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Nussbaum vs. DuBois

 

            The Double Standards of Citizenship and Identity.
             B Du Bois dedicate their philosophical writings to support the value of human rights. Both writers believe that through education, these values can be effectively transmitted and true citizens can be created. In For Love of Country?, Nussbaum promotes the rights of all human citizens, saying that there is no legitimate reason for valuing a single or group of individuals over another. She suggests that strong nationality and patriotism are dangerous because the sense of identity that results from them can lead people to disregard the rights of individuals of different identities. She believes that education should create citizens that regard identity as arbitrary and respect the rights of all humans regardless of their differences. Du Bois certainly admires the moral value that Nussbaum portrays in her argument, but his claims in The Souls of Black Folk demonstrate his skeptical opinion of Nussbaum's method of creating citizens. Du Bois believes that to achieve true citizenship, people have to be educated in order to acquaint themselves with their identities and thus be self conscious of who they are in society. Through this education, different groups of people can learn to reconcile their different identities and create a true democracy, as the African Americans and European-white Americans struggled to do in the United States. Du Bois would think that the circumstance Nussbaum portrays could only exist where particular identities don't matter, and this is non existent in today's world. In effect, he would not agree that a loyalty to anything less than the entire human race is dangerous because he believes that individuals must first be loyal and conscious of their particular identities in order to become valuable citizens. .
             Nussbaum's underlying claim in For Love or Country is that "one should always behave so as to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and moral choice in every human being,"" (Nussbaum 8) .


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