I picked up the first stapled copy.

Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. (Amazon Link)

I don’t know why I have Chapter 9, “Tragic and Comic Festivals: Shaping Compassion, Transcending Disgust,” in my possession.

Nussbaum starts with the story of Troy and the Trojan War.

I was researching pain and suffering a few years ago, so I think this chapter was related to my research.

I scroll past the storyline and quickly look for her nuggets of interpretation. And I stumbled upon this:

All societies, however decent and aspiring, face difficult choices. Because the societies we are considering protect a plurality of entitlements for all citizens, considering each person as intrinsically valuable and deserving of concern, they will sometimes encounter cases in which those plural values come into conflict. 15 Tragic spectatorsh1p has already helped citizens learn to identify key opportunities that ought to be protected for all, since their absence poses an especially grave obstacle to a life worthy of human dignity. But it makes another important contribution: tragedies also promote understanding of these conflicts, and of the limits of some common approaches to them. Although the idea of value conflict is prominent in ancient Greek tragedy, it is equally at home in India-seated, indeed, at the very heart of the great epic Mahabharata. So let us turn to a key case from that work.