In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum argues that literary imagination has a central role to play in political and legal judgments. Nussbaum is concerned by a deficit of sympathy and imagination in the political climate of the United States. She attributes this problem, at least in part, to the popular influence of schools of thought that separates emotion from rational arguments and devalues the role of the emotions. Taking aim at economic utilitarianism and legal models that unduly emphasize detachment while simultaneously choosing novels like Hard Times and Maurice as her allies, Nussbaum proposes a vision public imagination in which certain emotions have an important role to play in legal and political decision making.

This book addresses two central questions. First, how to measure the well-being of a population? The motivation behind this question is a concern over the influence of utilitarian measures of well-being that fail to consider important facets of human life and economic rational choice models that profess to be wholly objective descriptions of well-being but smuggle in bizarre and undesirable normative implications. Second, what role, if any, should emotions play in legal decision making?

Nussbaum defends the thesis that emotional engagement and sympathy can be not only compatible with, but important to, legal judgments. While arguments about the role of literature and novels in morality are obviously not unheard of, I have not read any other work of philosophy in which the role of poetry/literature in a legal setting is defended like this. I'm not sure I agree with this thesis, but it is an interesting one.

I do wish Nussbaum would have defended her claim that emotions are responsive to reasons and cognitive judgment more robustly, maybe referring to empirical studies. She also has an undue fixation on "highbrow" literature to do the important moral work that hinders her article. Nevertheless, I found this work to be a quick, accessible, and interesting introduction into Nussbaum's thought. ( )

Readers of Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness or Love’s Knowledge will not find the position and core arguments presented here to be new. The literary imagination, as practised through the reading of novels, provides insights necessary, she believes, for any adequate moral or political theory. Reading well-constructed, sensitive, realist novels develops moral capacities in citizens; failing to do so stunts their claims to humanity. The target here is any simplistic economic rational choice theory, such as is often deployed willy-nilly by public servants or those who would have hopes of becoming public servants. (The sophisticated and subtle theories of real economists are largely immune to these criticisms.) The extension and refinement of the argument in this case is to focus upon judges, whom Nussbaum argues need to be, in Adam Smith’s phrase, ‘judicious spectators’, fully alive to the all too human aspects of the cases before them. This they accomplish, at least in part, through development of their literary imaginations.

Nussbaum, as ever, is a sensitive reader of the literature she deploys in her argument. She may be a touch blind to the level and breadth of antipathy towards her view out there in the ‘real’ world (or even in the world of philosophy); sensitive novel readers, on the other hand, will tend to agree intuitively with her stance. Perhaps this explains why she moves on so quickly to the practical implications of her position for judges and others rather than delving more deeply into the roots of her own view. Or perhaps there is a fear that no philosophical position can be taken seriously in America unless it has clear implications for public policy. For my part, I could stand more, much more, scrutiny of the relationship between reading novels and our moral lives. Nevertheless, this contribution surely helps. ( )