, which I do not approve of.

And I don't approve of Nussbaum's shocking lack of empathy for plants and minerals.

DSJ: What makes the capabilities approach a kind of cosmopolitanism is that it is not grounded in a comprehensive view of the good life or a religion that is rooted in a locale or doctrine. From what I understand, it seems to be drawing from Rawls and citing the origins for this kind of overlapping consensus in 17th century Europe and North America and as a result of the Wars of Religion.

Hilarious! This shite claims its origins alongside the burgeoning of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and genocide against indigenous people on far continents! Cancel this shite now!

MN: No—in fact, I have strongly criticized Rawls for his ignorance of non-Western sources for ideas of rights and similar bases for overlapping consensus.

Nussbaum isn't just ignorant. She tells stupid lies about stuff she has read. Rawls didn't do that.

My own work has focused on India for many years, and in a forthcoming article I’ve written, “The Capabilities Approach and the History of Philosophy,” I emphasize that its historical roots in philosophy are highly diverse. They include the Greeks and Romans, Enlightenment liberals, and Marx, but also Asian thinkers as well. I discuss, for example, Amartya Sen’s debt to both Buddhist and Hindu thought and my own debt to the philosophical thought of the Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore [1861–1941].

Sen has no debt to Indian thought. He is too stupid. Tagore simply wasn't a philosopher. Radhakrishnan pretended otherwise. But Indians no longer think of Radhakrishnan as a Philosopher. He was a Nationalist and an effective Ambassador and later President of our Republic.

The one thinker I'd call 'Cosmopolitan', in a Utilitarian, not Soteriological, sense was Moh Tzu.

DSJ: How might you avoid accusations or criticisms, especially coming from postcolonial studies in the wake of 9/11, that this is a kind of liberal imperial project?

By harping on about how Sen was my boy-friend and I've repeatedly denounced Narendra Modi and, anyway, I'll tell you any stupid lies you want to hear.

MN: Well, it would surely be odd to call an argument that draws from the ideas of Amartya Sen part of an imperial project, since he is a proud citizen of India and his ideas were formed there before its independence as part of the resistance to the Raj, specifically in Rabindranath Tagore’s school.

But Tagore's grand-daddy joined with Raja Ram Mohun Roy to plead with the British Parliament to send more Whiteys to grab land from the Indian peasant. Tagore was ambivalent about Indian Nationalism. He lived and died a loyal subject of the King-Emperor. He was never jailed for sedition. Aurobindo was a different kettle of fish. His Ashram harbored plenty of police spies. Shantiniketan, however, was considered kosher by Police Commissioner Tegart. The truth is, Tagore had realized that Hindus would have to flee East Bengal. The Revolutionaries were digging their own grave. This explains the queer attitude of the East Bengali intellectual- Niradh Chaudhri, whose first big book ends with him begging Whitey to come back to save Bengal from itself, as well as the utterly vacuous Social Choice theorists who followed Chaudhri into English exile. What they share in common is a patriotic contempt for their own. Like Raja Ram Mohun Roy, they wish for the dignity of an English grave so as to achieve a comprador apotheosis. But for this to happen, India must remain weak, humiliated, and poor.

Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, and Nelson Mandela are also among my main sources.

But Nussbaum is too stupid to understand Ambedkar. She doesn't know Economics.

When I teach my course on global inequality, I insist on spending two whole seminars out of nine studying India, so that my students will understand that India’s ideas came from India! They were not borrowed from the Raj—they were invented in bitter opposition to the Raj.

This is foolish. Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a Benthamite and proto-Unitarian. Tagore's branch of the Brahmos could have merged with the Unitarians in the Eighteen Sixties. There were indigenous ideas which shaped resistance to the Raj. But those ideas were religious, not secular. Tagore, at one time, was somewhat enthused by them. But he had sense enough to see that the Hindu bhadralok would lose East Bengal. So he concentrated on the Arts and only succumbed to Gandhi's toothless charms so as to get money for Shantiniketan.

The fact is Tolstoy was influenced by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, not the Brahmos. Tolstoy in turn influenced Gandhi. Gandhi shat the bed. This meant that Marx became the new messiah. The Left made no bones about having a foreign ideology. The Right only started fighting back after a detour through American campuses.

