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Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. By Martha C. Nussbaum. Princeton University Press, 4.32 pp., $29.95.

JANET JACKSON'S recent display of her bare breast at Super Bowl halftime, the trials of Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart, and the public debates over gay marriage and the sexual abuse Of children by Catholic clergy--such events make a study of disgust and shame timely. Martha Nussbaum's book is an apt follow-up to her previous work on emotion and the moral life. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions secured Nussbaum's place in a group of thinkers determined to rescue philosophy from an exclusive focus on rationality by pointing out the moral significance of emotions. Nussbaum's professed project in Hiding from Humanity is to make clear the "psychological foundations of liberalism," particularly the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, with particular attention to the "institutional and developmental conditions for the sustenance of a liberal respect for human equality."

This study, written in an engaging style that reflects Nussbaum's concern to make philosophy accessible, contains a keen and erudite examination of the emotions of disgust and shame. Both, Nussbaum argues, are "ways in which we negotiate deep tensions involved in the very fact of being human," particularly in connection with our vulnerability and insecurity, but also with our sociability. Nevertheless, she concludes that their "cognitive content is problematic, and their social operations pose dangers to a just society."

While anger and fear appear to play an explicit role in law, Nussbaum argues that these emotions are distinguishable from (though related to) disgust and shame. She particularly distinguishes disgust from anger. Disgust may be a valid and necessary response to objects and practices that threaten "contamination to the self" or that serve as "reminders of mortality and animality, seen as pollutants to the human," but these determinations are highly subjective and easily distorted. Anger, by contrast, is directed toward real rather than perceived harms and "rests on reasoning that can be publicly articulated and publicly shaped."

Nussbaum surveys a number of "pro-disgust" arguments. These are motivated by concern about the dangers of social disintegration, debauchery and contamination from such putatively disgusting practices as homosexual sex, prostitution, incest and a variety of other acts involving bodies, fluids and sexuality. Notions of boundaries, borders and the ways in which we seek to separate ourselves from what we construe as alien or other pervade this discussion.

But the law should not merely give voice to our fear of danger or anomaly or, more perniciously, inspire spurious distinctions between people. The law and our zeal to enforce it should be guided not by disgust at supposed contaminants, Nussbaum says, but by righteous anger at actual harms inflicted on those who, even in a liberal democracy, may be perceived as objects of disgust--homosexuals, the disabled, the dependent. One's right to be disgusted at certain practices must stop short of responses that would inflict actual harm on the objects of one's disgust.

In our individualistic and confessional culture, shame is alternately stigmatized as toxic or solicited as the first step toward healing. Nussbaum offers a psychological account in which shame is our most primal emotion, one that emerges from the narcissism of our infantile

sense of helplessness and dependency. She challenges this "primitive shame" that leads us to stigmatize individuals and groups, but not before reclaiming shame, rather than disgust, as a distinctly moral emotion connected to self-regard and our human striving for completeness and perfection.

Disgust often operates as a deceptive emotion, serving "to conceal from us, on a daily basis, facts about ourselves." Shame, by contrast, "tells the truth" that "certain goods are valuable and we have failed to live up to them." It can serve as a "morally valuable emotion, playing a constructive role in development and social change" for both individuals and societies.

Here Nussbaum agrees with James W. Fowler's more religiously informed account of shame in Faithful Change: The Personal and Public Challenges of Postmodern Life. Fowler defends "'healthy shame" as "essential for protecting our relations with people and groups whom we love and upon whom we are dependent" and as a "guardian of our desire to be a worthy person."

Both Nussbaum's and Fowler's positive accounts of certain forms of shame may seem jarring in a culture in which shamelessness--whether on the part of terrorist bombers, serial snipers or Enron and Tyco executives--seems to rule the day. But careful attention to the absence and abuse of shame is certainly a timely and worthwhile exercise in an era of commodified sexuality, globalized culture and increasing disparities in health, wealth and the quality of life. Nussbaum singles out Barbara Ehrenreich's studies of the travails of the working poor as an example of appropriate shame directed at society as a whole.