Disgust, Shame and Law: A Critical Review of Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity

Abstract

Martha C. Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity: Disgust and
Shame in the Law is an ambitious book that argues disgust and
shame are fundamentally unreliable for legal judgment. She
explains how emotions work inside the legal system, especially
criminal law. Her main idea, put in her “cognitivist” terms, is
that while emotions like compassion or anger might help law
make sense of harm, disgust and shame do not work in the same
way. She calls disgust almost “magical,” because it’s irrational
and full of odd ideas about purity or strength. In the end it
projects our fears of death and animal life onto other people,
usually vulnerable groups. Shame, similarly, is described in what
she names its “primitive” version, where it comes out of a
childish wish to be all-powerful and then flips into putting others
down or even aggression. In this review the author weighs up
her arguments, evaluating how realistic they are in practice,
how far they apply across cultures and whether the person/act
distinction she relies on is effective. The author also looks at the
criticism that her approach is overly idealistic or utopian.
Finally, the author suggests how her ideas are useful in India
today, where caste discrimination and online shaming remain
significant issues and make her arguments feel very relevant
right now.