Tagore, to me, is among the world’s greatest political thinkers,

Isaiah Berlin tried to make this case. He failed miserably. The fact is Tagore put up a feeble sort of protest against Gandhian imbecility. But Shantiniketan was a money pit. He needed Marwari money which Gandhi got for him. So they formed a mutual admiration society and Radhakrishnan chipped in with some illiterate tosh about how Tagore was actually a Philosopher rather than a bird-brain with a beard.

and yet almost nobody in the US and Europe reads him.

This is unfair. Bengalis in the US and Europe read him. Why? He is lyrical in his own language. Even in English one or two of his prose poems are plays are quite affecting- at least in early adolescence. But why read Tagore when you hear his songs or watch Movies based on this work?

The reason, I think, is just ignorance and obtuseness. His philosophical works were written by him in English, so they are fully accessible, and his literary works, which also express his philosophical ideas, are now well translated. The only part of his legacy that Euro-Americans have a hard time accessing are the more than 2,000 songs in which he expressed his ideas of what a democratic nation ought to be, including the songs that later became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. Tagore also practiced what he preached: Like John Dewey, he created a radical school, but unlike Dewey, he also created a university.

Shantiniketan is now shit. But then Nalanda too was shit when Sen was V.C. I suppose you could say Tagore was a better philosopher than Sen. But that isn't saying much.

More or less everything I write is inspired by Tagore, though Ambedkar is a close second, and at the level of personal affection I feel especially drawn to Nehru and Mandela.

What about Mother Theresa? Or would that make you sound Gay?

I draw attention to their thought not only in my book and articles on India but also in other books of mine: There’s a chapter on Tagore in Political Emotions saying why he’s a better and deeper source for thought about liberal ideals, in certain ways, than Kant, Mill, and Comte.

But he had no liberal ideas for the excellent reason that they were boring as shite and involved 'baristry' or 'magistry'- i.e. he'd have had to be either a barrister or a magistrate and join the fucking Viceroy's Council or become a Minister for Rural Administration or some other such waste of time.

Still, Nussbaum misses a trick. She should say Tagore is a better and deeper source for thought about Modern Physics than Einstein.

I also have written extensively about Nehru and Gandhi, and in my recent book on anger, I have dared to talk at length about the thought of Nelson Mandela.

His big thought was that he'd rather be President than die in prison.

Though I claim no expertise in African philosophy,

what about Indian philosophy? Does this shithead think she has mastered navya-nyaya?

Mandela, I think, is always writing for an international audience, always in English. I have read virtually everything he wrote, including his prison letters. I have even visited that prison on Robben Island.
DSJ: Let’s transition a bit to talk about how The Cosmopolitan Tradition might relate to contemporary politics. Earlier this year, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri gave a keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference in which he blamed “the cosmopolitan elite” of this country for selling out the middle class to multinational corporations. In this speech, Hawley singled out you and three others as being “the nation’s leading academics” of the cosmopolitan elite. Without citing it explicitly, he was quoting from an essay in your 1996 book For Love of Country, in which you encourage students to think of themselves as world citizens rather than as citizens of the United States. Does your new book, which sees the cosmopolitan tradition as noble but flawed, allow for something of a compromise with Hawley?

MN: That essay was originally published as an op-ed in Boston Review in 1994. Hawley quoted me correctly, and since he is not a scholar, he was not aware that I have changed my views. I think that this failure of knowledge on his part is totally fine—a politician is not responsible for tracing a scholar’s changes of view. But many scholars too cite me as if I still held the 1994 view, and that I do regard as indefensible, since scholars should not cite another scholar on the basis of an op-ed in the first place without reading that person’s books. And then, second, they should take note of major changes that are clearly announced as such.

So, it would be scholarly to say Nussbaum by her own account was a stupid potty head who held views she herself admits were absurd. This suggests she is still a shithead because she is very very old and leopards don't change their spots.

