Sorry for posting an old interview (March 8th 2006), but I just got to read it this morning. This is the part I found most interested in from the hard copy:

Are emotions relevant to understanding and dealing with development problems like poverty?

We really need in development to pay much more attention to these psychological phenomena. One reason that people don’t is because they think of emotions as just hard wired, as parts of the personality that you are born with, that don’t interact with society. Research on emotions in both philosophy and psychology has shown that is not the case. Emotions contain thoughts about what damages are worth getting angry about and dangers that threaten you. They are deeply shaped by social norms in ways that are often part of women’s development problems. Therefore in the first place the subject of emotions is highly relevant in thinking about what sorts of worthwhile human lives we are trying to promote.

Let’s consider justified anger. Women are often brought up to think they must not get angry. In fact I myself was brought up to think that I shouldn’t be angry. In the first drafts of the list of capabilities you will find that anger is not on the list. Acknowledging that anger is a correct response to the damages that women have suffered is a very important part of women’s development, so keeping an eye on that as one is trying to construct women’s solidarity groups or an NGO is a very important thing. Good NGOs that I visited are all keenly aware of the emotional dimensions of trying to get women, instead of living in fear, to confront fear with constructive love for one another and then anger at the obstacles. They often use the arts to do that.

The second place that emotions are highly relevant is, as you say, in thinking what is the problem? Where does it come from? I am finishing a book on India, on the Gujarat riots, which I call The Clash Within, because I want to say that this "clash of civilizations" thesis that tells us that there are good civilizations and bad civilizations is really very unhelpful. What would be helpful is to think of the clash within each society, between people who can live with others and those who cannot, but more deeply the clash within each person—between the fear of the other and the ability to live in the world on terms of respect.

If you are going to have a public culture that supports human capabilities you will have to think about emotional development there too. How do you get people to be the sorts of people who can think about the predicament of somebody distant from them, who are willing to give their money to that? In America we do not have such a public culture; we have a culture of people who do not know anything about what is happening for example in India. Even if they knew, many people would be so wrapped up in their own success that they wouldn’t have the kind of compassion that is needed to address those kinds of problems. So that is part of what a good education would cultivate— good emotions that would make a decent world possible.

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The full interview can be found at
www.iss.nl/nussint.pdf