Oh, that Egalitarian Feeling!

Saturday, February 13, 2010 - by Dr. Tibor Machan Tibor Machan If I recall this right, the prominent philosopher and legal theorist, Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago (where she is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics), has argued that while it is true that full human equality is not something found in the world, we are, nevertheless, obligated to try to bring it about. She wrote, in her book Sex and Social Justice (Oxford UP, 1999), "At the heart of this tradition [of liberal political thought] is a twofold intuition about human beings: namely, that all, just by being human, are of equal dignity and worth, no matter where they are situated in society, and that the primary source of this worth is a power of moral choice within them, a power that consists in the ability to plan a life in accordance with one's own evaluation of ends." (SSJ, 57) She has also written, in that same work, that "Human beings have a dignity that deserves respect...