Every time that essay is reprinted with my permission, I require a prefatory note saying that it no longer expresses my view and referring readers to Political Emotions [published almost two decades later, in 2013]. But so often people reprint it and reproduce it for classes without permission! I have arrived at universities to find whole classes of students studying that article as if it were my current view. Well, OK, they might like it better than they like my current view, but they should still learn which is which.

Why? Nussbaum was as stupid as shit and utterly shitty she remains.

As for Hawley: Of course I was defending transnational moral ideals, not the greed of multinationals. But I did disparage patriotism—he’s right about that. And I now defend instead a globally sensitive patriotism, based on the ideas of the capabilities approach, as an essential part of sustaining good ideals.

Since the capabilities approach is vacuous nonsense, nothing is based on it.

I argue in Political Emotions that even the best ideals go stale and flat if we don’t use rhetoric and the arts to sustain the patriotic emotions focused in them;

but this would also be true of the worst ideals or the pretence of having ideals.

and in The Monarchy of Fear, I study how the arts sustain hope in difficult times.

but if the arts can 'sustain hope', then they can destroy it even under the most favorable conditions.

I see The Cosmopolitan Tradition as continuous with these books,

which were vacuous nonsense

developing a globally and ethically sensitive notion of nationhood

where? In Nussbaum's own shitty brain? But what marvelous change has she brought about? She used to write books which she now admits were shite. But she is still writing books which are shite- though it make take her another couple of decades to realize that this is so.

and emphasizing a potential alliance between nations and their duties to one another.

Actual alliances already exist between nations.         

DSJ: Your book spends very little time dealing with the post-Brexit, post-Trump world, and yet it does offer an analysis of what is happening today. As you put it, we are witnessing a “new medievalism,” one that has taken the “form of economic globalization, with multinational corporations leaching away sovereignty from the poorer nations as they pursue politics that are not exactly motivated by the moral law.” What do you mean by a “new medievalism”? And does not the notion of “leaching away sovereignty from the poorer nations” sound no different than a nationalist battle cry?
MN: The book began in 2000 as a set of lectures and has been rewritten for almost 20 years. It was complete in manuscript form in 2016, but it was delayed because Harvard didn’t want it to appear at the same time as The Monarchy of Fear. So that is one reason why I do not talk about Trump and Brexit in it! But more generally, I am a philosopher, and as a philosopher I seek a more general and lasting set of principles. I am not a political scientist or political commentator—that’s not what I am good at.

But you are also shite at philosophy.

Nor do I think that the world has really retreated from liberal ideals; saying that is an academic fad, I believe. How could lamentable events actually show the failure of an ideal?

Ideals affect declarations made by Heads of State. Those declarations are 'public signals' which affect 'correlated equilibria'. Nussbaum is too stupid to understand how 'ideals' affect outcomes.

They could show this only if it were shown that these ideals are bad goals or that they are utterly incompatible with human nature, and I don’t see that today’s world shows either of these things.

This is foolish. Correlated equilibria differ from each other in distributional and dynamic ways. Nussbaum is saying they are all the same. This suggests she has shit inside her cranium.

Most ideals are not fully realized.

So what? So long as correlated equilibria are sufficiently different to each other to make a material difference, they retain salience.

Do norms and laws against theft fail because there is still a lot of theft?

Yes.

People don’t say that,

Yes they do. People want the laws to get tougher on types of crime which  are burgeoning. Sentencing norms may be constrained by lack of prison space. Ultimately, more money would have to be spent on the police and on prisons.

and yet what they’re saying about liberal ideas seems to me very similar.

 One thing people do say is that 'liberal ideas' gave China a chance to build up its strength in a manner adverse to Liberalism.

The world never fully implemented those liberal ideals because power prevented it.

Power is required for partial implementation. Its lack prevents 'full implementation'.

But that would hardly show that the ideals are not worthwhile, any more than the enduring existence of racism would show that the ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. were mistaken.

Dr. King's ideals seem to have brought about changes he thought desirable. Nussbaum's nonsense- which she herself now admits was fucked in the head- brought about changes she thought undesirable. This isn't rocket science but Nussbaum is too stupid to get it.

And the success of the global human rights movement, and especially the progress in women’s human rights, shows that liberal ideals still inspire and are worth clinging to.

This would be the case if 'liberal ideas' had motivated those who achieved such successes. But this was not the case. Women wanted women to get a better deal and worked hard to make it so. Lawyers and activists concerned with vulnerable people achieved some successes. But plenty of people with 'liberal ideals' opposed such changes.

The phrase “new medievalism” was used by the international relations scholar Hedley Bull, and I use the term in a passage discussing his ideas. I think he is underappreciated, in part because of his premature death, so I like to make people aware of him. What he meant by the phrase was that we now realize that the world contains not just nation-states but other entities with which we must reckon. My own account includes in this list NGOs, corporations, and international agencies.

Bull died in 1985. The world has changed greatly since then. Nussbaum should be reading Mary Kaldor.

As for “leaching away sovereignty,” I think you might have misread the passage, or I must have written it unclearly. I was talking about the phenomenon in which a poor nation, Nation A, wishes to provide a certain level of labor support for the working poor and a certain level of environmental protection for all. But then a rich nation comes along and says, “We’d like to set up our factory in your nation, but right now we can’t afford those protections, so either weaken them, please, or we’ll go away to Nation B, which is prepared to play ball with us.” Here the US-based corporation, rather in the manner of a colonial power, is trying to dictate to the people of Nation A. So my view is that this is unacceptable.

But, domestic corporations in Nation A would also be offshoring. It is easy to tell a foreign company to fuck off. It is difficult to do the same to your own people. Nussbaum is getting her knickers in a twist over a crude horror story. Why not say, 'US-based Corporations demand beejays from the Head of State of Nation A? They threaten to set up factories elsewhere unless, they get to jizz on the face of disabled people in Nation A. Also they demand to be paid billions of dollars in return for inflicting racist and homophobic verbal abuse upon every single citizen of Nation A?'

Is that “a nationalist battle cry” on my part? Not on behalf of the United States, which, I am insisting, is trying to extend its national power illicitly, like a colonial power.

But US is much worse than any colonial power! It is demanding the right to jizz on the face of disabled people in shithole countries!

Perhaps it is a kind of battle cry on behalf of the people of Nation A, whose democratic choices are being squashed, and I do believe that Nation A has the right to choose its own constitution and its own set of standards and rights. But the reality in our world is that a few nations take that power away from many other smaller nations.

Also they jizz on the face of their disabled citizenry.

DSJ: The world right now is experiencing a right-wing nationalist turn. Given this climate, some might find the kind of global, liberal capabilities approach you’re advocating outmoded. Can you tell us why you think it is not?
MN: I don’t think that there is any single right-wing trend today. I think people are too myopically focused on the US and Europe. The world is larger than that, and each nation is different. India’s current murderous right-wing regime began its rise in the 1920s, inspired by German fascism.

The RSS was set up as a regional copy of the Congress Seva Dal which was indeed partially inspired by Italian, not German, fascism. The BJP is not murderous. The Left Front in Bengal was. But it has been beaten into submission by Mamtas goons. Her outfit is an offshoot of Congress. The fact is the BJP is now the default National party. Indira had two daughter-in-laws and two grand sons. One grandson has ruined Congress. The other grandson is with the BJP but his lack of talent has prevented him from perpetrating any great mischief.

If it’s only recently that people in the US know about the Hindu right, that is because they don’t study India in school. Modi won two elections in part because of his vicious “Hindu first” politics, but far more because the opposition was corrupt and ridiculous and because the US and Europe basically gave him a free pass out of ignorance and obtuseness.

This is nonsense. The US sent out Poli Sci scholars to India from the Fifties onward. They understood that Congress was 'Hindu first'. But Hindus only care about governance. Modi's ascendancy is based on superior 'last mile delivery'. Unexpectedly, he has turned out to be a good Diplomat. But a corruption scandal could wreck his career just as it could wreck any other politician's.

DSJ: What is the relationship between a capabilities approach and socialism or something like the Green New Deal, especially since both seem to avoid the bifurcation between the moral and material well-being for which you find fault in the cosmopolitan tradition? Is not socialism what the capabilities approach needs? Or would it be disqualified for being a comprehensive doctrine?
MN: “Socialism” is a word used today more for its emotional resonance than for a precise meaning. Some use it in its original meaning, including state ownership of the means of production. Along with virtually everyone today, I reject that idea as an economic idea that has failed. Some use “socialism” to mean egalitarianism. I am in favor of a democracy with an ample social safety net in which there is still room for people to use discretionary after-tax income to do whatever they like. So it is like most European social democracies in that sense: egalitarian up to a point, but with some room for differences over that ample threshold.
No nation offers a pure egalitarianism, for good reasons (incentives, but also personal freedom). However, I think that specific economic decisions about the best shape of a health care system or a university system are properly contextual and historical, and many different specific policies can be defended as good ones for a particular country. In health care, I favor universal coverage, but I think the US would be well advised to get to that incrementally, without eliminating private insurance—more like France than like Norway.

Norway does have private clinics and private health insurance. So does the UK whose NHS is more generous than France or Norway.

I also think that our mixture of public and private universities has proven a good system in terms of flexibility and quality, enabling us to avoid the crippling cuts to the humanities and arts that threaten most European nations.

America has more 'cross subsidisation' from Arts and Humanities to STEM subjects. But the student debt problem is macro-economically more serious.

It just is not healthy for academic policy to be made by elected officials who know little about research and for whom cost-cutting seems a passport to reelection.

Norwegian politicians tried to get more kids into the Humanities some fifteen years ago. They failed. Norwegian kids have the sense to stay away from bullshit.

As for the Green New Deal, I agree with David Weisbach and Eric Posner’s excellent book, Climate Change Justice, that environmental concerns should not be considered as a thing apart but should be pondered as part of an overall consideration of national welfare and global welfare.

But such 'pondering' is useless. The fact is we already factor environmental considerations into our budgetary decisions at both the private and collective level. This has always been true. What is different about the 'Green New Deal' is that it imagines an alternative trajectory for the economy with different positional goods and different 'multiplier effects'. The problem is, this has always failed- indeed it may crowd out viable projects and thus dynamic efficiency falls thus worsening the underlying problem.

We have to figure out what we can do.

But we must not listen to stupid shitheads like Nussbaum.

I like bold idealistic proposals as a first step, but at the end of the day the budget is multifaceted and finite. My capabilities approach is a multifaceted account of basic welfare that holds 10 separate goals in balance with one another.

But it is completely useless. A multi-dimensional policy space is a recipe for 'McKelvey Chaos'. All you get is a concurrency deadlock as shitheads struggle for 'Agenda Control'.

That, I think, is the right approach.

How come nobody is using it? It is because it is useless.

I would also like to add that one thing I believe in, to the bottom of my heart, is that we should elect more scientists to the US Congress.

Nonsense! Good Scientists should do Science, not waste their time log-rolling or playing pork barrel politics. In contrast, the COVID crisis shows the need for  improving official Scientific advise and making it more responsive to parallel developments. Six months ago, the CDC was concerned the best institution of its type in the world. Now, it looks like a bureaucratic shit-show.

Much of our policy is made by people who are ignorant of scientific fact or who even believe nonfacts.

Or pretend to. This makes no difference whatsoever.

I applaud the efforts of 314 Action and its associated PAC to achieve this goal.

But those guys refuse to support even the best Scientist if he happens to be a Republicans. This is not scientific. It is partisan. The idea is to make the Democrats look like the smart party and the Republicans to look like the knuckle dragging party which will make it legal to marry your sister-mommy like they did in Biblical times.

Climate change is urgent, and we need legislators who know the science and can rebut stupidity.

Anyone can rebut Nussbaum's stupidity- yet it burgeons. Hipparchia, the first Feminist Cosmopolitan copulated in the streets. That's why she will be remembered when Nussbaum is forgotten. On the other hand, I will not twerk nude even if this wins me a Beyonce Impersonator award. This is because I'm afraid a passing dog might bite off my dangly bits. Needless to say I blame Nussbaum's flawed Capabilities approach for this tragic outcome.